A bizarre story from 2016 is resurfacing (5 years later!), and while it sounds like something straight out of The Silence of the Lambs, it’s not what you think, yet also is.

It all started when Marieke Voorsluijs, a mother, author of knitting books, and textile designer from Amsterdam, self-submitted a post to the popular site Bored Panda. The post, titled “My Son Doesn’t Want To Cuddle Anymore So I Knit A Cuddly Version Of Him,” was a half-joking post I’m kinda sad I didn’t come up with. Because unless you’re a Liar McLiarson, you know that once your kids get a certain age, you start to miss them a disgusting amount. Motherhood is a little bit macabre, like how we used to ask strangers pre-COVID if we could sniff the top of their baby’s head.

“We laugh a lot about the stretching gap between his needs and mine. Him needing more of his own space and my covert needs to keep on smothering him with maternal love,” Voorsluijs joked on Bored Panda.

Voorsluijs has been knitting her whole life and owns a company called Club Geluk where she creates realistic knit goods using yarn. Once her son reached puberty, Voorsluijs began to feel that infamous womb tingle many mothers experience with slightly older kids (kinda like pre-empty-nest-syndrome). Realizing that her son was now more into things like hanging out with friends and video games and less into cuddles with Mama, Voorsluijs decided to put her needle skills to the test and create a yarn meat suit to act as her son’s hug double.

The knitted suit is a head-to-toe literal bodysuit that is hollow inside – kinda like a mother’s soul when their kids start acting too cool for cuddle sesharoos.

Facebook posts that supposedly originated from a craft-shaming group now read like the following:

Huffpost spoke to Voorsluijs back in 2016 to get the inside knit-one, purl-one.

“If I knew so many people thought this was really about getting more cuddles by a love-sick mother by knitting my son, I would have posted something different,” Voorsluijs says. Though most of the reactions online have been shock and terror, Voorsluijs’s youngest son (who the suit was made for) liked the idea and even helped out in its construction. “We worked together on it. He co-produced it,” she said. “It was a fun family art project!…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.”

Only, 5 years later, those same photos are being taken out of context. Again.

The 42-year-old mom of two, now 16 and 17 yeas old, explained, “The knitted son has characteristics of both my sons. The older one had just grown so much during the process that the smaller one was only able to wear it when it was finished. When it was finished we thought it would be a great idea for mothers with too much love for their children and need to cuddle. So they could knit their own cuddly son!”

If you listen closely, you can hear Buffalo Bill searching East for a knitting pattern for lotion his knit victims can rub onto their knit skin that he can lower from a knit basket while working on this pattern by Allyson Kennedy Artist as this knit son’s future knit wife in beautiful knit “Punk’s Not Dead” matrimony.

If you enjoy odd knitting projects, check out our post on how you can get the pattern to make a “Bernie’s Mittens” doll here.