The Art of Undoing

I grasped the end of the white yarn and pulled. One after another, the row of double crochet stitches came undone—a soft beat of thup, thup, thup reverberating up my hand.

Across the table, my friend gasped. “What are you doing?”

“I dropped a stitch. I have to redo both rows.”

Wide-eyed, he watched as I unflinchingly continued to unravel all of my hard work.

My grandmother was an avid crocheter. She made baby layettes for every child born our family for three generations and when she ran out family babies, she made them for friends and all the babies born in their families too. In spite of watching her create blankets, sweaters, booties and jackets for what felt like half the children in Philadelphia, I didn’t learn to crochet as a girl. My mother was absent and my father only had a mind for “serious” pursuits. I studied violin and art, took AP classes, made the honor roll, and kept only high -achieving friends. While I was interested in things like crochet and sewing, but my attempts were clumsy and my father offered no encouragement. There was no room for frivolous hobbies. Time was not to be wasted. Excellence must be achieved in all things.

I did try so very hard to be excellent. My father’s high expectations and my own natural perfectionism, however, created a crippling combination. Mistakes, when they inevitably happened, were devastating. What had I done wrong? You should have practiced more, my father would say. You weren’t prepared. Sometimes, he’d push me to go back and do a thing over because my good wasn’t perfect. Sometimes the failure seemed too catastrophic. Too public. Give it up, he’d say. Why would you want to get up there and embarrass yourself again?

As an adult, I never could seem to give myself a break. I continued to work at things tirelessly, intolerant of my imperfections, devastated by disappointments that could not be avoided. There was still no time for hobbies. Nothing in my life could be treated lightly. I had one chance to do everything right. Not surprisingly, this was an unsustainable situation. At 30, as a new mom with a colicky, “unfixable” baby, I had a nervous breakdown.

I was rescued by my best friend’s mother; who had been a surrogate mom to me since college. Nora took me and my baby back to her house in the country and nurtured us both like little wounded birds fallen from our nest. In college, I was always amazed at the vast store of skills she had. Home Cooking. Gardening. Sewing. Crocheting. Knitting. Embroidery.

“How do you know how to do all these things?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Women of my generation just did.”

Her own daughter had a natural flair for cooking and gardening, but no interest in the small handicrafts. Nora taught me first embroidery, then, a few years later, crochet.

I remember her bringing me my first hooks and a skein of gray yarn. I was surprised to learn that you held the hook facing down rather than up, how you wrapped the feeding yarn around your fingers to create tension. There were all these small but important techniques that had thwarted my unassisted childhood attempts.

I struggled at first and got frustrated. Yarn tangled and my stitches were mishappen and irregular.

“This is supposed to be relaxing,” Nora said, squinting at my technique and trying to figure out where it was going wrong. “You’re not making it look very relaxing.”

She was more right than she realized. As I continued to practice, each stitch a small but oddly soothing challenge, I began to see that the less I fixated on the perfection, the more easily the yarn slid through my fingers, through the hook, over and under, and transformed into something new.

Of course, I made mistakes. I’d drop stitches. I’d misunderstand patterns. Skip rows. Once, I started a new skein of yarn, only to go out in the sunlight later and discover I had done half the blanket in the wrong shade of white. I found myself confronting my fear of mediocrity and failure over and over in this silly, unimportant hobby.

Crocheting taught me that I can survive mistakes. In a blanket of 5000 stitches, imperfections are unavoidable. Sometimes, I’ll add in an extra stitch on the next row to fix a mistake. In the case of the mismatched white blanket, I let it be--a testament to the fact that even great public mistakes aren’t the end of the world.

When I can though, I pull the stitches out and do it over. Every unraveling stitch with its soft thup, thup, thup assures me I’m okay. Stitched and unstitched, my self-care and sacrifices play out in one long motion. My time hasn’t been wasted, but invested. Row by row, I remind myself to let go of my need for perfection and take comfort in both the gentle rhythm of creation and the soul-refining art of undoing.