My Hands…Mother, Daughter, Doula Part 1

By Rebecca

My mom taught me the basics of crochet when I was about 10. I never would have imagined that what those little hands learned would one day save my heart from breaking, and give my grief a voice and a physical place to reside. I had always thought of myself as a pretty resilient person, but September 2001 would challenge that notion of myself.

I was writing a book of poetry as my final step to graduate college while going through a long, drawn out, passive aggressive breakup with my boyfriend of 3 years, and my parents had just separated. Overwhelmed with all this drama, stress, and poetry, I was certainly not expecting to meet my future husband, David. But I did, working as a waitress in an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, one week after 9/11. We dated for a month before getting into a relationship, and I was so happy. Then, one day, my mom called me. Somehow I could tell she was bearing a huge weight and my heart started pounding.

“I have breast cancer.” She said reluctantly.

I was shocked. It was as if my heart turned inside out…I could not feel pain for myself at that moment. I wanted to take that diagnosis away from her, take away her fear and this battle and protect her.

My parents were heading towards a divorce, and although I was 22, the idea of them divorcing turned me emotionally into a 5 year old. Now this, I couldn’t really add this to my already ill-prepared emotions. My mom: a strong and muscular modern dancer, constantly caring for her four kids, her husband, and the family pets. She is a woman who has already survived so much. Cancer? That dark and vicious disease you hear about other people suffering from? How could this happen to her? Especially now, with our family crumbling? Trying to console her was a muddy path. I was confused and I’m pretty sure I didn’t say anything too profound or helpful. Integrating this terror I had into my poetry was unsuccessful. I just couldn’t find the words.

I had just started crocheting again and I was in this honeymoon phase with crocheting where I just wanted to make stuff all the time. I could tell people thought I was a little peculiar, crocheting away on the subway, at work, in class. All the while, falling in love and yet walking around with a huge lump in my throat for weeks. I was miserable with the idea that I couldn’t express this pain, or be there for my mom like I wanted to be. I couldn’t even cry. One morning I took the hour-long train ride to my favorite yarn store in Jamaica, Queens. I bought a big basketful of grey, white, light blue, and dark blue skeins of yarn, the colors in my mom’s eyes. The next day at work, I brought some of the blue yarn with me. It was a very slow day at the restaurant and I started to crochet. I made a 6” square, then another, and another. I started to cry. I prayed. I wiped my tears on the squares. I let all my thoughts and fears unravel into the repetitive loops of these grey and blue squares. I continued like this for weeks, saying all the things I couldn’t say and crying all the tears I couldn’t cry into the crocheted squares.

My mom soon had to have a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery using a strip of her abdominal muscles. The day of her operation was a very strange day for my family. My parents had been separated for months but my dad was there, sitting next to my mom on the hospital bed. My mom’s mom, her brother, and all her kids were there to see her roll away to the OR. She tried to keep a sense of humor, putting a sticker on the breast that was not to be removed that read “I’m with stupid à”. We laughed with her, like this wasn’t really happening to our mama.

What felt like days later, she came out of surgery and when I saw the huge wound on the belly I was grown in and the absence of the breast I had nursed on. I felt as if all the blood had drained from my body, and my uncle helped me out of the room. The waiting that occurred for the next few hours was a blur. I crocheted.

I went back home that night, exhausted, and started piecing together all my squares with the white yarn. It took me months to complete the blanket. My mom had to go through chemo and radiation. I finally finished just when her hair was starting to grow back. That year for Christmas, I gave my mama a queen size blanket, filled with all the unspeakable and unspoken.