The Husband Speaks
Gentle Readers, please forgive this brief intrusion into the blogosphere. My lovely wife is buried under a pile of yarn, sketches, mechanical pencils, and patterns, so she asked me, the husband and accidental fleece-loser (if I haven’t yet, let me apologize to you all for that incident: I really am sorry) to guest blog. So here goes, and she will helm the next post, I promise.
This might surprise some of The Mrs. Beloved readers but…she wasn’t always a knitter. Oh she was always busy, creative, and obsessive, so the characteristics for knittitude were all there, but she hadn’t found yarn yet. When I met her she built costumes and wedding gowns to work her way through school. That developed into her making really cool clothing for us when we first started dating (I remember a purple silk shirt she made for me to wear for a friend’s wedding. It was rock star chic, and if I could fit into it today I’d wear it again in a heartbeat). She gravitated to quilting, and would go back and forth between that and kidswear when our children were born.
Then in 2003, we traveled to the bay area to visit some friends and take in a Peter Gabriel concert. During our trip, our friend Jen took Mary into a yarn shop because she had recently taken up knitting. Mary had dabbled before, and she jumped back in with her trademark enthusiasm (a polite way to say obsessiveness). Well…the rest is history: no more quilts, costumes, and our cool Mary-exclusive threads have become far more ‘exclusive’ (though she did make me three kick-ass vests last Christmas). She hasn’t stopped knitting since.
As I look back on our life together, I divide it into two periods; Before Yarn (B.Y.) and After Fiber (A.F.). I realize that not only has my wife undergone a transformation in the AF era, but I have too. Living with a dedicated knitter changes the daily interactions of husband/wife/family in ways we don’t even think about. Bill Engvall tells a story where his wife simply says “I’m cold” and he realizes he’s gotten out of bed and is getting a blanket…he’s been ‘trained’ without even realizing it (his rendition is funnier). This is just like me with the knitter. I have been trained to live the AF world.
For Instance:
When I’m giving a time estimate (dinner is ready/we have to leave in…) I no longer use times, but rows. During our BY life I would say “Dinner is ready in five minutes”, unconsciously I have switched to “Dinner is ready when you’re at the end of your row.”
I am more careful picking out the movies we watch whilst Mrs. Huff is immersed in yarn (which is always). Mary mainly gives me ‘control’ over what’s on; it keeps us happier (mostly) and I’ve got pretty good taste (mostly). I used to love watching foreign films, and not just the stuffy pretentious ones, but the outrageous Jackie Chan films from the 80’s and 90’s. Yeah…watching a mile-a-minute-action-film…in another language…with a knitter…Super.Bad.Idea.
MSH: “What just happened”
Me: “He’s fighting four guys at once, and now he’s hanging off the end of a bus”
MSH: “How’d he get there? What’s he doing on a bus? Where did the bus come from?”
Me: Sigh. Roll eyes. “Look, let me just rewind it…but you’ve got to watch it, okay?
MSH: Nods head. "Let me finish this row.”
I think it took us five hours to get through “Rumble in the Bronx”.