Knitting in the Dark

Knitting in the Dark

“Honey, I got good news and bad news,” my husband stated. “Which one do you want first?”

I picked the bad because that was how I rolled.

“I broke your grandmother’s depression, glass butter dish,” he confessed.

I gasped.

“But your mom’s friend, Nancy, wants you to call her.” He had inserted his good news and waited. The line was quiet.

I couldn’t believe it. My head spun and my heart raced. Would I finally meet someone who was close to my mom. Someone who actually knew her? Someone who could help me connect the dots.

My mother fell sick when I was little. We called it, ‘The accident.’ I don’t know why we called it that. It wasn’t a real accident. There was nothing accidental. Looking back, I think that might have been how we made it neat and tidy. Just another way to help us cope a traumatic event of epic proportions. It maimed us and stayed with us.

Because my mom fell ill when I was young, my father moved us away from everyone we knew. But more importantly, from my mother. We ended up in California. A big mistake, but a change purely for survival. He carefully packed every part of her away - pictures, clothing - anything that would remind us of her. We were not to think or speak about her. We were pushed into a virtually silence. If one of us cried, the others would try to support but also warn. “If you start crying, it’ll make us all cry.” We pretended to be strong. As if my mother’s accident wasn’t traumatic. It was just the way my father chose to handle his grief - and a way that made it exponentially worse for us kids. Instead of only once, we lost our mother multiple times.

The first few calls to my mother’s friend built a sense of familiarity. Nancy lived on the east coast, just an hour from my brother-in-law in New Jersey. I set up a trip, and while my family visited the Bronx Zoo, I visited Nancy in Yonkers, New York. Our first meeting was full of trepidation. I even set up a pretense for my husband to call from the zoo to provide me a quick ‘exit.’ But it wasn’t needed.

The threads were soon sewn. Nancy and I were like old blankets. We felt warm and familiar. As it turned out, there wasn’t enough time that afternoon for us to cover everything. When my husband arrived with our daughter, I couldn’t begin to account for the time. A norm for our future visits. As we pulled away, I smiled and waved madly. Something inside me had changed. I can’t describe it, but it felt good and safe.

The funny thing was that what had started as just a random afternoon grew into so much more. It grew into twenty years of east coast visits - each richer than last. Three and four-day weekends full of sleeping in, delectable meals, and endless talks.

The visits began innocently at first. Inevitably, they ended with us planning the next. We rarely left Nancy’s kitchen, but inside our minds, we were traveling. Not though miles, but through time. With each story, I was able to explore my mom’s personality. Like a character flushed from an artist’s sketchbook, my mother became a three-dimensional person.

Nancy and my mother were more than just friends. They also enjoyed academic careers that paralleled. My mother studied piano while in college and Nancy studied voice. They accompanied each other during their performances. Nancy not only had anecdotes to share but she had a few dogeared concert programs, annotated with my mother’s beautiful script. My mother had narrated highlights of each concert in the margins, and her humor shone through the ink with critiques of performers’ fashion and make up mistakes.

We would talk into the wee hours of the morning. We talked until we were bleary eyed and our throats dry. I was so desperate in the beginning, I once followed Nancy to the bathroom. I stood outside the door with the glass doorknob and impatiently waited. I just didn’t want our conversation to stop. I drank up every word.

I never met anyone who had personally witnessed my horrible tragedy but who also was a participant. I knew there were doctors and such, but her old friends were scarce. My aunt was technically a first cousin, but I often wondered if her allegiance was more of a sense of family duty. I never met anyone who actually knew everyone in my family. But Nancy knew my grandparents on both sides. She knew my aunts and uncles.

My mother had her accident in the late sixties and I met Nancy in nineties. Anyone privy to my mother’s traumatic event had simply disappeared. By the time I was old enough to reach out, not many were alive or cognitively alert.

Through the years, I build my mom inside my mind from scratch. Although it was painful, the joy was more powerful. The exhilaration of learning something about my mother overshadowed the pain. What pain did hit came from the realization of what I had lost. What had been stolen from me. The more I learned about her, the more real she became. There was, however, some things I didn’t want to know. And for just a moment, I wondered if I’d be better off not knowing.

Eventually, others came forward to share their stories about my mother. My father even gave me her calendars. Three years of gas station booklets with personal tasks in tiny square.

Another of my mother’s first cousin once revealed, “She could knit in the dark at the movies!”

I couldn’t crochet in the light.

A friend down the street from my grandparents said that my mother once scooped up my three-year old sister in the midst of a tantrum and left without a single word. “Your mother was wearing an A-line white sheath. A mother of four wearing white?” the lady said. “Your mother gave me hope.”

When my mother first became ill, she lived with my grandparents, and was later moved to a home. A blood clot caused her to collapse, and no one knew CPR. She was without oxygen for over six minutes. Because of the brain damage, the doctors could not bring her back, not fully. She had to relearn everything, including her children’s names, who she was, basic math, and any thing else we could imagine. Her psychological evaluations placed her aptitude at a twelve-year-old.

I shared my mother’s story many times and the reaction was always the same. ‘The loss of a parent is terrible.’ But losing her twice was akin to tossing gasoline on a fire.

As I grew older, I visited her in North Carolina. Dealing with someone with brain damage was difficult. It required patience and consistency. I loved my mother. There was nothing I wouldn’t have done for her, but the explaining and constant repeating felt exasperating. Many times I cried in the parking lot after leaving her. I would count to ten in the hallway before re-entering her room because she was upset over a red, woolen coat. There was no woolen coat!

Somehow, the contact with Nancy sandwiched between visits with my mother gradually changed things inside me. The random sharings moved my world from black and white to full color. I was becoming more patient or perhaps more tolerant.

One afternoon, I stood outside a department store’s dressing room tapping my foot. My mom refused to move. But, I wasn’t angry.

“My shoes have to match my purse!” my mom called out.

I took in a deep breath and laughed silently. “Just come out ... we’ll find the purse later.”

“No!” she stated. “They have to match!”

Thanks to Nancy’s stories, I remained calm. My mother’s confusion had nothing to do with her brain damage. It was her keen sense of fashion and the crazy misplaced allegiance to etiquette from Raleigh in the late forties.

The salesperson pop her head in the entryway.

“Any chance you could look for a small, white clutch as an accessory?” I whispered.

She nodded.

Nancy laughed so hard when I shared the story. “You have to understand that we were not allowed in town without our gloves and a hat. And ¼ our purses had to match our shoes.” She shook her head. “Wouldn’t be caught dead with mismatched items.”

I laughed, remembering. Nancy had taught me well.

Nancy had given my mother back to me. We may have lost her in sixty-six, but she was slowly returning to me. I now admire and was proud of her. I saw the similarities between her and me. I wore a new badge of honor. Even though I was only three when my mother became ill, she had left her mark on me. She was there all along.

She handled my children so deftly that they never knew what hit them. Playing absentmindedly, they refused to come downstairs to say good-bye. I was upset.

“If the mountain won’t come to Mohammad,” my mother stated, “then Mohammad must come to the mountain.”

She slowly climbed my aunt’s worn, walnut stairs. The door creaked open, and my children peered up with wide eyes. They ran and hugged her legs. I stood silently in awe. I could have threatened but still not receive the same results.

On a flight home, I thought about my mom. For the first time, I could see her as a whole person - as complete. I no longer felt that searing, burning pain of loss. Something had changed in me. I could now stand back, watch, and enjoy. I could love her for who she was today and not what she was yesterday. Her humor, her savviness, her efficiency, her intelligence, and ability to make everything look easy gave me hope.

My mother was perfect, for she could knit in the dark.