When I first started living away from home at 15, empty nest syndrome hit my darling mama fairly hard. She had always been a champion knitter (and continues to be, I received a text from my dad yesterday with absolutely no context that just said "Your mom is a knitting rock star"), and once I left the house her hobby took an adorable turn. Instead of just knitting socks, mittens, hats, and the occasional sweater, she began to produce a horde of tiny, knitted hedgehogs. The first ones she made were gifts for my older sibling and me (my original hedgehog, who is named Harold, is pictured above), but she didn't stop there. She knits them for her high school students as rewards, knits them for my friends and partners, and of course, I now have a substantial collection of little round hedgies distributed among all of my purses and various bedroom nooks. My mom has even passed on the skill to my sibling, so now I get twice as many hedgehogs in my stocking!
While my mom and I haven't always had the easiest relationship and fought constantly for most of my teenage years, my little hedgehog collection reminds me that even when things were difficult, and even when they still are, my family still loves me enough to bestow me with more tiny knitted creatures than I know what to do with. All I need to do is reach into my purse or glance at my bedside table to know that I've always been loved and valued, even when I was an absolute monster of an adolescent girl.
Thank you @missy and @rambo for a prompt that made me into the sappiest of saps.