Crocheting to Process Intergenerational Trauma: A Narrative Journey

Rainbow spiral on my bathroom door.

Full disclosure: I am a European mutt born into privilege, and I had the opportunity to have a parent teach me some of these skills, which I recognize is not something everyone has access to. But, wherever you are in life, I encourage you to think about similar hobbies, skills, or crafts that people around you have done and discover how doing those activities yourself transforms the way you treat and understand those individuals.

I must have been about six when I watched my mom make blankets out of yarn and a needle. It was nothing short of magic. I would happily pull yarn out of her skein for her (okay, okay, that’s enough now) and enjoyed watching her watch soap operas while she let her fingers wind knots they knew by feel.

I asked her to teach me, and I learned how to chain (after she started the first one for me, of course), which was my favorite part, and then I learned the single crochet stitch. My stitches were uneven, and it was difficult to keep tension with my tiny fingers, but I do remember having made a (shoddy but wearable) halter top that I wore at least once. I started several blankets that never got past the third or fourth rows.

Fast forward.

The year is 2020. George Floyd has been murdered, and there are massive protests in Portland where I live, and I have become an outspoken activist and protester for the cause. Other than that, I am stuck inside due to a pandemic, and I source comfort from the blanket my mom made just before my parents divorced. I tell several people that it is the one thing I would save out of a fire, and one day, I realize: I could make one for myself.

At the same time, I am grappling with the fact that I am white. I am white, and I have little-to-no idea what my actual heritage is. I am white, and I never wanted to be white. I am white and have privilege I rarely know how to use wisely. I am white and being white has erased almost everything else in my family history. I don’t know what my family’s traditions are or where they come from, at least, other than the Danish pancakes we make on Christmas. I know that there are so many benefits I receive from being white, but in order to dispel the myth of race in my own body, I know I need to rediscover what I gave up to be white. And, maybe crocheting would be an interesting step on that journey.

After a bit of light internet research, I purchase some rainbow gradient yarn. I try to make a blanket out of the single crochet stitch I knew as a child. The colors do not turn out right. The section I make is warbled. Starting over—which required unwinding everything I had done—I decide to learn how to make a spiral from watching YouTube videos, hoping that would work better with the gradient pattern. I learn to double crochet in spiral and make some kind of wall hanging, which is currently up on my bathroom door.

My grandma’s scarf.

I ask my mom how she learned to crochet. She says she learned from a friend of my ex-step-grandmother, and some part of me is disappointed that this was not exactly a family affair. Still, I am undiscouraged. I tell my dad I’m crocheting, and he says that my only living great-grandmother crochets and does macrame (aka, shibari for plants). Ah, ha! So this is in my blood! Not that it matters. I am already hooked.

I buy more gradient yarn (having learned that the kind I like has been discontinued) and learn to adapt the spiral pattern into a beanie shape, so I make a hat for myself. After that, I realize that the gradient of the rainbow yarn I originally purchased works well in short horizontal lines, so I make a scarf for myself. Because I don’t like doing the same thing twice like, ever, I then find new beanie patterns and make wristers to match for my girlfriend. I make a two-tone rainbow gradient hat for another partner to prove I can switch between yarns, and I make a crocodile stitch hat for my sister just before she moves to college.

I attend an Indigenous protest in solidarity with Black Lives on the Fourth of July. I march with my girlfriend during the day in downtown Portland, and we gather in Pioneer Square to listen to Teresa Raiford and others speak. I see a woman knitting off to one side of the crowd, and I wish that I, too, had brought my projects.

My next project was to be two scarves, one for my middle sister who is a police officer, and one for her boyfriend, also a police officer. Though I don’t understand her life choices and she certainly does not understand mine, I hope that I could at least remind her I am human (not just some rioting Antifa anarchist) with something that both of us admired our mom for having done. But, before I start that project, she cuts communication with me off completely.

After grieving the loss of communication with my sister, I decide to translate that energy into making wearables for other family members. I start with my grandmother, who was regularly engaging in inflammatory social media conversations with me and regularly disagreed with my stances. I even crochet some of her scarf—also in rainbow gradient—at the protests, both in the car caravan and at the Justice Center.

While making this scarf, I am also in the process of listening to My Grandmother’s Hands, which delves into the intergenerational trauma of both Black and white bodies, and I finish the scarf during one of those book club meetings.

During that process, I learn something. For every stitch I make, I cannot help but think about the person I am making it for, each of them a tiny moment of organizing and processing trauma I have buried in my body and perhaps even in my DNA. In the same way that NASA hires weavers, knitters, and crochet experts to neatly weave rocket wires before a launch, I am neatly arranging my past, my understanding (or lack thereof) of my family, and the absence of tradition and heritage in my life. In crocheting, I create loops and resolve them. Create loops and resolve them. And with each hand motion, I am resolving to heal myself, to heal the untold tragedies inflicted by and on my family.

I had created an heirloom and passed it upward instead of down. I had rewritten the past with string. I had created perpetuating magic for the future.

My great-grandmother’s shawl.

And, it’s something I love to do. It’s a meditative, creative, mindful, mundane activity that calms my heart when I’m anxious and delights my fingers. I fall so much in love with it that I decide to raise Angora rabbits so I could clip their fur and make my own yarn with someone else’s hand-me-down spinning wheel. I am recreating traditions 2020-style—with YouTube videos and intimate self-discovery.

After the scarf for my grandmother, I move on to a scarf for my grandfather (her husband). I learn a new stitch (the front post single crochet) for that purpose. I write a letter to each of them before I send the scarves off, detailing what I learned while working on them, the ways I thought about each of them while I worked, and the places I took the scarves while I worked on them. Specifically, while I made my grandfather’s scarf, I loved thinking about how he ties flies for fly fishing and how, surely, the process of crocheting isn’t all that different.

Now, I am working on a shawl for my great-grandmother out of upcycled deep blue, white, and saffron yarn. She is sick, and who knows how long anyone will live nowadays. While working on hers, which has a simple but delicate lace pattern, I think about how her genetic material is the starting place for so much of mine. At the same time, I am working on a hat and scarf combo for her daughter, my Nana (easy because all her clothes are black and white), made out of individual “Granny Squares” that I will sew together once I complete all 28 of them. This feels exceptionally appropriate because she is a stained-glass enthusiast, and each piece of glass is wrapped and placed individually.

I have started to think that heirlooms passed upward have an extraordinary value to both the maker and receiver. Really, objects made this way are more than gifts (a love language I have never really understood but is very popular in my family); they are acts of service and quality time. It’s a chance to really get to know the version of that person as they exist in your own perception while making something gorgeous to be proud of. And ultimately, it’s an opportunity to recreate a heritage for not only yourself but also for those who come before you, safely bundling and packaging nicely processed history to hand to those who come after.