Trina Chance O'Gorman's son still uses the blanket she knitted.

Personal Essay
The Imperfect Blanket

by Trina Chance O’Gorman

When I was pregnant with my son, I decided that I wanted to knit him a blanket, even though I did not know the first thing about knitting. I imagined lovingly wrapping him in that blanket and carrying him into our home, whispering, “Welcome home, my sweet boy.”

But this is not what happened. Instead, the weeks of my pregnancy whizzed by, and before I knew it, I was on maternity leave from my job. I thought that would be the perfect time to knit the blanket, but then my ankles swelled, and it kept snowing, which kept me from going to the knitting store. And so, my son came home from the hospital in a nice blanket that my husband and I had purchased a couple of weeks before he was born. And I was too overwhelmed to say anything like, “Welcome home, my sweet boy.”

For months, the absence of the blanket haunted me. It seemed to act as a constant reminder that I was not the perfect mother I had thought I could and should be. Then, nearly two years later, when my son was about 22 months old, my mother came to visit with a bag of yarn, knitting needles, and a sudden desire to pass on her newly acquired skill of knitting. In about half an hour, she taught me everything I needed to know, leaving me with enough information and yarn to knit a simple scarf.

“For months, the abscence of the blanket haunted me. I was not the perfect mother.”

Not long after that, I headed off to the knitting store to get what I would need to knit my son’s blanket. I chose a soft, luxurious blend of cashmere and cotton in baby blue, and I set out to knit it in two weeks, in time for his second birthday.

In the evenings when he was sleeping, I would sit beside him in the glider, knitting and reflecting. I recalled the first time I’d felt him move within me, the exact moment he entered the world with a cry, and my fear that I would not be a good mother. I thought of the sound of his infectious laughter. I thought about the smell of him, and how breathing it seemed to fill me with the most awesome love. And I knit, though not fast enough, because the blanket was not completed in time for his birthday.

When I finished it nearly two months later, I felt relief as I cast off the last stitch. I lay the small blanket out before me and ran my fingers over it. My eyes were drawn to every misshapen stitch. I noticed quite a few snags, and tried to smooth out several spots, but it was to no avail. I pulled one side of the blanket, then the other, trying to work it into the square it was supposed to be. I felt like crying because I’d wanted it to be perfect.

I shoved the blanket behind me on the sofa when I heard my son making his way into the living room, trying to hide it. But children seem to have a sixth sense, and he made a beeline for the sofa, climbed onto my lap, reached behind me, and pulled out the blanket. “Mine,” he screeched with delight. I tried to take it back from him, explaining that it wasn’t finished. He pulled on it even harder, stretching it out of shape even more, saying, “Mine.” I gave in, though it was clearly not the moment of presentation I had planned.

Then I looked at him and at the blanket I’d knit, and in that moment realized that the imperfections in the blanket paralleled the imperfections of my mothering. There were perfectly good stretches of blanket mixed in with the not-so-perfect ones. The snags and bumps represented our experiences as mother and son, our snags and bumps along the way. There were a lot of them in some rows, not so many in others.

Later I would realize that he seemed drawn to those places, they seemed to give him the most comfort, and he’d run his fingers over them while drifting off to sleep. That day I put aside my desire to be the “perfect” mother and covered him with his imperfect blanket. It was too short, and his feet stuck out the end of it, but he snuggled in it quite happily just the same.

Trina Chance O’Gorman is a New Jersey mom.

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