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I recently looked at an afghan my mother helped me crochet in the later years of her life. Her hands were too arthritic to do more than a couple of model stitches at a time, but the pleasure she got out of teaching me seemed to outweigh whatever encumbrance in her joints she experienced. And I got pleasure from letting her teach me. She felt excited when I’d finished it (so did I, after ripping out a particular part one time too many) and was happy when family members could wrap themselves in it to keep warm. Though I’d chosen the afghan’s colors and design, and done most of the work, it was a cocreation in which yarn interwove as did my mother’s and my feelings.
I also recalled a childhood experience in which my mother and I worked with yarn that also reflected our relationship. When I was eleven she showed me how to knit a scarf, but I think she felt less patience and joy than she did with the afghan project so many years later, described above. The sense I have now is that my mother viewed the scarf too much as a reflection of herself. She had too large a say in the colors—we had a tiff about them—and too great an investment in the stitches’ neatness. Perhaps the scarf was, for her, another way to get special attention, because when I finished it, though she did compliment me, it seemed important to her that others know the part she had played. And it didn’t seem as if we really shared the experience as much as we did when we crocheted the afghan together.
Excerpt from My Mother, My Mirror: Recognizing and Making the Most of Inherited Self-Images by Laura Arens Fuerstein, Ph.D.
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