Crochet my grief
Learning to create when everything feels like it’s unravelling
Sometime last year I mentioned to my sister in law that I wanted to learn crochet. She took it up recently and was making some lovely things. But I was worried about getting started and she offered to help by going through some basics together.
For Christmas she bought me yarn, a book, lovely crochet hooks, and some granny square pattern cards. In some of that limbo time between Christmas and new year I picked up a hook and some yarn and tried to start. I made a slip knot and put it on the hook. I tried again and again to chain a stitch. I could visualise what needed to happen, but I couldn’t keep the yarn on the hook. Frustrated, I gave up.
My mum was a crafter and she was very good at it. If anything she was annoyingly good at sewing and craft things and it put me off trying them for myself.
She took up crochet as one of the many things she tried and quickly became very good at it. She created blanket after blanket as well as bunting, mermaid tails and more. I’ve gifted her baby blankets to friends up and down the country; she always had a stash so I could choose the perfect one.
Before Christmas mum was taken into hospital and spent over a month in the cardiac ward. When she was there, one of her nurses was pregnant, so she had me go through her cupboard to find a blanket to give to her. I found all sorts of incredible things.
The last time I saw my mum was on the hospital ward. I didn’t know then that this was the last time I would see her. I mentioned that I couldn’t even keep the yarn on the hook and she immediately took the crochet that she had in the hospital and started off a chain for me (of course she had crochet in the hospital, I mean… of course).
She started trying to explain to me how to make a granny square, explaining how to do a triple crochet and grabbing the patch of yarn off me to show me where to put the next stitch.
I was slow. I used both hands just to keep the yarn on the hook. Used my fingernails to select the loops that needed to be moved. I held the square inches from my face to see each loop. I had no idea where I was. I didn’t count my stitches.
Every so often she would grab the (very wonky) square from me, berate me for putting a stitch in a completely random hole and then pull out all of my stitches. If there was one thing mum enjoyed it would be unceremoniously telling someone they’ve done something wrong.
It reminded me of the Pottery Throwdown, when Keith Brymer-Jones takes the pots that the participants have made and chucks them into a bucket when they’re not good enough. Hilariously brutal.
Sat around the kitchen table, in the shock of my mums death, dad and I talked about that day. How bubbly mum was, and for a moment, distracted frm all the anxiety of being ill.
After a few days, Dad went to the hospital to pick up all her things. An uneaten orange which made me cry in floods, a book full of puzzles I’d already messed up, and this wonky square.
A bundle of stitches, produced by me, umbilically still connected to a ball of yarn.
I still have it. Though it is not connected anymore. I tied it off where it was and cut the yarn away.
My mum was almost 68 when she passed away.
Two weeks at my parents house and desperately missing my own baby, I travelled home from Cornwall with the yarn in my bag and an orange crochet hook. Her hook. The hook we had both used together to produce this silly little artefact on that last day.
Stuck in limbo between shock and a funeral service, after a few days I picked up the yarn and mums hook again. Sat in bed I plucked up the courage and made a chain.
I tried to make a scarf, but as I worked my sample turned into a triangle. I didn’t understand what had gone wrong and the desire to text her and ask was automatic. It shocked me and made me feel sick.
Then I tried to make squares which ended up looking like hats for small mammals and I wanted to text her because she would think it was very funny.
Eventually I bashed out a scarf which was wonky and ugly and not at all long enough. I made another with more ambition but it was almost worse than the first and impossible to unfurl as I’d used a mohair yarn. I discovered that learning to crochet with black yarn is a terrible idea.
My heart was in my mouth, my eyes got so tired I booked an eye test, I kept going.
Time and again I asked myself why I was carrying on, and who was I doing it for? For my mum? For my dad? To prove that I cared? To prove something else? I’m not sure, but in those weeks I was not doing it for myself.
Years ago I had cognitive behavioural therapy and before any session I had to fill out a form so they could assess if I was a risk. It included a statement around feeling “driven by a motor”.
I kept thinking about that phase as I tried and stitched and tried and tried and tried again. Driven by a motor… driven by a motor… driven by a motor.
I experimented with more squares, and eventually started feeling more confident. I grew more comfortable ripping out my work.
I started messaging with my sister in law and a friend. So where the connection with mum had disappeared, I was grateful that others felt stronger.
On the (unseasonably warm) January day of the funeral I clutched my terrible black scarf with me. Proof that I had tried. Proof that I really tried and I brought it even though it was rubbish. I did it for her. I did it for my dad and my brother and his wife and my nieces and for my family and for all the love that I didn’t know I had inside me and around me.
I met mum’s craft group friends and they said she was a good teacher and we laughed about how she liked to tell people when they got things wrong. I felt glad that others knew her like I knew her.
After the funeral dad found a whole set of granny squares that mum had made and I brought them home with me. Over a few days I stitched them together and created a baby blanket. Finishing her work felt like collaborating.
Keeping the 4 squares she had started to join together with pink yarn, when I only had orange yarn for the rest of the blanket, felt strangely reverential. I keep coming back and touching them, even though she made 90% of the thing, those stitches feel the most important.
And now? I still feel compelled to make but maybe I’m slowly moving towards doing it for my own sake.
I’m still nervous about trying new things, there are stitches I don’t know how to do, and I’m taking that in my own time. But I’m trying to remember that this has built my connection with people I love and I hope it will keep doing that.
I also feel like I was gifted something that is going to help me through what will be a year of remembering, worrying and feeling in ways I haven’t before. In some ways mum managed to leave me with a tool that would help me after she was gone.
Now as I stitch I remember what my mum told me in the hospital on that day.
“Crochet is very forgiving… it’s very forgiving… it’s very forgiving”
