Inaugural Address

This is my first ever post on my new blog (or any blog for that matter). I've been thinking about starting a one for quite some time, somehow today seemed the perfect day to take the plunge. While this is primarily to be a discussion of knitting and other fiber related fun, what inspired me today is my two day immersion in that dark dank place otherwise known as the family court system.

Today a person very close to me lost custody of her three children. I sat in a dingy hallway for eight hours yesterday and seven more today so that I could testify on her behalf for what seemed like three minutes. In those fifteen hours I learned more about the way the legal system perverts parental love than in the last thirty years. I witnessed dozens of little dramas, some reeking of Jerry Springer others more like Shakespeare, all of them tragedies. All I know today is loss. Everyone lost. One man lost because he used the worst of himself for what he believed were the best motives. One woman (my friend/sister/love/heart) lost everything.

I watched one woman stand alone, with her whole family arrayed against her. They had a lot of good reasons, and in their place I might of been one of them. She was almost a stereotype, just out of jail, no secure place to stay, no real place to care for her kids. Maybe on drugs. Maybe a little crazy. I probably wouldn't want her to have her kids either, but neither did I want her to be so alone.

I saw another woman, at first glance, well put together. As my eyes passed over her I quickly noted, blond, upper middle class. Not only didn't my heart bleed, I didn't pay her a second thought. Later a teenage girl entered with a large group of clearly affluent people. They had at least three attorneys and a couple of paralegals in tow. She asked one of them if she could see her mother. As she ran to the blond woman I had dismissed and hugged her with an intense longing I looked at the older woman again. I noticed that her shoes were a little worn and her clothing while selected with care was clearly a little old. She didn't stand a chance.

I saw a third woman. A well preserved formerly wealthy woman in her sixties who had to beg her husband to sell their country club membership so that she could have some money to pay for her health insurance.

I saw a couple of attorneys jousting over whether, in the joint custody agreement, the child should move from house to house every week or every three and a half days. I wanted to scream, " How about every hour. "

I have never had children and probably never will. My experience of the last two days certainly doesn't encourage me. It isn't the tales of those who have lost that saddens me most. It is what you must do to win.

Okay, this is no way to start my knitting blog, or maybe it is. For me knitting is about connection. I love to knit for myself, but I usually end up giving everything away, even items begun as presents for myself. You take your love and embody it, transform the invisible into the tactile. A scarf is a hug. A hat a kiss on the cheek. Gloves are like tracing the fingers of children with your own in that glowing amazement that such beings are possible.