Written by DeAnna Erdmann
I like to crochet a lot. For me it is a type of therapy. The repetition of the knots is healing for me by distracting me from the chaos of my thoughts. It gives me something to focus on that satisfies the part of me that wants instant gratification and constant movement.
In reality, I feel crocheting is a lot like life. Life is full of knots. If you look at the knot by itself, it just looks like brightly colored chaos. So, each event or hardship we experience in life is like that. It just looks like pain or chaos or passion or desperations or glee. If you string enough knots together you get a reward for your work. You might get a blanket or a hat… maybe even a set of mittens. That’s how I have discovered my life to be. I have had so much hardship and work and uncertainty and fear, but when I string all those knots together, I can see the beauty that is my life. My life is a large tapestry, and each knot tells its own story. When I reach the end of a series of knots, sometimes I must change stitches to make the tapestry work. So, when I survive each new season of life, sometimes I have to make some changes to make life work again.
As sad as it is to admit it, when something goes wrong, I often unravel the messed-up stuff so that I can fix my work. That is also a reflection of my life. Sometimes the good Lord unravels chunks of my life. It might feel like pain or shame or punishment at the moment, but with some time and more work I can see how those parts of me needed to be undone so that I could be remade the right way… the way I was always intended to be.
Which brings my thoughts to parenting and how it feels so important to me to help stitch these little humans together the right way from the beginning. I don’t want them to have to unravel to make things right. I know that there will be times in their life that they will have to change stitches, to make a new normal for themselves… but it would be amazingly satisfying as a mom if one day they told me that their afghan began beautifully and that they recognize the pattern I was trying to teach them.