How to Make Einstein Jealous

Four years ago, I was laying on my back on the patio in my backyard crying. Not like cute little tears but like eyes swollen nearly shut from more hours of crying than not crying, like straight up ugly crying which had become my norm.

I was six months pregnant and was just released from a two-week stay in a specialty hospital after going into preterm labor at 24 weeks. Miraculously, and to the shock of all the medical personnel, I was still pregnant. I can’t tell you how many times I saw an ultrasound tech’s face morph from neutral to horror then to an awkward smile when they said, “ummm, technically you’re in labor right now.” to which I replied, “I know… I’ve been in labor for weeks.”

Eventually, my doctor sent me home, with the promise that I would probably be back and this time….. in a helicopter instead of an ambulance.

So there I was, freshly “free” from the hospital but on bedrest (aka house arrest with only my conscience and fear to keep me honest instead of an ankle bracelet). I was in my backyard pretending to do yoga but actually crying and obsessing about the very real possibility of taking a helicopter back to the hospital (I was not a mellow flier) and hoping I’d make it long enough to go to my local hospital and not the special one. I’d been a mess of nerves my whole high risk pregnancy, actually my whole life from inherited anxiety and OCD.

But now, I had real things to be scared of. The probability that things were going to be ok for my baby and me was low. That’s what the doctors and the internet reminded me of again and again, yet somehow I was still pregnant. A bundle of nerves yes but every day, every hour that I was still pregnant the statistics said our chances were better and even if it was just a fraction of a percentage, it was something and I was banking on it.

So, I’m laying there doing my fake yoga and I open my eyes and see this small brown thing slowly coming towards me. I wipe my tears, squint and realize it’s a leaf. I watch it float from the canopy of the oak trees above my patio. And for a few moments, I totally forgot about the doctors and statistics and just watched that leaf.

I mean I really watched it, like I had never seen a leaf fall before and maybe I hadn’t. I mean, who has time to sit and watch a leaf fall? Before I was trapped by doctor-prescribed bedrest and anxiety, I certainly hadn’t. Yet here I was watching this dead leaf sort of dance through the air, swaying back and forth and it was beautiful… the way the tree let go of the part of it that it no longer needed. I thought about how I could capture that moment, sketch the leaf, write a poem about the art and science of a leaf falling and in those moments where creativity took the place of fear, things seemed ok, calm even.

The thing is that the leaf doesn’t know when to let go. It’s the tree that sends out a message via a hormone to the leaf saying, let’s part ways. Then small cells appear where the tree meets the leaf. These cells have one job, to sever the tie. The name of this process is abscission, which literally means, to cut.

I thought about how my anxiety about my pregnancy and life in general wasn’t going to leave on its own, the same way the tree had to tell the leaf to get lost, it was my job to tell my anxiety to go. But, How the F was I supposed to do that?! I was as attached to my fear as the tree was to its leaf. Fear had been in my passenger seat, passing me beef jerky and Doritos on every adventure I’d been on throughout my life and a gentle, “see ya!” wasn’t going to be enough to sever our ties.

But, what I could do was start to let go. I didn’t have to do it in one fell swoop. I just needed to take baby steps. And those baby steps were all about paying more attention to the present moment just like I’d done when I watched that leaf and found something, anything to be thankful for and let the hands of creativity in to push fear aside.


Sometimes that meant writing every feeling and fear down in my black and white composition book the same way I journaled my way through teen angst and my differentness in junior high. Other times storytelling was my cathartic art as I shared with a nurse taking my blood pressure during one of my several times a week check-ins. That was when I started knitting.

My go-to craft has always been something messy or heavy or complicated or big like sewing or painting but I needed something that I could stash in my purse and do in my lap in the hospital and doctor’s offices so I learned how to cast on and knit and purl. It was also very unlike me to do a craft with no endgame in mind.

I’m the queen of trying a new craft and immediately jotting down a business plan, pricing structure and marketing strategy to turn weaving or macrame or clay jewelry into my next small business.

The thing about me knitting was, I couldn’t deal with making an actual thing. I don’t know if it was because my future was so uncertain and I didn’t want to end up looking at a half-done scarf or sweater and thinking of how things could have been if they’d have worked out. But, all I’d knit is these little 4×4 squares and when a nurse or tech asked me about them, I said I was going to stitch them together and turn them into a blanket… someday.


Part of me knew I was lying. I wasn’t knitting for pleasure. I was knitting to survive. I was knitting as therapy. I was knitting because it was my way of telling the fear to get lost like the tree had done to the leaf. Lots of us creatives do that. We make stuff because we literally have to. Because if we don’t, the voices telling us there’s no point to any of it and we have no purpose will get way too loud.

I’d used crafting as therapy in elementary school when I was the creative weirdo and made shoebox dioramas, crafting little bedrooms for imaginary dolls from cardboard and paper towels that were more comfortable than the world I was in at school where I always felt less than. I’d done it in my high school sketchbook, drawing nude women to unknowingly work through my feelings of queerness.

I’d done it in my journals since I wrote my first entry in my Hello Kitty diary in first grade which was “Today, I did see my friend,” l know, genius right. I started then and kept going my whole life… processing through making art and writing down everything about my heartache or fears or dreams.

Making stuff wasn’t something I had to make time to do. Making stuff was the thing that made me feel connected and purposeful and better.

Somehow as what I did to survive, making, became the thing I did for a living when I turned my crafts into a business in my early twenties, I started losing that primal need to make and the freedom that came with not caring how what I made would end up because no one was probably going to see it, unless I wanted them to.

I was tangled in the business of making. I judged every idea, everything I made, every craft I tried from the perspective of how it would be perceived by the world. Would someone love it and give it a home? Would someone shower it with compliments when they saw it in my booth at a craft fair? The unconditional love that I had for what I created had been replaced by pressure for my art to perform.