At Growing Home, we listen to our pain, its echoes, the silence of after It happened—whatever It may be.
If you have a Before and an After, an It you are trying to understand—I invite you to take a seat with us.
WELCOME
to a sanctuary for those who suffer
Here’s what I’ve got for you this week: using words, I try to map my most vulnerable experiences and recent griefs through the embodied practice of crochet1—
Or, an essay on how crochet saved me.
Essay—to try.
Embodied Practice—a repeated activity which engages mind and body.
Last week, I added “toward a constructive end” to this definition of practice. After writing this essay, I realized holistic practices are not The End, or An End, or even A Means To An End. They are places at which we, through hand and mind, encounter one another across time.
Or, we work ourselves into the material (rocks, yarn, ingredients, books) we touch, which makes us magicians who cross the boundaries of time.
Read on. You’ll see what I mean, promise.
(This. This is trying. This is essay.)
My Gran (Hi,
! 👋) taught me to crochet—my, I must have been no older than six? Maybe seven. I’m not sure, but her house was quiet then; she only had one babysitting kid and only us two granddaughters. Most of my memories of her house include lots of babysitting kids and my brothers and cousins, who came a few years later. So this was early.We struggled at first, because I was (am) left handed, but we got on okay. I just did everything backwards. Eventually, I made a fuzzy white beret from a pattern off the yarn label and, later, a purple almost-silky cape of my own invention.
I crocheted off and on after that cape; it didn’t turn out the way I wanted. Too small, not majestic enough. I returned to crochet, though, to make a baby blanket when I was pregnant with my daughter. I finished it sometime after my son was born.
That’s when I returned, to crochet. I suppose crochet was a way of returning home, as we were on the other side of the continent and across a border from my Gran and siblings and cousins, from all my family and Jay’s. I took up my needle again in part because I had friends who crocheted (Hi
! Hi Carrie! 👋). They were (are) crochet artists. They made cardigans and stuffed animals and all kinds of blankets and hats and headbands with intricate stitches. Me, I just—fiddled.But, really, I needed something to do. It’s hard to describe how I felt, what I experienced, in that beige basement suite, when Jay was gone from sun up to sun down and I was at home with a one-year-old and a newborn, recovering from a c-section which resulted in (close to) three-fourths of my blood being lost, and then, four months later, losing a third of my blood after a routine, five-minute procedure.
Just thinking about it makes my fingertips feel loose, like they are flying away one cell at a time. Reminds me of the little spiders floating away on their thin threads at the end of Charlotte’s Web.
I was staring at walls, all of them beige, the beige broken only by scuffed-white baseboards, which gave way to a lighter beige carpet. A prison of beige, is how I think and thought of it.
I was staring at walls. What do I do? What should I be doing? I didn’t know how to play with my daughter, I barely knew how to care for my colicky son, I thought I had to do the work of healing myself but didn’t know where to start.
So I took up a needle. And some white fuzzy yarn not unlike the yarn I used in that earlier beret. I tried something new. Piece by piece, I wound stitches into a sloppy bunny (but only after picking them apart and restarting at least five times).
My daughter watched me build each body part. One afternoon, after finishing the tail, I stitched each part together during her nap. When she woke up, she was in raptures as only a one-year-old can be, meeting her new friend. Who became her best friend (or one of them). Who, that spring, rode every one of the 2,000 miles to home on her lap.
That’s the story. But it doesn’t really end there. When we came home, I got a job at a craft store, and that fall, we hired an old friend of mine (Hi Tori! 👋), and a lady named Holly, born on Christmas whose parents almost named her Merry. I wasn’t sure about Holly initially; my first image of her is from her training. She was hunkered over a laptop watching those awful videos chain stores make their team members watch before they can work the floor. She was grumbling (who wouldn’t be) and didn’t seem to excited to get started.
But, oh, Holly. She was one of those crochet artists. Or, rather, a magician. I think she worked actual magic around her needle with every strand of yarn. So I think of the items she’s left behind, like the weighted turtles she made Tori out of plush yarn. The night after she died, I held it to my chest while we laughed and cried and hoped.
She died, a month or so ago, sitting at her laptop. Though we don’t know the details, Tori and I hoped her last thought was inspired. By a new crochet project, or pictures of her grandkids. Hopefully not a bank statement or bill or bad news or something equally uninspired, like those training videos.
She left so much of herself behind in the creatures she made with her hands, for us to hug and hold.
Now, it’s your turn
to practice listening, with empathy.
Recall: your presence is power. Consider acknowledging you are in the room with me and you are not going to leave. The following examples are more than enough:
‘I read it.’
‘I am here.’
‘Listening.’
If you feel compelled to share more, considered what words or phrases stood out among the rest. Simply repeat them in your comment. You could also highlight which photo(s) appealed to you.
Your commentary is not required, but it is welcomed. Consider how your body responded to these words or phrases or photos.
What happened to you, when you read them?
What part of your body responded?
In what way?
Additionally, I welcome your stories. Do you have a friend you’ve lost? Who left some piece of themself behind in an item they made? Have you tried something new, like crochet, when you didn’t know what else to do? You are welcome to add these stories in the comments. We will enter the room, not leave you alone.
Though I love the power comments have in creating a community at Growing Home, please respond in whatever way works for you: email, DM, text, conversation. I am listening.
And if you need some time, take it. We will wait.
Thank you for listening today.
Take care.
—CJS
If you found this story valuable and have the means, would you consider becoming a paid subscriber, so we can continue this vital work together?
Better yet—share it with someone who might need a place to listen and to be heard in their suffering.
from the French; pronounced crow-shay. It’s like knitting, but with one needle and never on a machine. (Which is why none of your clothes are crocheted, unless you are my friend, Carrie).