Covert Mom: Silver Threads and Golden Needles

By Mariah Mottley

I’m a knitter. When I had small babies, I got really attached to the pastime because it was the one thing I did all day that didn’t get undone, my creations were little pieces of permanence amidst chaos.

Now, I make ganseys, a sweater traditionally worn by fishermen to endure the rigors of life at sea. Knit with tough 5-ply yarn, on small metal needles in sober colors, they are the marathon of knitting projects, the resulting fabric a chain-mail of knit and purl stitches.
When I heard about The Pussy Hat Project, I changed gears. Wednesday night, my kids found me on our green sofa, knitting with thick, fuchsia yarn and bamboo needles. They wanted to know what I was making.
“It’s a pussy cat hat,” I explained. “When I put it on, the corners will stand up, you know, like a cat’s ears.”
“Yeah, but why are you knitting it? You don’t even like pink.”
They stood, skeptical.

I said that friends who were going to march in Washington, right after the inauguration, had requested them. Lots of people were going to be wearing these hats, I said, thousands, even.
“Why?”
I explained that the word pussy, in addition to meaning cat, is also a slang term for a woman’s vagina. Donald Trump used the word when he bragged about how it was totally cool to grab women there because he was really rich and could do anything he wanted. Since Trump’s been around, the kids have learned all kinds of new words.
I continued, saying that one of the secrets of social justice is to take the word that’s been used to oppress or marginalize you, something that is perceived as a weakness by your oppressor, and turn it into a strength. You take the name they tried to insult you with, claim it for yourself, turn it into a battle cry. I put the hat on.
“How do my ears look?” I asked. “Are they sticking up?”
In the past, going to the yarn shop was a guilty pleasure. This week it felt patriotic. Julie Schroeder (pronounced Schraeder) the owner of Homespun, near the Commons, set up a drop off/pick up box for pussy hats at her store. You can drop some off if you’ve knitted them, or pick some up if you are in need. While I bought bulky, raspberry-hued skeins, she told me that her phone was ringing daily and that her hat box had seen many exchanges.
She imagined pink pins on a giant map, showing every location where someone was furiously knitting a pussy hat, and that soon all those pins would begin to coalesce and move towards Washington in a big pink flow. She said that knitting these hats were a way for knitters of the community to channel their negative feelings about the state of the union into something productive.
“What are you going to do, kick a wall?” she asked.
The week ended and I got more hat requests. How would I find the time?
The answer was to go old school. Contract knitters in the 1890s on the Cornish coast knit while they walked, and knit while they shopped. They knit all the time, because they were paid by the piece, and often knitting was the difference between starving and not. These women were the creators of some of the ganseys I love so much. I took a page from my Cornish heroes and left a trail of fuchsia yarn behind me all week.
I found that one can knit while rollerskating, grocery shopping and on a treadmill. In a real moment of ingenuity, I handed a half finished pink hat to my husband, who is capable with needles but does not enjoy them. Sean is a feminist, and the father of daughters. He had the hat finished before he went to bed.
Gordon Reid, an archivist and writer in Caithness, Scotland, runs a celebrated knitting blog dedicated to ganseys. He called the act of knitting them “alchemy in wool: bad stuff came in, and by the magic of knit and purl stitches it was transformed into something positive, all the poison drawn out. Nobody knits something like a gansey with anything other than good intent. It’s like an arrow of hope loosed into the future.”
I don’t think anyone knits pussy hats without good intent, either. I sincerely pray that my fuchsia creations will join all of Julie’s pink dots in converging on Washington and all the other Women’s marches in other cities, that they will draw all the poison out, and indeed become arrows of hope loosed into our future.
Still wearing the first hat, I began another, casting the stitches on and counting under my breath. Three more to go, plus a purple one for Seneca Falls. I looked at the children.
“Any questions?”
My son had a smear of peanut butter on his cheek, jam on the other. He looked at me, thoughtful.
“Will you make me one?” he asked.
“Me too,” his sister added.
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Originally from Manhattan, Mariah was educated in Massachusetts, Montana and Texas, often by failure. She lives with her husband and three children in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Mariah can be reached at mariah@mariahmottley.com.