Will you love me despite the ridges on my head?

I was just thinking of something, I think I just worked something out, sort of. I'm not sure I can get it down, exactly, but I might make a first stab and then try to develop the thoughts more in later posts.

I was thinking about knitting, and how my Mom knits and got me started. Tonight we were talking on the phone about casting on and casting off, and throwing your yarn vs Continental (I throw, she says Continental is faster, but when I try it it gets way too tight, but she gave me some tips that might help so I might come around eventually). She said, "You're going to be a better knitter than I am." I said in retort, "No, no. I was never a faster typist than you, I'm sure I will always be behind in knitting as well." And I'm sure I will be - she has such precision and regularity. Like her handwriting, always confident and beautiful. I love knitting and hope to advance, but I know I don't have the steadiness and built-in motor coordination to ever do it like she does.

I was thinking about starting out knitting, and the story in family legend about the first sweater she knitted, as a young married person, recently uprooted from home and family and everything she had ever known, to go live in St Joseph, Missouri, where her brand new husband had just been transferred (they moved one month after they got married, and she's never managed change very well, so I can't even imagine. When I ask Dad about it, he just says, "Well, she cried a lot.").

My Mom's side of this family has this thing that has come to be known as "Gaffney Hysteria". It comes down from the Gaffneys, my grandmother, and so it's only in the youngest three of the six daughters, the other three's mother was Mrs. Miller and they just have strong, German stoicism and practical, unflappable attitudes and aren't like the rest of us. Gaffney Hysteria is, well, crying a lot, basically. I have it, way worse than my sister, and I know one cousin's kid who lives in Denver has it, and Grandma had it but not as bad as others, and one of Grandma's brothers had a male version of it where he'd just get stressed out and would have to bring his family home from holidays and things.

From the inside, it's like a coil, like an orange mist in your brain. It's always associated with the future, or actually no, it's always associated with one's performance. It's associated with the future when it's a worry that one is going to fail at something, because of lack of time or a looming deadline or lack of sleep because one is up at 12:55 am worrying about it and has to go in to work, early, for a meeting and outside it's blowing a positive gale and polishing up the new snow so the drive to work, early, will probably entail risking death and mechanical damage and awkwardness and delay, and so one surely won't have time in the morning to do the thing that should have been done tonight, this afternoon, days ago, weeks ago. And so one shouldn't be blogging instead of just sitting down and doing the thing now, but one is because one has Gaffney Hysteria and there's an orange mist in her brain and all she can do it panic and worry and keep herself up later, there's nothing to be done about it.

Anyway, so I was thinking about knitting and thinking about the family story of the first sweater my Mom tried to make. It took her ages and ages, and she finally finished it, in that little house on Lover's Lane Heights in St Joseph Missouri, newly married and newly uprooted from her home and everything familiar. I can now appreciate just how long it would have taken, because sweaters are really hard and have a great deal of real estate. They take a long time to finish. And she finished it, but because she knits too loose, it was way, way too big, would never fit in a million years. "And she threw it across the room," Dad says when he tells the story. In fact, "threw it across the room" is a refrain that's spoken together when this story is mentioned in the family when this story comes up, it's the story's tag line or abbreviation.

I can imagine. The long hours of toil, the hard work that went into the knitting, also the expectation of what the sweater would be like, and then it's finally finished, and it's wrong, and then just the explosion.

I'm her. I have that too (and here I am knitting! will work slowly up to sweaters, though, and make sure to do a gauge). I know just what it would have felt like, and it's not good.

I am my Dad as well. I am the steady intellectual who can love this woman, but is not like her. But only half.

I am also her, I have Gaffney Hysteria, but it's not a good thing. It's not something I value. A therapist once got me talking about this - what qualities were identified with the female, in my house growing up, and what with the male. I don't want to have this orange misty thing. But I do, we all do, it comes down from Grandma. So, I was thinking about being that kind of woman, about my Mom being her back then with the sweater and about me having her inside me, and I was thinking about the men who love them, and it still baffles me a bit that anyone could love them, but they do. My Dad loves my Mom thoroughly, completely, steadily by her side, and for just coming up on 50 years.

And it put me in mind of a particular episode of Star Trek Voyager. I know, I know, but stick with me. There's an episode where Belana Torres is pregnant, having been married for a little while to the pilot Tom Paris. She finds out the baby has a very slight little genetic thingy, and the doctor can just wave a woobly woo device over her belly and fix it. All cool, very routine procedure, done of course on a space ship in the Delta quadrant by a doctor who's a hologram. Anyway, Belana then after hours sneaks in and looks up more about her baby's genetic structure, and finds her daughter is going to have forehead ridges, like her mother does. Belana is half human, half Klingon. The baby will look Klingon like her. She then does all sorts of sneaky and underhanded things to try to get the baby's genetric structure changed again so that she's a version without the ridges. And it's dangerous to do this and she gets caught and yelled at by the doctor, and her husband is outraged and baffled and they have a big confrontation scene toward the end. Belana explains that her father, Mr. Torres, left her and her mother when she was a child, because he couldn't handle two Klingon women in the family. He couldn't manage the temper or the gutsiness or the arguments, or etc. else. There is a tender flashback scene to illustrate this, showing Belana as a confused little girl. The grown-up and pregnant Belana is now terrified that if there are two Klingon women in her own household, that Tom won't be able to handle it and he will abandon them like her father abandoned her and her mother, and so she was trying to change her baby to be more human to prevent this from happening.

Tom realises, and grabs her and holds her and says, "I will love having two Klingons in the family. Or three or four, or even more!" He convinces her that he loves her and is not like her father and has no intention of leaving, ever. They go back to the medical center and look at the holographic projection of what their daughter will look like, and a tear rolls down Belana's cheek as she says, "She's a cute little thing, actually, isn't she?"

This episode just floored me. I sat on the couch and cried and cried and cried. It still moves me, to remember it, and I've only ever seen it once.

So, I've sort of figured out why. I have this emotional thing that has come down through my mother's side, I have it too, and it makes us emotional and hard to live with because we go hysterical, every now and again. But there are men who love us, just the way they are. I'm sure that resonant theme is what I saw in the Star Trek episode, and why it affected me as it did.