All Art Requires Courage – Useless
February 24th, 2010
Knots
February 23rd, 2010I’ve had a lot to say, and yet nothing to put to words. And time has just slipped away from me, as I let myself get pulled into the swirl of holiday planning and meetings and snow days and doctor appointments and life in general.
During the snowstorm earlier this month, I was knitting a pair of gloves. I had leftover sock yarn, a funky self-striping pattern, and I found a pattern in one of my magazines for fingerless gloves with mitten hands to fold over them (that probably makes no sense whatsoever, but I suppose what I was knitting isn’t the point of the story). I started a new skein of yarn for making the mitts with the intention of picking up the pattern somewhere near the same point in which the hand pattern fell. That way the stripes would match up, there would be no jarring change in the color sequences. I pulled the yarn from the center of the skein, and instead of unspooling neatly, it came out in a huge tangled clump. I worked at the clump to untangle it, winding the yarn into a neat ball as I went. I was bound and determined to have my tools perfectly ready so I could make this glove coordinate, make the patterns align. I worked at that gigantic tangled mess of yarn for close to two hours- I didn’t realize how much time I was spending as I was going, I was just focused on the task at hand.
Then the yarn broke.
That tangled mess of yarn became a metaphor. In the end, I started the mitt part of the project at a slightly different point than I’d intended to, since I wasn’t able to properly judge the coloring to make it perfect. I know that there is a glitch in my mitten. I had an extra yarn tail to weave in at the end because of the split, so there are technically two glitches from having to add an extra joint. No one else can tell. No one else would think to look. I spent a ton of time trying to work through a problem that wasn’t really all that much of a problem, and instead ended up damaging my yarn. The final mittens are warm, and they are a quirky pattern that makes people smile when they see me wear them. I made a mistake and I recovered from it and it didn’t detract from the final outcome.
I’m not always like that with my knitting, I often turn my goofed up stitches into ‘design elements,’ but I am like that too much with my life. I spent so much of the past year worrying that the decision to put Hoss in the hospital or the delay in getting him into another therapy group or my losing my temper with him when he can’t focus is negatively affecting his daily life. I see his outbursts, which are less frequent and less intense than a year ago, and I wonder why I haven’t been able to give him the tools to stop them. I get so entranced by untangling the knots that I forget to go ahead and start the damned stitching so the mittens can be ready to wear.
We are rapidly approaching the first anniversary of that hospital stay. I’m alternately thankful for the progress he’s made and the help we’ve gotten from the school and the doctors and my family and everyone, and being scared of becoming complacent. I don’t have a pattern to tell me how this is supposed to turn out.
Playing With Fire
February 22nd, 2010I have recently reconnected with someone from my past.
This someone was the most important person in my life for many years. He was instrumental in my highest-flying moments of joy, and in the worst, dark depths. He was my best friend and my worst enemy. In the end, he fulfilled a pattern that had been present in my life since childhood: the ones who say that they love you are the ones that hate you most when no one else is looking.
I focused almost all my energy alternately on pleasing him and rebelling against him. Relative to how I am now, people say that I looked smaller then, more like a ghost. (Physically I’m the same size as I was.) I was more of a sidekick than a wife.
I don’t blame him. I know his past, and how it shaped him. After the divorce, I read that two only children should never marry. You’ve both been brought up as the centre of attention. You never had to learn to share. We were two only children in a battle to be at the centre. He was dominant. All our space was his space. All our plans were his plans. All our friends were his friends.
And yet, he was my best friend for twelve years. He was my high school sweetheart. He had some wonderful qualities. After I left him, despite how bad things had gotten, I missed him unspeakably. I felt as though I had chewed off my own leg to be free.
Time passed. Close to ten years after I moved out, I have reconnected with him online. I barely thought of him anymore by then, but it was nice to share some memories together, and catch up on news. We started writing more often, re-kindling the friendship side of our connection.
At first it was fun and easy. But it’s been getting more difficult for me. The more I know him now, the more it feels like he’s a real presence in my life, the more all those unresolved feelings come floating to the surface. There were so many things we never talked about, near the end.
Sometimes after an e-mail from him, I can’t sleep at night. I wake at 3 am with a pounding, racing heart. All the insecurities I thought I had outgrown are being triggered, almost as though no time has passed at all. I thought I had forgiven him, but I had only forgotten. Now that I’m reminded, I can time-travel back to my old self instantly.
I have to stop, look around at my new home, my new life. I remind myself what year it is, how old I am. I look in the mirror and see that I’m different. As soon as I stop focusing on the now, the past snaps me back like an elastic band.
Why don’t I just cut him off again? Same reason why I can’t sleep at night. There are too many unresolved issues begging to come to light. I hope that if I can weather the anxiety, we might be able to talk through some of the past, and heal it. He has changed. He went through his own personal hell, and it humbled him. I can’t bear to lose him again. I’m willing to let it be messy, difficult, and awkward. The possibilities are worth the risks.
