Passing it on

Like many women of her generation, my mother used to knit. Growing up we were all dressed in knitted jumpers, hats and scarves, and a lot more. If she could make it herself, my mother would, and as children our concern for our style choices wasn’t a factor in the equation.

She continued knitting clothes when I had children of my own, but as they grew up the world changed. With clothes becoming much cheaper and easier to get hold of, it was hard to convince them into their grandmother’s homemade clothes – and of course, they wouldn’t appreciate the treasure of having something made for them by a loved one until much later.

Undeterred, my mother knitted clothes for those who did appreciate them, sending countless tiny jumpers, baby grows and little hats through various schemes to people who couldn’t afford their own clothes – I never knew exactly where they went, but it was a common venture for women of my mother’s age and I like to think they were useful somewhere.

She would sit on her reclining chair, needles click clicking away - knitting while talking, while watching television, listening to the radio, sometimes in reflective silence as the late afternoon sun streamed through the windows. She didn’t seem to need to pay much attention to it, but never dropped a stitch, turning out beautiful garments finished off from her treasure-trove of a button box. It seemed like an awful lot of work, but she said it relaxed her, that she liked doing it.

For my birthday last year, my now grown-up son got me a blanket. Except, rather than just a normal present of a blanket, he got me a bag of thick, deep red wool, and two enormous knitting needles. It was a ridiculous present, and we all laughed about how the blanket would be bigger than me by the time I had finished it. It took me a few months to finally get around to starting it – I hadn’t done any knitting in what felt like decades.

But when I did, I began to settle into a rhythm. Sitting on the sofa watching television in the evenings, the blanket helpfully keeping me warm even as I was still constructing it. It was impossible not to think of my mother and the thousands of hours she spent clicking away, contentedly absorbed in her task.

Last week’s blog was inspired by Michelle Obama’s new hobby of knitting. She describes in her book the feeling of returning to an activity that her relatives had done before her, and the sense of tethering and connection it brought her. For most of us, huge changes in society mean our lives are almost unrecognisable from those of our parents. But there are still some elements of connection to be found, and sometimes they can bring comfort along with them.

Euan's story

Before Euan began learning about PPD, whenever he had pain he would fall into a “deep depressive state”.

“I was fooled into thinking I was defective,” he says.

He found himself being grumpy, not able to go to the gym, which was a really important part of his life, and not able to play with his daughters.

“I thought I would not be able to play with my girls properly again, I thought I would never do weights again properly, I thought my active life was over,” he says.

But then, he listened to a podcast and began learning about PPD, through which he contacted me and we began working together.

Now, he says, with the knowledge he has gained, he knows he “will fix this”.

He has discovered that he is a highly sensitive person - as he puts it, an amazing realisation that this is where his “super powers” come from.

Now when he feels pain he doesn’t dwell on it, catastrophise or end up in a pit of despair, he says.

“I now know that the pain is a signal telling me that there is something I need to address, or something I need to change. I now see the pain as a tool, an annoying tool, but it is helping me figure out what I need to do to fix it,” he says.

In a letter to his former self before he started learning about PPD, he writes: “Your time is coming. Do not fear this any more. You are stronger than you know and you can do anything you want to. It is time to get excited. Excited that the end is in sight. Excited that this is not the way your life is going to be forever.

“You will be able to play with the girls again. You won't be as grumpy and you will get back to training in the gym. Everything will fall into place. Just give it time and trust your thoughts.”

You can learn more about Euan’s story, which he has kindly agreed to be shared, through this video and letter to his former self on the website.   

Going small

I’ve recently been enjoying Michelle Obama’s new book, The Light We Carry. I wasn’t sure about it at first as it is a little sentimental, but there are also a lot of interesting insights and a nice tone of hope – made even better by listening to the audiobook, I find. One aspect early on in the book struck me, as it’s something I’ve spoken and written about before.  

Michelle describes struggling with the pressures of the pandemic while still coming to terms with not being in the White House anymore. Undoubtedly Michelle Obama faced none of the fears about income, job security and access to healthcare that millions of people around the world had to cope with during that time, but it’s interesting to hear that some things, like loneliness, isolation and uncertainty, affected even those at the top.

Like many of us, Michelle turned to a new hobby during this time. Hers was knitting, which she had never done before. She describes the benefit of doing something productive, which used her hands as well as her mind, and which was on a small scale, to distract from all the big problems worrying her at that time.  

“I've come to understand that sometimes the big stuff becomes easier to handle when you deliberately put something small alongside it,” she writes in the book.

“When everything starts to feel big and therefore scary and insurmountable, when I hit a point of feeling or thinking or seeing too much, I've learned to make the choice to go towards the small.

“On days when my brain apprehends nothing but monolithic catastrophe and doom, when I feel paralysed by not-enoughness, and my agitation begins to stir, I picked up the knitting needles, and give my hands a chance to take over. To quietly click us out of that hard place.”

I find this really rings true. I’ve written before about the benefits of taking control of small things, and how that can spread a sense of calm through the rest of your life. It could be tidying a small area of your home, drawing a picture, or baking a batch of bread. I think there’s a reason why these hobbies surged in popularity during the pandemic, and it isn’t just that we all found ourselves stuck inside the house and needing distraction.

Focussing on one small thing, which is easy to complete and shows tangible progress, can be a wonderful way of reigning in overwhelming worries and never-ending to-do lists. I find activities like this also take me away from my phone and computer screens for a while, giving me a few minutes of respite from constant updates.   

Give and take

If the world were split into “givers” and “takers”, many people I know would put themselves into the “givers” category. These people have a tendency to spend their time doing things for other people, often putting the needs of others above their own.

In some cases, this has negatively impacted them, contributing to problems with their own health – either because of the increased stress of continually worrying about other people, or the lack of time left over to take care of themselves. Being a “giver” has come to be seen as almost a negative thing. But it isn’t, and not only because giving to people around you can benefit those you love.

Adam Grant, a psychologist at Pennsylvania University in the US, has written a book and given a TED talk on the subject. As part of his research he identified givers in various areas of work and study, and ranked them against their colleagues or classmates in terms of performance. He found, perhaps not surprisingly to many people, that the givers tended to perform the worst – presumably because they were spending so much of their time and energy helping others.

However, the givers were also the group which performed the best – it turned out that all the takers, and the people who didn’t fit either definition, sat somewhere in the middle. Grant determined that givers can sink time in the short term, but cause huge benefits to a team or company in the long term.

His findings are surprising, and combat the view that giving is a negative attribute. Instead, Grant argues, it’s important to manage that giving tendency appropriately – by preventing burnout, asking for help, and surrounding yourself with the right people.

His advice rings true when I think about the givers I know. It is not the giving nature that is the problem – the world would be a better place if everyone acted like this. But givers need to protect themselves, by setting boundaries, or limiting the amount of time and resources spent on others for example.

It is also vital for givers to be surrounded by the right people. Grant argues that if even one person on a team is a taker, while the rest are givers, it disrupts the team dynamic. In the examples that come to mind of givers blaming themselves for the difficult situations they end up in, there is always another person – a taker – without whose actions there would be no problem at all. So it looks like giving is to be encouraged, so long as it is to the right people.

Easy does it

Welcome to the first blog of 2023! Very best wishes to you for the year ahead.

Over the festive period, I was racking my brains to think of a fun challenge we could do as a family for the first few months of the new year. The idea would be a set goal for each day, and we would share updates to a group chat on how we were all doing. It was inspired by virtual family challenges we used to do during Covid lockdowns, and which I have written previous blogs about. It’s a nice way to have a bit of fun, connect with family members you might not be able to see in person, and maybe do something good for you in the process.

We decided to run the challenge from mid-January for 100 days. But the problem was, when discussing it with family members we just couldn’t agree on a goal to set. Walking 10,000 steps a day? Spending one hour outside in the fresh air? Running 5km? Reading 20 pages of a mind-expanding book?

In the end, the problem was obvious. The targets were too difficult. We had forgotten that age-old advice of not setting goals which aren’t achievable. It was deemed by a family council that if we set these kinds of blanket goals for everyone, we would all just end up miserable because we weren’t able to do them – or worse, sacrificing other areas of our lives in order to hit them out of a negative sense of competition. After all, this was supposed to be fun.

So we changed tack, and now everyone is going to set their own goal, which they know is achievable, and the emphasis will be on connection and sharing our progress with each other. Rather than pressure to complete whatever task it is every single day, we’re going to celebrate the days that we do get there.