A Yarn of Perseverance

The Boston Herald

It wasn’t a metaphor at first. It was just a ball of yarn. I took a picture of it, though. A close-up. I set it on my daughter’s pull out couch and clicked away intending to keep it as a reminder that perseverance pays off.

Julie had bought the yarn to knit her sister’s unborn baby a blanket. She was new at knitting and the only other blanket she’d made had come out the size of a napkin. 

“You have to buy at least six skeins this time,” I told her. 

 But there were only five skeins of the yarn she liked. 

“The baby’s going to be small, Mom. It won’t need a big blanket,” she said.

By the time I visited her in New York where she and her husband live, the blanket was almost finished. She’d knitted four skeins. But the fifth, the one that would turn a square into a rectangle, lay in knots beside her bed.

“I pulled the wrong end,” she explained.  “And when I tried to fix it, it got worse. 

She’d spent two hours one night and an hour-and-a-half the next trying to right the wrong. But the knots only got tighter.  “What should I do?” she asked. 

At any other moment I would have told her to throw away the yarn and the blanket and start all over because life is too short to waste untying knots.

But there was this almost blanket for this almost baby. And it wasn’t just a pattern of interlocking loops of soft wool she was knitting.  It was love and pride and hope – a gift not just from my daughter’s hands, but from her heart.

So I sat down on a cold January morning, turned up the lights in her apartment and began unraveling something that had more knots in it than the Boy Scout handbook.

It wasn’t easy. The yarn was soft and fuzzy and the fuzz made knots of its own. An hour into it, I had a ball that was only the size of an avocado pit. “You don’t have to do this, Mom,” my daughter said.

But I did have to do it, though I didn’t know why. 

When my daughter’s husband came home, I’d been at it for close to four hours. “Let me try,” he said.

It would have made better sense to quit. There was enough yarn to make the blanket look like a blanket. More would be better but less was fine and wasn’t it crazy to waste our little time together quarreling with knots? 

Plus, the nearer we got to the end, the tighter the knots were and the harder they were to undo. But by then this project wasn’t about knots or a baby blanket. It was clearly about not giving up.

By the day’s end, every inch of the gnarled yarn was knot free. The three of us smiled and I took a picture and we all said how this proves anything is possible. And then we went out to dinner and the next day I went home and a few days later Julie finished the blanket. 

In May, she gave it to Lauren at her baby shower. In June, Lucy came home swaddled in it. In August, it kept her warm when she was in intensive care. Now, every night, Lucy sleeps wrapped in this blanket. And if she goes back into the hospital for more surgery the blanket will go with her.

I have many pictures of Lucy with her blanket. But it’s the picture of the ball of yarn that I have taped to my computer. For it’s this picture that sustains me 

I never thought we’d get it untangled. But we did. I was sure we’d have to cut off some of it. But we didn’t. 

Keep going, the picture says. Hard means only hard, not impossible. Be patient and persevere. Knots can be untangled, problems can be worked out.  That’s the metaphor of the yarn. That’s the story this picture tells.