Knitting and unknitting

It seems like I have been boring for a long time now, as if
I am in some shadow existence, part of my life, but really only skimming the surface. I putter; I fall asleep given any
opportunity. I don’t write because I
have nothing to say. I make lists, I talk about THINGS, as if their presence
will make up for the void. I don’t sew or knit because I feel incapable of
creativity.

I blame it on January. January is always hard for me, partly because it is often gray, but it
is not the grayness of the weather that makes me this way, the grayness of a
January winter actually more reflects my mood than shapes it. January is the month that marks the life that
might have been and hence it is always sheltering background sadness. Sometimes I get busy, cleaning out closets,
filing and doing other mindless busy work, scrubbing floors (how unlike
me). Sometimes I sit and stare at the
fog on the river, at the boats passing by, at the cardinals on the once snow
covered bushes. I think of planting peas
but I don’t have the energy to order the seeds yet, just to dream… This foggy mood has gone on, probably since
before January, since before the holidays, but I kept busier then. Little automaton Mardel, keep moving, don’t
think. January is my excuse, the cover
that hides what lies beneath the surface.

January is the month in which my last pregnancy would have
come to fruition. It was the only one
that got far enough along for me to think of due dates and names and the
potential for change that was coming. It
marks, in my mind, the division between the time there was hope and the time
there was none. That first January
passed quietly. I did not even realize I
was depressed until considerably later. By the next January, I realized that there would be no children no
matter how hard I tried and January became my month-of-despair. Better, sometimes, to contain things. Having always been more a dreamer than a hard
realist, hanging onto the vision and the date of the dream-that-was-lost, was
more telling than the dates of any sad events or hard news. Now, at the end of the eleventh January, the
fog rolls in slowly sometimes. I sit and
lose time completely. I know I will snap
out of it. Probably our upcoming trip to Tucson will break me out of my
routine. But I also realize that certain
things will always be a part of me and I just have to accept their presence and
try to mostly avoid their sharp edges.

I have knitted and unknitted the pink socks endlessly,
trying new pattern stitches to see what I like best in this yarn. None have satisfied me. Perhaps none will. Sometimes that repetition of forward and
back, forward and back, endlessly rocking between accomplishment and reflection
is the greater progress. I suppose I “should”
have knitted a swatch. But the swatch is
so planned and methodical, so blindly assuming that all our plans and goals
will be achieved. Forward and backward,
knitting and unknitting; sometimes the circuitous route is the best.