In preparation for the Writing for Comfort session as part of World Childless Week, we were asked to have with us an item that we associate with comfort. I started this piece during the session and made notes about how I would finish the piece. Here is my humble offering:

The Beanie

I pick up the dove grey beanie, knitted during the UKs spring lockdown. It is soft and asking to be pressed against my cheek. A pattern of 13 circles, some intentionally incomplete, decorate the front of the hat from the edging band to the crown. The circles are created by a picot pattern; intentional holes to create a feature. A design of absence, highlighted by the shadows of my steely grey hair: a depletion process which started when I was eighteen and accelerated by this third and final menopause.

I found my first grey hair when my periods were merely excruciating. I was twenty-three when the endometriosis began, multiplying the pain to fever inducing agony. The first and second temporary medical menopauses an attempt to minimise the lesions and the pain. Another absence process as the medical process stops the body from creating oestrogen, the loss of this female hormone starves the lesions. It also caused me to lose some of my hair and my memory. The endometriosis contributed to my childlessness, the biggest absence in my life, although I will never know whether I was infertile. That is a different story and not one I dwell on today.

While I have battled my endometriosis and my childlessness, I have worked and studied, sometimes simultaneously. This has given me a reason and a purpose in getting out of bed each day and to keep living on the days when I feel that the world would be better if I was absent.

In 2011, I joined a small team for the second time, a service in Gateshead which supported young homeless mums and their children. The irony of life.

The first time I had worked for the team had ended in disaster. I was seconded into a temporary position that was quite a full role when the team lead stepped up to cover a manager’s maternity leave but didn’t let go of the reins. I was kept in the dark about the staff member’s development needs and they didn’t get to know that I had knowledge and experience available to support them. A gap in knowledge that proved disastrous for the four of us. I walked away from the secondment and the team in 2010 feeling a failure, useless and broken by trying to fit myself into a peghole too small for my skills.

I knitted this beanie once before, somewhere around 2013. I used a beautiful pale aqua cotton, but the silky smooth fibres slipped where they should have held. The beanie sagged out of shape and became useless. I unravelled it, carefully winding the wool onto a piece of card in case I should find another use for it. This spring I knitted some of it into a cord to use as a tier on a facemask I made for myself. A large portion of the remainder went into a knitted page in a book about my recovery from my pain.

Second time round, I came in at the same grade as my team, replacing one of them who had moved on. I spent time inducting another member of staff, a new man who had never worked in homelessness before and was naive about the complex issues facing these young women. We did the training at the table in the kitchen which adjoined the office. As my colleagues overheard my coaching, they disclosed to me that they had never had such an induction and didn’t know the fuller uses and purposes of the documents in the files. Suddenly my knowledge and wisdom was benefitting the team, although the male staff member left for somewhere more suited to his experience. We knitted ourselves together in a way that was both supportive and robust, fit for purpose but kind and gentle with one another too. This team supported me through leaving my husband whose conduct contributed to my childlessness. Their support and his absence from my life were a blessing, giving some balance to the weight of grief at my unfilled womb.

I reknitted this beanie during lockdown, using a different yarn; a mixed fibre that is matt not silken, soft but less slippy so the stitches pull together to hold the shape of the beanie as it was intended to be. I look at it in my hand, before rubbing it against my cheek and then pull it onto my head. It cocoons the place wherein lives my knowledge and the ideas that feed my creativity. A place that holds the memories and stories of thousands of books, including one where a young woman who is burdened by grief finds a dove grey covered book under her pillow one Christmas. This book brings her comfort on her darkest days when she is weighed down by the absence of her father in the first instance, and then later, the permanent loss of her younger sister. This young girl eventually goes on to become an author, writing about her loss and her sister’s life.

There is a comfort and a warmth in the garment itself, but to me, after forty four years of practice, there is a comfort in the process of knitting itself. Beginning with standing in the wool shop as I feel the yarn and look at the colours to match the texture to a pattern, through sitting in my favourite spot on the sofa, cup of tea beside me, the steady rhythm of making each stitch and feeding the stitches along the needles, each stitch an interconnected loop running continuously from first stitch to last and contributing to the integrity of the garment.

Over the months of working together, I discovered that the three of us had a mutual love of crafting: sewing, knitting, crochet, upcycling. We each knew the joy of making, of creating, of being fruitful as we turned raw materials to garments and toys and soft furnishings.

When I finally had to leave the team, one of their presents to me was a book of hat patterns, the very one this beanie features in. So, knitting this particular beanie had the added advantage of remembering my team, and the journey from feeling rejected to being welcomed and accepted into a like-minded community.

And now, here I sit writing this reflection, part of the community of people who are Childless Not By Choice. A community knit together by our shared feelings of emptiness where we can learn from and with each other that, just like the picot pattern on my hat, it is the shape and texture of the stitches around the emptiness that give meaning and beauty to the absences. And while it was never my intention to have these gaps in my life, I can fill my life with intention and purpose so that I may give comfort and warmth to others.

Joanna