Family/CommunicationReflectionJuly 17, 20160Building On What Came Before Us

Many years ago, my mom declared that she would knit each of us, her four chil­dren, a sweater.  She had lots of oth­er stuff she was inter­est­ed in doing, though, so she nev­er quite com­plet­ed the project. I’m pret­ty sure she fin­ished my younger broth­er’s sweater, and she may have fin­ished my old­er sis­ter’s. In any case, when we went to clean out her house after she died in 2004, I dis­cov­ered most of the sweater she had been mak­ing for me in a knit­ting bag with (for­tu­nate­ly) the pat­tern book she was using. I was touched; I decid­ed to take it home with me and fin­ish it someday.

So here I am, 12 years lat­er, fin­ish­ing the sweater my mom start­ed for me some­time in the 1990s. I thought it would be a nice way to con­nect with her, and it is. It’s easy to imag­ine her work­ing on it: get­ting irri­tat­ed when an instruc­tion did­n’t make sense; swear­ing soft­ly at hav­ing to undo and redo a mis­take; her crooked smile of sat­is­fac­tion at a beau­ti­ful­ly com­plex bit of fin­ished work. And most of all, think­ing of her think­ing of me.

I’ve also enjoyed the mys­tery-solv­ing aspect of it. It’s a cardi­gan, and she had com­plet­ed the back, both fronts, and most of one of the sleeves.  So I had to deter­mine where she was in the sleeve (there’s a cable design run­ning down the mid­dle, so I had to fig­ure out exact­ly the cor­rect row), and which of the six avail­able sizes she had cho­sen to knit. And since I had only one skein of the yarn she was using, a yarn that has­n’t been made for many years, I had to find more of it (thank god for ebay). Final­ly, I had to fig­ure out what size nee­dles she was using in order to fin­ish the ribbed trim on the front, neck and pock­ets.  I tried the size called for in the pat­tern, but that made stitch­es that were big­ger than hers; I tried a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent size nee­dles, knit­ting a few rows, pulling out the work and redo­ing it till I got it right. (You can see how it’s going in the pic­ture above.)

Most of all, though, doing this is mak­ing me real­ize that I gen­er­al­ly don’t give my mom enough cred­it for the foun­da­tion she pro­vid­ed to me through­out my life. So much of who I am as a pro­fes­sion­al, a par­ent, and a human being is ground­ed in her good exam­ple.  She taught me how to think crit­i­cal­ly; inspired my love of lan­guage and of writ­ing; taught me that a par­en­t’s job is to pro­vide the tools kids need to cre­ate their own life and the moral com­pass to assure that life is one of con­tri­bu­tion and val­ue to oth­ers and to the world.  She taught me that humor can ease ten­sion, and that it’s men­tal­ly lazy to accept “what every­one knows” as truth. She insist­ed that I take respon­si­bil­i­ty for my mis­takes, and she was qui­et­ly proud of my accom­plish­ments. She (and my father) taught me that judg­ing, dis­miss­ing, or hat­ing oth­ers for some part of who they are — skin col­or, sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, coun­try of birth — is just plain wrong. She raised all four of us, two boys and two girls, with equal expec­ta­tions that each of us would find work we liked and were good at, and build lov­ing, strong rela­tion­ships and families.

And as I’m reflect­ing on this, on my own fail­ure to acknowl­edge her gifts to me, I’m won­der­ing if we aren’t all guilty of this to some extent.  It’s too easy to believe that every­thing now is “new,” that we’re start­ing from zero every day and hav­ing to invent every­thing as we go. But even though almost every aspect of our world is chang­ing faster now that at any pre­vi­ous time in his­to­ry, we are able to nav­i­gate through this time of seis­mic change by virtue of the foun­da­tion laid down by those who have gone before.

Just as I can fin­ish this sweater because of the start my mom made on it and the knit­ting skills passed down to me by her and many oth­ers, all that we do builds on the dis­cov­er­ies and advances of pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions. The fact that I, a woman, can be accept­ed and respect­ed as an author, speak­er, con­sul­tant and busi­ness own­er is built on the efforts and sac­ri­fice of my fem­i­nist moth­er, my suf­fragette grand­moth­ers, and mil­lions of oth­er women of past gen­er­a­tions all over the world. The fact that I can share my thoughts with you here, one-to-one, per­haps with­out ever hav­ing met you, is a trib­ute to thou­sands of gen­er­a­tions of humans who cre­at­ed lan­guage, invent­ed ways to write it down and dis­sem­i­nate it (includ­ing the print­ing press), then cre­at­ed ever-more sophis­ti­cat­ed com­put­ers, and final­ly har­nessed the pow­er of the internet.

It is both hum­bling and inspir­ing to acknowl­edge that we are links in this human chain. It makes me feel very grate­ful, and it makes me want to leave a lega­cy that will help move the world and every­one in it toward more joy, more col­lab­o­ra­tion, and lives of pros­per­i­ty, inde­pen­dence and discovery.