I spent the last year perfecting a pattern for a knitted boob hat.
I'm the same woman who once knit wool diaper covers in my efforts to be the ultimate thrifty, faithful Mormon mother. Same hands. Same needles. (Who am I kidding? I have ADHD. I lose needles like sunglasses.) What changed wasn't the knitting. What changed was the purpose. The motivation.
The good Mormon homemaker
As a young mom, knitting fit right into my stable of homemaking skills. I made dishcloths. I made wool diaper covers. Everyone got homemade scarves for Christmas. I saved money and made useful things for the people I was taking care of. There was real pleasure in that! There still is. A stack of something you made with your own hands is satisfying in a concrete, wholesome way.
But in that world, those handmade items meant something about me. Like everything I did meant something about me. A wool soaker meant I was frugal. It meant I was nurturing. It meant I was the kind of woman who sacrificed and provided. Lovingly crafted. Which was the kind of woman I'd been told God wanted me to be. Those dishcloths were doing some heavy lifting. Besides wiping counters and faces they were also proving that I was doing everything I could not to let my Savior down.
It's not that I didn't enjoy knitting. I loved it! Something I could do for myself that didn't feel selfish because it wasn't. It was also productive. And then I stopped.
My arms got more and more full. Little fists grabbed and tiny people got mobile. And the knitting got tucked away. That part wasn't ideological. Squishy babies and pointy needles are not a great combination, and I needed my hands pretty much around the clock for a number of years.
The needles and yarn were packed away with every intention of picking them up again one of these days. Just as soon as I had a few minutes.
Picking the needles back up
Coming back to it was the hard part.
I wrote in my last essay about disappearing into my family. In the years after leaving the church, I was processing betrayal trauma, grief, and the loss of basically every framework I had used to understand my life. Add ADHD, a lifetime of scrupulosity, and some very big feelings, and my nervous system was a mess. Now we're going to throw in delayed adolescence and being "new again" to alcohol and I did an endo right into a drinking problem. That's a really common story for people with ADHD. And yet I didn't see it coming at all.
Knitting became part of my safety plan. When I would have been cracking open a drink and sipping my way through a movie, I picked up my needles instead. It gave my hands a job. It soothed me in a way I still can't fully explain.
It also felt complicated. Here was this thing I genuinely needed to do to stay okay, and it came packaged with everything I was trying to get away from. Every time I sat down in a pile of yarn, I was also sitting down with the good Mormon homemaker I didn't want to be anymore. It's unnerving to lean on a tool for your mental and emotional well-being and resent it at the same time.
But picking up the needles again felt like a lifeline. Something solid I could grasp onto when the rest of my world and my reality was shifting, shaking, slipping, swirling around me.
I knitted constantly for a long time. I knit so much in my solo travel time that any time I left my brother's apartment in SoHo, I left a fresh stack of his very special, very gay dishcloths behind. (A pattern I created just for him and will someday share with the world. When I feel the world is ready.
Why it worked
My hands understood something way before I did.
Betsan Corkhill, a physiotherapist who has done most of the research I could find on therapeutic knitting, describes it as a bilateral, coordinated, rhythmic pattern of movement that crosses the midline of the body. Using both hands together, across your center, while watching what they're doing. It takes up a lot of brain capacity. And when that's happening there's less room left for doom spiraling or the creative catastrophizing us neurodivergents are so good at.
My therapist compared that back-and-forth movement to the bilateral stimulation used in EMDR trauma therapy. The research on that is still thin, so take it as her observation, not settled science. But I know what it felt like to knit through a hard feeling instead of drinking through it. It felt like my body had something to do with the panic besides just panic. A place to channel that energy. To release it. Even relieve it.
Herbert Benson, the Harvard cardiologist who coined the term "relaxation response," said repetitive needlework can bring on a state a lot like meditation. A 2013 survey of more than 3,500 knitters found that most of the respondents with depression felt happier after knitting. And a small 2023 study from a neurological institute in Milan found that experienced knitters paid better attention after only twenty minutes of knitting.
That last one makes total sense to my ADHD brain. Knitting makes me a better listener. Give my hands something to do and my brain will actually stay in the room.
Taking the needles back
To ease the dissonance, I started knitting things a good Mormon mother would probably not make.
First, profanity dishcloths
.
Then my first pattern invention. The one I think the world is still not ready for. Sorry… don't let the suspense kill you.
And eventually, the boobie beanie.
I get that this sounds like a big, intentionally rebellious gesture. That wasn't it… entirely. Rather, as I walked through the valley of my religious-trauma-induced delayed adolescence, I kept noticing what made me laugh. And then I did more of that. I wasn't making things to prove I was good anymore. I was making things that entertained me and my friends and served no higher purpose whatsoever. And if it made a random stranger cackle irreverently as they registered what hung on my needles? So much the better.
That turned out to be what I needed. It wasn't enough to stop believing knitting made me a good woman. I had to make something that couldn't possibly do that job. A dishcloth that says Fuck It isn't proof of anything except that I think it's funny.
A pattern for my actual brain
The beanie took me a year. I made the first one last year for a friend's daughter who was into boob everything. I went searching for a pattern and the internet was flush with them. But only for crochet! I don't crochet. That's a story for another day. There were knitted baby boobie beanies, and other patterns that came close but were just not quite what I was looking for. So my second original pattern was born. My second irreverent, inappropriate pattern.
I gifted my friend the first one and then changed every single iteration in some way or other for the next year. Until I had the perfect, foolproof pattern that worked every time.
I approached it the same way I approach coaching. I didn't try to turn myself into the kind of knitter who loves long, tedious projects. I paid attention to where I got stuck, bored, or irritated, and I changed that part. It's simple where I want to zone out and interesting where my brain needs a little novelty. The yarn doesn't make me want to crawl out of my skin, and it's short enough that I actually finish it.
That's basically my whole philosophy in a hat. You don't fix yourself to fit the pattern. You fix the pattern to fit you.
Needing it and wanting it
I still knit through uncomfortable meetings and the scary parts of movies. The regulation part didn't go away, and I don't want it to. I'm not going to pretend the knitting that held me together was some lesser, unhealthy version of a hobby. It did real work. It kept me okay when not many things could have
The difference now is that the knitting doesn't have to carry all that weight. Most often, I pick up my needles because I want to, because the project is fun and I want to see how it turns out. Because I want to gift the gift of my time and my sense of humor.
Leaving the church made me want to shake off everything that came with my assigned divine role for a long time. The skills along with the expectations. So I had to change who the knitting was for. It used to be for God. For survival in the system that made me worthy to be with my family again in his eyes.
Now it's mostly for me. And sometimes it's for boobs.
P.S. Yes, I really do knit the boob hats. And yes, you can actually buy them. I’ve listed a very limited quanity as well as the pattern in my little Etsy shop, TuffKnitties, if you’re curious.
Ok, so have a lot of nipple conversations at my house and I’ve written about them, so I had to buy one of your beanies. Can’t wait to wear it this winter. 😊