Matching

The other afternoon, shortly after I posted last, I was knitting a little bit, and really not feeling the magic.  I was having a good time, I mean – it’s knitting and I’m not dead, so how can it not be great – but I just wasn’t feeling super excited about my sock. 

I got to thinking about it, and I realized what I need.  In the face of the organizational monstrosity that is the Sock Summit – I can’t possibly expect a wee sock to hold its own.  It’s like babies – there has to be matching. 

Do you know this about babies? If not, I’m about to give you a piece of information about how they work that will change everything between you and the little beasts. Here’s the thing: If you want a baby to be happy with you – if you’re seeking to calm, comfort or content them, you have to match their intensity.  If they whimper, you rock.  If they cry, you stand and rock. If they cry harder, you stand, rock, bob and hold them harder – upright against your chest.   Sing too.  If they’re absolutely out of their minds (and you’ve fed them, there’s nothing anyone can do with a hungry baby) then you have to ramp your response up all the way.
Blast the radio, clutch them tight, and sing, bob, weave, walk, dance and thump their little bummies firmly in the rhythm of their own heartbeats.  (Not yours. That won’t work. The wailing will continue.)  It’s all about meeting them where they are, and if they’re enraged, screaming and purple, and you’re holding them tenderly and stroking their backs, you’re going down – and they’re not.

I got to thinking, as I held my little sock, that maybe that’s what was wrong with it. Maybe it just didn’t have the intensity that it needed to match my workload – I know it sounds crazy, to want something to be bigger and harder when things are already big and hard, but there you have the theory, and I think it’s accurate.

I present to you then, the next big and crazy to match the big and crazy everywhere else in my life.  It might look small now, it’s just a swatch…

but it will be big later.

It’s a baby blanket of my own reckoning, and it’s going to be epic.