Knitting as silent screams

Last week I had an interview for a job I really wanted. For a few days, I wrapped my heart around the idea of leaving my baby with a stranger (who might keep the babies padlocked into barred play pens), got work clothes in order, and braced for a possible return to the workforce. But I didn't get the job. A man with smart glasses got the job, and I got an evening crying into my knees.

The next day, I knit a doily. I was not sure how to feel about this. What is a doily? Why do I want a lot of them, in bright colors? Could I find a way to knit bad words into them? 

While I was grappling with my vague sense of shame over knitting a doily, another one came off my needles.

So now I have made TWO doilies. I realized that I am trying to fill some hole in myself - with doilies. Maybe it is a doily-shaped hole, eloquent and full of smaller holes. Maybe if I let myself go into the doily as I knit, I will wake up to find I have worked a map or star chart or blueprint to destinations vast and unknowable into the coiling stitches. That is not a fuckup in the second circle from the middle, that is a cypher.

I dunked the doilies in kool aid and pinned them out on foam kiddie mats to dry. 

But in an spooky manner.

And I stared at the doilies, thinking these things, when suddenly I saw it there, amongst the yarn-overs: get an agent, get your pens, and get to work, you idiot. 

So that's what I'm doing. It is wise not to argue with doilies.