The Unravelers

There are two kinds of women: those who knit and those who unravel. I am a great unraveler. I can undo years of careful stitching in fifteen gluttonous minutes. It isn’t even a decision, really. Once I see the loose thread, I am undone. It’s over before I have even asked myself the question: Do I actually want to destroy this?

“My mother was a knitter,” my Therapist says. She pauses. We’ve been seeing each other for so many years that we occasionally drift past the doctor/patient boundaries. I know that she is from New Hampshire and was an ice dancer. I know she’s been married for thirty years or so, since her early twenties. Her husband can build a boat. I don’t know anything about her mother.

Maybe it’s the unseasonably mild November weather, or that her hair has grown back and she’s not wearing a wig and she looks like herself again, but she continues.

“I have a story about knitting.” She glances at the clock to my right.

“That’s wonderful because I have to write this thing about knitting. And knitting is like, a whole metaphor thing.”

“A metaphor for what?”

“I think for life and fate. Also comfort. For love. For the divine feminine?”

She smiles and waits.

“So, I don’t know yet. But it’s one huge metaphor,” I say finally