Toronto gets little enough snow that when we get an actual storm, we freak out. Some bitch and complain. Others build snowmen and go tobogganing. (I was at the Tim Horton’s at Christie and Bloor on Friday night and was touched to see teenagers and some adults, in snow encrusted pants, trudging back from Christie Pits just like I did as a kid.) We take our ‘snowmageddon’ jokes to Twitter, and Instagram pictures of bikes peeking out from mountainous snow banks. A cold winter causes Toronto to lose its cool, while the rest of the country laughs at us.
The only thing I did differently when I left my house mid-blizzard was what scarf I wore. Like many people, I own a variety of scarves of different designs, warmth, and patterns. I have a soft spot for the woven one I bought in India, and the green plaid one I wore during my trip to Scotland. But something about the pretty, persistently falling snow made me reach for a long, hand-knit scarf of turquoise green. I wanted the sensation of fuzzy wool against my cheeks.
I only own two knitted scarves. One is the turquoise one I wore the other day. The other sits in a silver metal box, deep in the closet of my old bedroom at my parents’ house.
My Mom knitted the turquoise one. Like a family from a progressive eighties sitcom, my Mom was the one who worked during most of my childhood. My Dad fully embraced being the stay-at-home-parent, taking my brother and I to parks, museums, shopping malls, and the zoo on a weekly basis. When my Mom left her job, it was the first time she hadn’t worked since my brother was born. Although she has maintained a constant business through the years, when she suddenly had no office to go into, she took up knitting.
Scarves are the classic beginning knitter project, as they are essentially a long flat line. She made one for my brother and one for me. We picked out the colours, which is why mine is bright turquoise. I asked her to make it really long, so I could loop it around several times. I wanted to look like an Edward Gorey character.
The knitting isn’t perfect, but that adds to its emotional significance. When I wear this scarf I think about the interesting, unexpected things we create when we go through life’s transitions. I also think about how my mother is always working, yet never stops doing things for her family. I only hope I can be as tireless and caring when I have a family of my own.
My parent’s love and support was important when I started dating my first boyfriend during undergrad in University. We’ll call him John. His family was the opposite of mine. We were downtown Toronto lefties who weekly got in Chinese takeout. John’s family were from a small town close to Hamilton, and their weekly tradition was going to the Seventh Day Adventist Church. John’s mother had converted when she was pregnant with him. It provided a sense of support and community that she didn’t get from her family growing up. A forceful woman, she encouraged her husband they raise their children within the church.
She wasn’t exactly thrilled when she found out her son was gay. When he started to date me, those feelings came back to the surface. Though we had only briefly met, she tried to make me look like a bad influence on John. This was fruitless.
“Does Max also smoke?” she asked him.
“No, and he wants me to quit.”
“Hmmph.”
I can laugh about it now, but at the time I was scared of her. I had never had a parent not like me before. It was a good thing my parents were welcoming, because John spent a lot of time visiting me in Toronto. I think that his mother thought if she gave him a hard time about me, I would go away, and she wouldn’t have to deal with the fact of her son’s sexuality any more. When things at home got so bad that John considered moving away from his family, my Mom lost sleep over it.
“I don’t understand how you could treat your own child like that,” she said.
Sometimes I’d forget that John’s mother was still his mother, and I said bad things about her. He did an about-face and defended her. Our Moms are still our Moms, even when they’re difficult.
Eventually, John’s Mom came to realize that I wasn’t going away. I hope she also understood that I was a good thing in his life. I realized how far she had come when she phoned our house and invited my parents and me to a surprise birthday party she was throwing for him. When I told Mom and Dad about it, they exchanged glances
“Well, we’re not exactly thrilled about the way she’s treated John, and the two of you together,” one of them said wearily.
“Oh, we’re going to this party,” I countered. “If she can accept us, we can accept her.”
When he opened the door of his family’s house and saw us standing there, John looked genuinely stunned.
If the birthday party provided the epiphany that she had changed, the gift she gave me that Christmas represented the sea change. She knit me a scarf using beautiful wool that undulated in colour from purple to red to purple again. Because I could tell how much time she had spent on it, it meant a lot more than if she had bought me something. I wore it all that winter.
My relationship with her never grew warm, but a cozy, hand-knit scarf symbolized that it had at least thawed.
Two years later, John and I broke up. To be honest, he broke up with me. I think he thought he was putting our relationship out of its misery, that he had no choice. It was the first and only time I’ve had my heart broken. We had the conversation, which took two or three hours, in his bedroom in Hamilton. It was the first time I visited him at his University house. When the sun went down, we didn’t bother turning on the lights.
My cheeks still wet from tears, I calmly told him my plan–“When I get home, I’m going to take your pictures off my wall, and gather everything else that reminds me of you, and put it in a box. I need to not think about you for awhile.”
Back in Toronto, I took his photographs, a mix CD, a couple books we both read, the pocket watch he gave me, along with everything else I associated with him, and put it in a tin cookie box. The scarf his Mom made me took up most of the room.
I smile when I realize that such an old-fashioned motherly tradition as knitting could be used to say ‘I accept you in my son’s life’. Some wintery day in the future, I will dig out the box, uncover the scarf, and wear it proudly.
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Max Mosher writes about style for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @max_mosher_.
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