Unraveled

I have fallen into the rhythm of knitting, enjoying the click-clacking of something appearing bit by bit; seeing something real in the world.

I have been knitting a second elephant. Orlando and I sometimes sing a little rhyme when we do it:

Under the fence,
Catch the sheep,
Back we go,
And off we leap.

I find myself humming along to a satisfied tune.

Then I find myself yelling, "Look what you've done! It's all undone! Why does everything have to get ruined?"

Mica is throwing the ball of yarn. The ball of yarn that I am knitting into a pattern of an elephant that was attached to needles.

An unkempt, unswept, undone woman, I am.

I stop yelling. I gather up the remaining scrap of elephant, search for the orphaned needles, and try to put it back together.

I insert the needle back into the loops. It looks okay.

It feels all wrong.

So I pull the needle out, unravel another row, and insert the needle again, thinking that will make it better.

It doesn't.

I diminish my work row by row, but it feels all wrong until I finally realize that I need to "turn" each stitch to a new orientation.

Aha!

Still, I struggle through each stitch; things don't feel quite right.

Neither do I.

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My adrenals went poof! again a couple of weeks ago.

[[The adrenal glands control the hormones which control your response to stress. When they're poof!, I get a recurrent inner ear infection that makes me dizzy and nauseous, I can't sleep at night, and during the day I go from weepy to ragged to overwhelmed.]]

The room was darkened and the doctor steadied her pen light. Her student stood off to her left, eager to see what there was to see.

She shone the light in my eyes, and there was no response. "Shot. Your adrenals are shot." (My doctor is a no-nonsense New Yorker with three kids and a wife of her own.)

My eyes filled with tears, "But I thought I was getting better."

"You're just barely hanging on, sweetheart. Anything goes wrong and you're back to flat on your ass."

"But how can I get better?"

"Wanna farm out your kids?"

I laughed a bitter laugh.

Last Tuesday when Rom came home and found me in a puddle on the floor, he got mad. He got mad because things are so hard for us right now. He wants it to be better. He wants me to be better.

I reminded him that I am better. Just more than a year ago, I felt this way every day. At least now it's an unusual occurrence, a noticeable bump, a missed stitched in an overall pattern.

I tell myself, I am better.

But I want to be better than this better.

So it's back to tying it all back together.

Stress relief,
Lots of sleep,
Go with the flow,
Sow seeds of hope, then reap.

Things look, and feel, a little funny in spots, but I persist in knitting together this life, in creating something real, and whole, in this world.


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Last year, I was writing about teeth falling out.