Why cross stitch

A lot of people has asked me: why do you cross stitch?  isn't it an old people hobby? 
I normaly keep it brief and just say that it's something that relaxes me and move to the next topic, but I have often questionmyself too:  why cross stitch?
It actually goes back waaaaaay back, to when I was a little girl and used to look at my mother crochet for money, meaning she sold her works.  When I was small I used to adore my mother, I mainly grew up with her (a blessing in a way, since my father was not exactly the best of people) and looked at everything she did with adoring eyes, I infact think the main reason I got into smoking was because I saw her doing it and thought it looked great (luckily later I realized it wasn't that great and quit).  The problem with this picture is, my mother was/is neither maternal nor has enough patience to teach anything, and I wanted so bad to be able to crochet like her that, after a few tries where she brought me to tears and actually almost convinced me I was incapable, I decided to try and teach myself... it was great!!  I saw these things created by me, and even though I could see every defects, I still was amazed i did it!!  Things got worse in my house, my father was a very violent person and, as I said, my mother wasn't the maternal type, so the onlything that kept me sane was crochet,  I even did a bedspread (I did it for myself but my mother sold it...sigh!!).  One day I happened to see a cross stitch magazine, and I loved all the colors, the details that you do not have with crochet, so I purchased some simple kits, and have started with cross stitch, which as a teraphy worked better since I really had to concentrate on the chart, and that kept my mind better away from what happened around me.

I love art but am not able to create, cross stitch gives me the chance to copy somebody's else creations with my own hands and expose it with pride for all the work that went in it, plus I sometimes make little mistakes that do not compromise the final results and leave it there so that I know there is a personal note on it that is just mine.

Cinzia