The Ravelled Sleeve

I haven’t posted in a few days, and this was going to be an upbeat post. Deb left me a comment that cheered me up about Rosedale, which has been stalled while I decided what to do about the contrast rectangle on the back. Carrying the yarn across the back of the contrast area has given it the consistency of a board, and messed up the tension on the adjacent stitches, and I’m enough of a perfectionist to be bothered by both these things. Apparently, I’m not the only person to have problems with this part of the pattern, which is encouraging to know: I’d put the unsatisfactory result down to my deficient colourwork.

But I’m not feeling very upbeat. I wasn’t sure whether I’d blog this, but here goes: I’ve just had a miscarriage. It’s my fourth, in fact, and my third within the last twelve months. I have no idea why, and neither do my doctors; all the tests have turned up nothing.

I’m trying not to generalize the misery. My life definitely doesn’t suck: I realize my great good fortune in having a patient, tolerant, funny and utterly decent husband whose few small quirks (pathological attitude to sleep, for example, and an inability to hurry up when required) are really very easy to live with, and who somehow–miracle of miracles!–manages to put up with me, my moods and my morning grumpiness. And I have my son–charming, offbeat, affectionate, smart as a button, and healthy as a horse–which is an enormous consolation many of those in the recurrent miscarriage boat don’t possess. Miscarriages aside, we’re healthy. We have a house we like, jobs that engage us, for the most part, and we’re financially stable. We’ve been lucky.

But this year has been spectacularly bad. Two miscarriages, my mother’s rapid and painful death from cancer (a cancer, what’s more, triggered by medical hardware used to repair an injury caused by a careless driver who hit her when she was crossing the road), and now another miscarriage. There’s also been a plethora of troubles, small and large, in the lives of people I care about and hurt for: bereavements, health worries, anxieties over children. I hate this year. I’m afraid to contemplate the ways it could have been worse, in case I make them happen. I just want to sink its feet in concrete and drop it into the sea.

I’m going upstairs now to spin up some merino roving.  The spinning helps: it’s part physical therapy, part hopeful reminder that, with patience and gentle encouragement, the snarls and tangles can smooth themselves out and become something useful and beautiful.   And if you have any good luck mojo going spare, send it our way, OK?