On day 12 of the 100 Day Challenge, I posted a second picture, with the following text:
I spent a few blissful minutes in the sun this afternoon sewing.
Later I decided to un-sew the detail in the second picture and to try doing that flower bud another way. All that un-sewing felt too much like a metaphor for life at the moment.
I will be aided in my next steps by an embroidery book gifted to me by my grandmother when I was a bairn.
As ever, please click on the link in my bio to learn more about this project and why it means so much to me.
I loved sitting outside in the sunshine, gently stabbing at fabric with my embroidery threads. I wasn’t much enjoying this particular bit of embroidery though – I could not get the threads to look how I wanted them to. But, it was a good reminder that this wasn’t ever going to be a sampler showing perfected examples of lots of different embroidery techniques. It was more of a sketch book, a gentle throwing down of thoughts, of memories, of love. With hindsight, it feels so very filled with gratitude. I really am so incredibly grateful to have the mother that I do, to be her daughter.
Looking back, it wasn’t all embroidery in the sunshine in June 2021.
Mum, a week or two earlier had started to say that she felt useless, that she had nothing to do, she was clearly bored.
As children, during the long summer holidays, if one of us ever uttered the phrase “I’m BORED”, back would come the retort: “Only boring people get bored”. It was such a put down. We might not have known exactly what we wanted to do or be when we grew up, but we were all clear that we did not want to be BORING. To this day, we will all respond with “Only boring people get bored” if ever someone even suggests they might be bored.
Anyway, back to Mum, who was bored. But how to deal with this? We couldn’t just laugh it off and tell her only boring people get bored. Her eyesight had deteriorated to the extent she could not read any more; she was unable to focus on an audio book; she could not manage even relatively simple tasks, such as making soup, she was frail and unable to walk anywhere without the support of her walker (also known as her Dancing Partner). The reality was that she needed help even to go to the loo.
But she could make fruit salad. She sat at the table with a big bowl, a wooden board and a sharp knife, and various bits of pre-prepared fruit (melons already peeled and in slices, nectarines peeled and off their stones, etc). And she set to, cutting everything in tinier and tinier weeny wee chunks – so very unlike the big chunky fruit salads of our earlier years. I added a basil syrup (as I said to a friend, that supermarket-bought basil plant needed to be used) and we ate fruit salad. At every single meal.
We were also noticing how much weight mum had lost; she needed new trousers, smaller ones that wouldn’t fall down when she stood up – there were enough other hazards in her life. So I ordered new trousers online, and I noted on the 12th June that as well as a courier delivery of trousers, we also had a delivery of a VERY LARGE box of disposable pants from Boots. This was not on my list of Things To Do in 2021, but here we were.
And we had delicious fruit salad.
This series of posts starts here, with Taking Smock of the Situation. Head there if you want to catch up on how we got to this point.
And finally, dementia is confusing and distressing.. for the person with dementia and those around them. My wish is that nobody with dementia should go through it alone. Click on this link to help make this true. Thank you.
Shewolfinthevalley 
One Response to “Un-sewing”