If you have a teenager in your life, you realize just how many changes tend to come your way. It seems that the bond we had and treasured when they were younger just goes away as they begin to flex their independence muscles. We often regain that closeness when they get older but the years in-between can be rather difficult.
Marieke Voorsluijs knows this just as well as any parent. She is a mother from Amsterdam and her two sons began to pull away when they reached their teenage years. Perhaps most distressing is that her son didn’t want to cuddle anymore.
Marieke wasn’t about to take this lying down so she got busy, and she got creative. She grabbed some yarn and made a brand-new son for herself.
“My son is reaching puberty,” Voorsluijs explained. “We used to cuddle all the time, but those days are becoming scarce. Now he [would] rather hang with friends, play with his phone and listen to his iPod. Exactly according to nature’s plan. I am a good mother, so of course, I accept this, and I am happy he is a healthy kid.”
“We laugh a lot about the stretching gap between his needs and mine,” she added. “Him needing more of his own space and my covert needs to keep on smothering him with maternal love. So we started to [think about] how we could visualize this puberty gap. So I suggested to make a cuddly version of him.”
This mother even has her own knitwear brand, Club Geluk. They have many knitted items for sale but knitting a son is above and beyond.
She went into detail about the project in a blog post:
“I am a professional knitter who likes to knit weird things for my brand Club Geluk. We knit realistic everyday stuff with lots of details and even wrote a book about it. We knit hams, tv’s plants, etc. To set the bar a little higher regarding my knitting skills I thought of knitting my son. He liked it and we worked together on it.
“The reactions during the process were so diverse from creepy to beautiful that we decided to make some photos in real life to place the weirdness in context. It was a fun art family art project!
“When it was finished we thought it would be a great idea for mothers with to much love for their children and need to cuddle. So they could knit there own cuddly son! My knitted son consists of: a knitted head with a cap, hands with nails and watch, knitted trousers, a knitted sweater with an obstinate slogan, knitters sneakers, and knitted iPod. Actually, the knitted son has characteristics of both my sons. The other one had just grown so much during the process that the smaller one was only able to wear it when it was finished.”
This was a two-month project. It might seem like a long time but when you consider what she accomplished, it really is rather impressive.
h/t: VT