So time has passed. My son is not only born but three months old and I feel as though I’m beginning to emerge from the blur of the last few months.

Today I finished my cardigan. I designed it to wear in my postpartum weeks. During pregnancy I knitted imagining wearing it as I nurses my baby. I wove in dreams of the birth I would have liked. Even then I knew that having type 1 diabetes meant that a natural experience at home where I felt safe was probably not going to happen but even now it feels important to honour that dream and what it says about who I am.

The turquoise yarn was bought specially and reminds me of all the effort and resources I poured into managing my blood sugars from before I even conceived to give my child the best chance I could of a healthy start. The stripes though came from my yarn stash. Now they stand for the way things are and how I worked with that. There are two shades of cream. I knew from the start that I didn’t have enough of either and chose to alternate them from the start rather than running out of one part way through. In the same way I had to be realistic about my limitations especially around coping with hospitals in preparing for birth. It was hard. My previous experiences with mental health care made it harder but knowing that it would and asking for help gave me support from the excellent one to one midwifery team and our amazing friend Jenny who was there for all three of us through the process even delaying a trip to London to stay.

It is the cardigan I knitted as I tried to prepare myself for a planned induction at 38 weeks because of my diabetes. I wanted to have it done when my son was born and I wanted to give birth vaginally. I hoped it would be a healing process that reclaimed my pregnancy from all the medical monitoring, and my vagina from the abuse I experienced as a child teenager and young woman and help message overcome the last of the vaginismus that made sharing my adult sexuality with my husband so difficult and painful even as we tried to conceive.

None of it happened. I had to focus on what was most important and put it aside as my fingers (and everything else) swelled too much to hold knitting needles just as I texted the midwife to tell her I was ill abandoning my last days of quiet preparation safe at home for an even earlier induction in hospital due to pre eclampsia. I tried a few stitches and had to abandon it between the internal examinations and pessaries flashbacks and hypno birth tracks.

It was in my bag when I made the choice that induction wasn’t working and consented to the cesarean section that brought my son safely into the world. It was still there as I used all the support I was offered to find a path between medical help and getting home so that I could feel safe and my blood pressure could finally come down again.

I didn’t complete my cardigan the way i imagined but today I finished it. My son is an active engaged three month old and despite early challenges and a tongue tie he is fully breastfed. This is the cardigan on which I put in a few stitches as he slept and which helped me stay calm when his Dad first took him out without me. He played with the sleeves as I was knitting the front band and slept on my chest wrapped in it while I waited for him to wake so I could weave in the ends. Now it’s finished and I’m ready to work on new projects in those times. I was right though, it does work well for nursing him!