A Year in the Making, but Really a Lifetime

I have this awful habit of not finishing what I start. I've been like this forever. For years my family has been on my case about publishing a book, and though I've started hundreds of stories, I have finished relatively few (and the ones I have finished have been short stories). My brother convinced me to illustrate one of my short stories with watercolors and market it as a children's book. I worked very hard for two days dividing the story into pages and sketching the illustrations for each page. And now the papers sit untouched in my filing drawer. I bought ten or so picture frames from D.I. a while back and was going to paint them, print out pictures, and make a picture collage for our bedroom, and I have yet to finish sanding them. I am highly distract-able, and I think that's my problem. As a child I would have these grandiose ideas about cleaning every inch of my bedroom when we were having company, and I would dawdle so much that my mom would get irritated, tell me I wasn't moving fast enough, and I would shove everything in my closet and under the bed. I have boxes of books that I bought with the intention of reading, but after getting almost halfway through any particular book, I'd find another book that "I just have to read." And so I have actually read very few books for an English major. Jonathan often gets irritated when I won't put down a project for even a minute, and every time, I try to explain that the second I put down a project, I put it down forever, or at least for a very, very long time.

When I was in elementary school, my dad taught me how to crochet. Yes, my dad. I think he taught me because I would get too frustrated with myself if I didn't get it just right immediately, and my mom would get too frustrated with me. My dad had a little more patience when it came to teaching me to do things that took any amount of skill. And so for months I would make endless chains that I would tie onto my stuffed animals, and then I would drag the stuffed animals through the house and outside and on the trampoline and in the garage and tie them up to things and pretend that they were my pets. In high school I finally decided that I was going to crochet a blanket for my niece Rochelle. It was a crooked mess and only half finished. My sister-in-law probably thought, "Uh, thanks, but no thanks," when she pulled it out of the gift bag. It was a few years before I reattempted crocheting anything so ambitious. I crocheted a blanket for my niece Sophie. It was pink and green to match her crib bedding. For the first time, something I made actually turned out! I was so proud of that thing, not because it looked good, but simply because I actually finished it. So then I decided that my next niece, Lily, needed one as well. Four times I restarted it. Every time it turned out more crooked than the time before. But I was determined to finish another blanket. I bought new yard. I crocheted row after row. And eventually, in moving to Idaho, to Utah, to Idaho, to Washington, to Idaho who knows how many times, I never finished it. In fact, I just found it last night and said, "Maybe I should think about finishing that someday."

Last December I decided to crochet a blanket for Netty. I thought it would be so wonderful for my baby to have a blanket made my me. Of course, we've already established that my crocheting skills are sub-par, and I had to restart five times, and take out a few rows several times. In the thick of student teaching, I set the blanket aside and decided it would be a much better project for that month after graduation before the baby was born. But then I was depressed because our apartment wasn't ready and we couldn't unpack and I wasn't going to be able to make a home for my baby. And then the baby came and we moved again, and then I hated that place even more, and we moved again, and now it's the following December and Netty is seven months old. But after discovering that we have almost no money for Christmas, I became even more determined to finish this blanket. Yesterday I finally finished, and the moment I did, I snapped a picture, wrapped it, and slid it beneath the tree. I know Netty will love it because every time I would pull it out to work on it she would scoot across the room and grab and pull and make crocheting an even more miserable experience for me.

After completing another small crocheting project and a half, I told Jonathan, "Hmm, maybe I'll start another blanket." And he rolled his eyes.