Joyful Mama: Lessons from the Knitting Chair ~ Love is More Powerful Than Perfection

When I was hugely pregnant with The Princess (and I mean hugely), a sweet friend sat next to my massive form on the couch one afternoon, handed me two wooden needles and a ball of yarn, and taught me how to knit.

Being slow to warm up to projects of a creative nature (ahem), I immediately decided to knit a blanket. I wish I could blame it on pregnancy hormones, but this is a handicap that afflicts me regularly... if I can do it in miniature I get the wild idea that I can do it on a grand scale.

So I waddled off to the local craft shop, bought the only 100% cotton I could find, along with some hideous aluminum needles, and set to work. Naturally I picked a lace project.

If you don't know anything about knitting, let's just say that starting with lace is kind of like starting school by going to Harvard. Who cares about kindergarten when you can go straight to college!

I did not finish that lace blanket in time for the baby's birth. It sat in my closet while I nursed and rocked, and homeschooled our oldest. Then my husband started traveling for his job. Then we moved. To a farm. And had another baby. And on and on like this... for six years we did things that required my hands and that made me hesitate to pull out the blanket. Note that perfectionism had nothing to do with my hesitation. Nothing at all.

But one day, I felt that blanket calling to me, and I decided that by sheer force of will I was going to finish it. Not only finish it, but finish it with a simplified pattern and with all the mistakes left unfixed.

This was huge.

Leaving mistakes is not natural for me. I do not like mistakes. I accept that they are going to happen, but I try to remedy them, not leave them intact.

My new goal had become to finish, not to perfect.

So on a March evening in 2008, I finally finished the blanket for my six year old baby.

I was utterly shocked when she swooned over it. I mean swooned. She gushed and oohed and aahed and made me feel like the best mama on the planet.

And when we evacuated because of the fire last September, it was one of the things she wanted to have with her.

Apparently my daughter understood that while I was knitting holes where they didn't belong and dropping stitches with that cotton yarn, I was also carrying a strand of love with each dip and twist of the needles.

If I hadn't embraced the mistakes and forged ahead, there would still be a pile of unfinished yarn in my closet.

If I hadn't just gone forward without regret, my Princess wouldn't have her treasured blanket.