When I was twelve, my mother spent weeks teaching me how to knit. One Thursday evening, as she corrected my uneven stitches, the phone rang. It was about my father—he had suffered a heart attack. She rushed to the hospital, leaving me home because I was too young to go.
Alone in the quiet kitchen, I didn’t know what to do with my fear. My hands kept moving on their own, knitting one clumsy stitch after another as I waited for news. Hours later, my mother returned and told me my father had survived.
She picked up the long, uneven piece of knitting I had made and smiled gently. “You kept going,” she said. I answered, “I didn’t know what else to do.” She nodded and replied, “That’s exactly what you do.”
From that day on, I knitted every day. What began as a way to survive one frightening night became a lifelong reminder that when life unravels, sometimes the bravest thing you can do is keep making the next stitch.
