Is knitting luxury? Are the pieces we make actually used? If they were, could we equate knitting to a really involved chore, like ironing 1000 shirts or picking up a toddler lifetime of dropped Cheerios with a set of toothpick size chopsticks? If our pieces aren't used, or mightn't be, can we accept that all the effort--and spouse or child ignoring--is worth it for the satisfaction derived from a good ol' bind off?
Hmm.
I used to think that knitting was a deserved luxury; now, I am convinced otherwise. Indulge me with the telling of two parables, starring yours truly.
Number 1: My freshman year of high school I started a new, relatively small, private high school that felt like the biggest organization on the planet. A few months into school I acquired a boyfriend, who, to my adolescent hormone infused brain, had the best smelling hair I had ever ... well, anyway. I was knitting a scarf, which I still have, out of mohair I purchased at the now defunct Woolcott's. I felt super cool. Not only did my mom now let me travel into Boston on the train with my oh-so-cultured 14 year old friends, but I was on the leading edge of a major trend: the knit in a meeting/class.
When you knit in a meeting or other public place when other people are merely paying attention, you are telling the world, in screaming body language, that you are so talented that you can produce the next trendy accessory whilst engaged in the conversation that plebeians need their whole brains for. Either that or that you are so cool you don't need whatever they are trying to sell you.
Anyway, there I was, either smelling my boyfriend's sexy hair or knitting away at my rightly-flavored gray scarf, when my Humanities teacher turned drama teacher suggested I step away from the boy, or the knitting, or both, and start remembering my lines.
I should tell you, my part in that play was the voice of God. Ironic. Did you know that God is a knitter?
Number 2: Getting a Ph.D. in Biology sucks and requires that your weight in tears be shed between when you start, all naive (and sh*t), and you finish it off by getting drunk on a pear martini in your doctoral regalia. If you want to make it, you take up something to calm your nerves:
A. social alcoholism,
B. smoking, or
C. needlework.
My point being that sometime in 2003, after having not knit much since high school, I took up cross stitch and knitting again. It brought me closer to my happy place and cemented friendships. Instead of discussing, AGAIN, the aggravation of having no clue when we would be moving on to the next stages of our lives, we could discuss tension, fiber content, and pattern authors.
... and now, as a mommy, I can tell you the same things are true. How is being a mom like being in graduate school? You never know when the next stage of your life is starting and although you have a huge amount of influence over it, it is blind influence. Your children have no investment in your sanity, just your hours. So, if you are a mom and you haven't already, learn how to knit and join a mom's group, lest you spend your child's youth wondering when it'll be over so you can move onto the next stage, which will likely be no simpler.
Now, back to knitting. My point is that knitting is not a luxury, neither is it a chore. We hope that our end products will be loved, of course; more importantly, we require the practice of focusing on some colorful sock yarn and stitch counts, or some such nonsense, to keep us out of trouble.
Moral: Next knit in public day, I'll be taking the Ergo for a spin. Want to come?
"Your children have no investment in your sanity, just your hours." love this line.
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