When you spend most of your time in the present moment, sometimes it is hard to see how far you’ve come, or how much you have made, or how you have come through something with grace.
After I lost Ilse, my youngest daughter to a brain aneurysm when she was 21- in July 2020, community life worldwide was in a different place. People didn’t meet indoors- they met outside.
My world had been changed forever in an instant and I was living in another world with only very close family and friends – as much as everyone else, given the Covid situation.
One day, my dear friend suggested that I join her outside a knitting shop to meet her knitting group. I went along. It was lovely to meet these other women.
My friend was very gentle with me – knowing that I was in a place in early grief that requires the kind of respect for someone who is learning that she is strong enough to be vulnerable.
But I wasn’t yet in a place where I could really be present with strangers who react in unhelpful or funny ways and say inappropriate and hurtful things because they don’t have a healthy or evolved perspective about motherhood, their own relationship with their own daughters and loss in general.
When one goes through this kind of experience, it changes you forever – in ways that one might not predict if one had ever spent anytime thinking about it – which I had not, nor would I recommend anyone else doing so – that would be a waste of time.
For me, it made things very clear.
This experience made me someone who is perhaps difficult to be around if you are not emotionally mature or willing to listen without judgement or has the idea that you need to fix something.
There was nothing to fix, I was not broken- I was learning. Learning how to live a life without her. Not something that had ever occurred to me. Learning how to take my knowing of her, my relationship with her into a life that I was creating without her…but where she will always be…
When you love your child- that doesn’t end. All of that love never stops.
So I am not alone when I enter a group- I come with something invisible, something bittersweet. I come as a mom who can no longer hug her child, but whose child still inspires her, makes her laugh. And so I need to be around people who can “handle that”.
What I didn’t know that day outside a familiar village of shops with an unfamiliar group of women was that they could “handle that”.
Fast forward 5 1/2 years of meeting weekly at one of our homes, in the warm-enough-season in the garden, in the winter in the house— sitting in a circle with our knitting.
In being with these wonderful women, my lifelong relationship with knitting has deepened. I have learned that I can make harder things that I first thought I was capable of. Just because I saw someone else make something and she thought I could too- looking at you socks! ( I’m on my 5th pair).
We share ideas, stories and laughs.
AND we have started a new adventure together….
We have a knitting podcast.
It’s really fun…it is a creative journey that we are taking together with the same joy, respect and admiration we have for what we each create and share with one another, and now we are exploring the wonderful wide world of hosting a knitting podcast.
I had heard the others talk about knitting podcasts, but because I am building a business when I am not making something myself- the podcasts that I bring into my days are all more about learning for the business.
Knitting podcasts serve quite a different purpose.
They are more to be watched or listened to while knitting, crocheting—-making – for company, because of stories, to see what others are making – to get ideas and inspiration for things to discover that you might like to make or pass along, to know what others are enjoying making or to get ideas for certain knits that would be perfect for certain reasons ( a new baby blanket, a pattern for that hat for them, or a knitting project to suggest to your own group to do as a knit-a-long).
The other day, I gave one of these fine women some wool that Ilse had chosen for a project I was going to make for her…it felt right to give it to her because everything I pass on that was Ilse’s seems to bring some emotion. But I know that wool, as all materials we use to create something, must not be in a plastic bin when they could be brought to life and loved. It is in good hands.
Ilse knew 3 of these women and hadn’t met two of them–
I know that she would have been happy that mom had made such close friends that she could share stories about her along with the others sharing stories of their families.
And I know that she would have recognized me – because I haven’t changed a bit.
I am completely myself.
And she would have heard my laugh– so familiar to her in life.
Here is our Island Fibre Friends podcast if knitting and textiles are your thing
Thanks for reading.
I wish you peace on your path,
Lise-Lotte