Shewolfinthevalley

On 2 October 2021 I posted:

The third (and final) wee strawberry is complete so this weekend will be all about the many shades of green on leaves and stems.

The bonus pic today is from last weekend’s breakfast on the beach. We brewed up fresh coffee (Rwandan beans from @rafikicoffee_) and although we drank from disposable cups (don’t judge me. The Captain worked in the packaging industry and we’re using up old supplies) we used proper heavy linen table napkins. This one must have belonged to my great grandmother, given her initials are embroidered in the corner. It’s dated 1937. The stitching is incredibly fine, much finer than I could manage. But… I have many linen napkins, mostly un-embroidered, so perhaps I will ensure future generations know they passed through my hands by adding my initials to them? Or a swallow, swooping across the corner. Or a wee wild strawberry.

Lately I’ve been reflecting on being in an “in between” stage of our lives.

It’s not always a comfortable place to be – the anchors that you have gotten used to using, to hold you secure, are pulled up (albeit possibly only temporarily). You’re not sure that your navigational system is going to get you back to safety… you hear these days of SatNavs that take you on most inappropriate journeys.

But there is also a freedom that you have during a period of limbo. While everything is in the air, you have the space to think more creatively, you are not bound so much by what has always been, and what you had always unthinkingly assumed would be. When nothing is secure you can throw it all up in the air… and while it is up there, floating about, you can go foraging for new things, for wild things. Or just pick up the old things that you really want in your future life.

Specifically we are between homes. We are living in the home that The Captain made his home 23 years ago. When I say ‘made’ I mean it literally – he practically built the whole place, from a run down wreck. We hope to move into what has been Mum and Dad’s home sometime before Christmas.

And during this limbo period, much needs to be done. There are all the legal and administrative aspects of selling a home, much planning, many spreadsheets, all the lists! And then there are days and days of going through STUFF, deciding what to keep, what to throw, what to try to sell. But instead of getting bogged down in those tasks, I find myself more and more just thinking about what life will be like on the other side, once we have moved.

Daily I say to myself, “I’ll do that when we are settled in Galloway”. And some of this is valid, though possibly only in my own head (buying a bike makes sense once we live somewhere I will feel more confident and happy cycling on the roads, and where we don’t live half way up a hill). But I’m sure there are many things I could just get on with now in my life. And the lesson I am taking from this is that if there’s something I think I’ll enjoy, I should just get on with it. So long as no-one else gets hurt in the process.

This is actually the one piece of advice my Grandmother gave me the night before I left home to go to University.

She told just 18 year old me, “Now don’t do anything you’ll regret, Loïs. But remember the only things you regret in life are the opportunities you missed. If it makes you happy, do it.” So, I am going to embrace new things, open my eyes to new opportunities and possibilities. We are going to live our best life.

***

Thank you for reading this.

If you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.

Finally, if it’s not too much to ask (I know, it is, apologies) I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.

Tags: 100 Days Project Scotland, dementia, Mum Has Dementia, Taking Smock Of The Situation

On 30 September 2021 I wrote:

Wild strawberry season might be over but this one is still bearing fruit.

The edges of Mum’s garden are abundant with wild strawberries.. I love how enthusiastically they spring up and how generously they provide such delicious wee fruit.

Photo 2 may look like a Jar Of Not Very Much. But look closely. Although it’s an old mustard jar (Colman’s English) those are not mustard seeds in the bottom.

They are pearls. Seed pearls. And each one was found in a mussel picked on the Solway coast, mostly at Carrick.

As children we were often out foraging, getting food for free as Mum called it (after the Richard Mabey book). Those wee islands in the third photo are mussel beds, or they were in the 1970s. And at low tide you can walk to them, even if you’re a short-legged wee girl. So we ate a lot of mussels when there was an R in the month.

The Solway coast is opposite Windscale (as it was back then) and mum was vaguely worried about the mussels being radioactive. So she invited our science teacher round for supper, on the condition he brought his Geiger counter.

He duly arrived and set up his ‘probe’. He sat it in the sofa, next to my bum to get a background reading… and off it went bleeping and clicking and flashing.

Then he stuck it in the bucket with the freshly foraged mussels. And everything slowed down.

Conclusion: my bum was more radioactive than the sea near a nuclear power station. Hurrah! I think.

Back to that jar. Whenever we found a pearl in a mussel we would save it in the jar. We were going to make the most beautiful opulent seed pearl brooch. Or a tiara. A whole crown! With sceptre and orb to match, why not?

So that jar I found tucked away at the back of the cupboard? That’s a Jar Of Hope. And it will never be empty.

We’re still in the process of clearing Mum’s house, in advance of us moving there. I re-found this Jar of Hope the other day. It won’t surprise you to know that it was put firmly in the Keep pile.

***

Thank you for reading this.

If you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.

Finally, if it’s not too much to ask (I know, it is, apologies) I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.

Tags: 100 Days Project Scotland, dementia, Mum Has Dementia, Taking Smock Of The Situation

On 29 September 2021 I posted:

I’ve been distracted with other projects but here we are stabbing the wee strawberry again. Not a euphemism.

We took Mum out for a coffee on Monday. Well she had a hot chocolate. She looked so thrilled when this enormous big cup and saucer arrived in front of her. I looked alarmed, wondering if she could manage it.

And then her muscle memory kicked in and she picked up the teaspoon and spooned spoonfuls of hot chocolate fluff from the top of her drink into her mouth. She did this so slowly, so precisely like she wasn’t really sure it was real.

But I’ve seen her do this so many times before. Such a simple pleasure, spooning the fluff off the top of your drink and feeling it melt on your tongue. I do it too, when I have a cappuccino. Always have. Never thought before now that I maybe learned this from Mum.

The giant cup reminded me of a childhood weekend treat we occasionally had, possibly only in the winter. Mum had two ENORMOUS cups and saucers, bought in a French flea market I think. And she would make café au lait (hot milk with instant coffee and sugar) and we would drink it out of these cups as big as our heads. I reminded Mum of this treat. But it’s gone, she couldn’t remember it. And that doesn’t matter. We enjoyed those times, she made them special. And I now thank her for that.

And the bonus pic is the view looking west from Carrick Shore, at breakfast time on Sunday.

I loved that moment of joy with Mum, watching her spoon the fluff off the top of her chocolate. And, having recognised it as something I had instinctively learned from her, I notice it and recall this pleasure every time I sit in a café and drink a frothy coffee.

Small pleasures. We should try to notice them, to capture them each day.

Tonight I’m attending the JustGiving Fundraiser of the Year Awards at the Roundhouse in London. I shall wear a frou frou frock and will accessorise with a rather fabulous beaded bag which Mum used to use. I’m a finalist in the Creative Fundraiser of the Year category; for the Taking Smock of the Situation Project. You all know of the love that went into each and every stitch, the stories that they unleashed. Perhaps the most unexpected outcome was the outpouring of support I received through it, often from strangers. That support and love is for every one of us who has experience of dementia.

Today I could not be prouder (or more surprised). I feel like a winner just being recognised and shortlisted for the final.

I’ll let you know how it goes – probably on Instagram first of all, so do check me out there if you’re interested.

***

Thank you for reading this.

If you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.

Finally, if it’s not too much to ask (I know, it is, apologies) I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.

Tags: 100 Days Project Scotland, dementia, Mum Has Dementia, Taking Smock Of The Situation

On 25 September 2021 I posted:

Sewing more name labels on things for Mum today. This is a pillowcase, but there’s also a few more tops and some woolies now the weather is turning.

Mum seemed frail today. I gave her a wee shoulder massage and she was so bony, in a way she never has been.

She was happy to have me there, but was quite lost. I busied myself with tidying her things and sewing name tags and refilling her biscuit tin. And we wrote birthday cards for her sister and step daughter. But I came away with such an overwhelming feeling of sadness. Not for what she’s lost, but for who she is now. She tried so hard to participate but it was too much for her today. It was almost too much for me too.

And now, two years later… I saw Mum recently. A couple of relatively short visits over a weekend… but she slept through most of both of them, and struggled to engage when she did awake.

As I read back at what I wrote two years ago, I have no recollection of how much she was able to participate, or not. And at that time, I had no idea how much further her health would decline, how much more of her capabilities she would lose.

Sometimes it seems impossible to believe that she is still the same person as my Mum; and certainly unbelievable that her body continues to live with so little stimulation, so little engagement with the world. I feel strongly that Mum would hate to be as she is, and in all honesty I hate it too.

I love her, as much as ever, but I hate the situation we are all now locked into.

***

Thank you for reading this.

If you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.

Finally, if it’s not too much to ask (I know, it is, apologies) I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.

Tags: 100 Days Project Scotland, dementia, Mum Has Dementia, Taking Smock Of The Situation

On 20 September 2021 I posted:

Sunday evenings are infinitely improved with a bit of stabbing. I nearly made a couple of strawberries while Suranne Jones was getting into ever deeper water on board Vigil on BBC1.

And today my embroidery threads organiser box arrived so I’ve started sorting it out whilst in meetings, under MisoCat’s supervision, obviously.

When I spoke to Mum yesterday evening she knew that she’d been out and about with my brother, but mostly what she remembered is that it’s cold out there. So I’ve promised to take more warmer clothes to her at the weekend… which means more sewing WolffeLabels on to things.

It’s interesting how we label things isn’t it? Including ourselves.

For many years. although I loved my name and the history it brought with it, I resisted being the sister, the daughter, another Wolffe. I suppose that was less about the actual label and more about the context, and HATING being compared to others. To this day I feel uncomfortable with comparisons, I don’t have favourites and I don’t think I am competitive – in fact I resist competing, but perhaps that is also because I hate not winning. We’re complex creatures aren’t we?

Mum had us three children one after another. She always claimed that there was no point getting used to a good night’s sleep and then a few years later start all over again, with nappies and night feeds and all that jazz. So, she had Three Under Three. And I am that third one, after which she decided, ENOUGH.

One of the consequences of being so close in age is that at school, your teachers are all too aware of your two elder brothers and their achievements; and you will know that you are always being compared to them. And if they excel in what they do – both very different, one academic, the other sport, music and art – then you might find yourself striving to do something different to avoid those comparisons. I was clever enough, rubbish at most sports though I tried and I liked joining in. I enjoyed art, but wasn’t especially talented.

But in all these areas I never excelled in the way my brothers had.

Teachers back in the day would tell me this. And my response was to withdraw from trying… I knew that of course I was not as good as them, but with the benefit of hindsight, I wonder if perhaps a 13 year old Loïs was generally being judged against a 14 year old Andrew or a 15 year old James?

Anyway, I did science and maths, because neither of my brothers had, so I could plough my own furrow as they say. And I was good at it. My brain likes all that order, understands the art of mathematical equations. And someone had left an endowment for maths prizes at school, so I always got a bigger pile of books as prizes than either of my brothers. (Perhaps I am competitive after all).

In all of this, Mum had absolute clarity that we should not be compared to one another. And to this day we delight in her edict, “It’s not a competition” which can be used to great effect in a surprising number of circumstances!

I seem to have veered off my topic of ‘labels’. And also of the working title of this post ‘It’s cold out there’.

But I think I’ll stick with it. It is colder out there again now, after a mini heatwave. And somehow, my life seems temporarily colder… there are lots of decisions to be made, of practical activities to knuckle down and complete. And the longest lists you can imagine. I do love a list though, so that’s something.

***

Thank you for reading this.

If you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.

Finally, if it’s not too much to ask (I know, it is, apologies) I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.

Tags: 100 Days Project Scotland, dementia, Mum Has Dementia, Taking Smock Of The Situation

On 18 September 2021 I posted:

Well this is beginning to resemble a wild strawberry plant, which is handy because that is what it is! It was designed by my nephew MaxTheHuman, making this a properly transgenerational project, inspired and dedicated to my Mum.

I’ve been thinking of memory a lot as I’ve been stabbing, as you might expect, given Mum has Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia. Actually I’ve been thinking about how we value memories. I’ve always loved stories of my parents’ pasts, their remembered histories. Dad, who was born in Berlin in 1920 never really spoke much of his until he was in his 90s. But what a life!

But Mum. I feel like Mum’s stories, her life, runs through me like it’s my own lifeblood. I’ve known some of her stories as long as I’ve known my own.

And the stories, the memories, have felt like treasure, like my own super power too.

Recently I found a journal that Gran wrote over a 6 week journey from Sandefjord to Cape Town in a whaling ship in 1954. It’s fascinating. And I treasure it. It fits alongside Mum’s stories, but isn’t the actual memories. Mum’s sister Astri was on the same journey and will have different memories of it. I treasure the story, but have no memory of it, of course.

Now, as time passes, it has felt like Mum is diminishing, not just physically, but as she loses her memories and memory she loses something of herself.

And I wondered about this. Why do I consider her less than she was? She still had the same life, still enjoyed the same experiences. It’s only because I value MEMORY so much that I have been seeing Mum as being less of herself. I need to value the experience and the person who had it more than the memory.

Mum is still remarkable. She is living with dementia and I am grieving for the relationship we had, but I embrace our new relationship. It’s not easy, but it is what it is.

Oh, and your bonus today is cheese and onion cornmeal muffins, just out of the oven.

Two years have passed since I wrote the above. And I’ve done a whole lot more thinking about memory and what we value. But that can wait for another day.

This weekend I was reminded that memory is not always straightforward.

The other day I was sitting here at my laptop when I heard The Captain come in from the garden with something of a commotion and a lot of swear words. I went through to the kitchen to discover he’d upset a wasps’ nest and had been stung… several wasps, of course, had followed him into the house. Pandemonium ensued.

After a while things when things calmed down, I felt a tickle on my upper lip and swished it away with the back of my hand, only to experience the searing pain of a wasp sting. Somehow I had inadvertently managed to separate the wasp from its sting, so all that venom pumped into my upper lip, giving the impression I’d spent a LOT on some lip plumping procedure. The pain was excruciating.

The first memory which this prompted was when I was a child and we were foraging in the woods. I was at the back of the Wolffe Pack, with Dad ambling along just ahead of me…. and he must have knocked a wasps’ nest. For they all rose up and stung ME as the nearest human! I screamed as we all ran back to the car; the car seemed to fill with wasps and I screamed some more. So of course I ended up with a wasp sting in my mouth (to add to others on my hands and the worst one, on my eyelid). This incident was forever after referred to as ‘that time Loïs had hysterics‘. I always added, ‘because I was being STUNG BY WASPS’.

That story has never left me, and is part of our family lore.

But another story came to mind, dragged from an older memory. Of a small child in the garden, being stung by a bee on her nose, before she was going to a party that afternoon. And, to reduce the pain, some blue ink was applied to the sting, so the small girl went to the party with a large, throbbing blue nose.

I have a feeling the small girl was Gran, and that it was Miss Wright, her governess, who applied the ink. But perhaps the small girl was Mum? It’s a story I remember being told when I was a child, perhaps to tell me how lucky I was that blue ink was not being applied to my stings? But now I have no idea who that child was. Somehow, I have such a vivid image of her in my mind, of a wicker chair in a sunny garden, and of roses in the flower bed.

I will never know now who she was, but I’m grateful for her… and for the story of that moment in her life that has lived on.

***

If you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.

Finally, if it’s not too much to ask (I know, it is, apologies) I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.

Tags: 100 Days Project Scotland, dementia, Mum Has Dementia, Taking Smock Of The Situation

On 15 September 2021 I wrote:

And we almost have a leaf! I’m enjoying this wild strawberry more than I expected, possibly because I have learnt that the key to satin-like satin stitch is THREE strands of embroidery thread. I suspect I knew this aged 12, but am pleased to have learned it again.

I called Mum again this evening. When the carer gave her the phone and told her it was her daughter, Mum asked which daughter.

I am her only daughter.

She seemed pleased enough that it was me though and remembered that I’d gone swimming at the weekend, so assumed that was what I was going to do when I got off the phone.

She talks more freely about her confusion these days, though yesterday she assured me she isn’t very confused, not yet anyway.

The day after she moved into the home she said to my brother, “It’s good we don’t have to pretend any more”. Although it was never entirely clear what she meant by this, we took it to mean that she felt she could drop the social veneer now, and allow herself to relax and just live with her dementia. Certainly she seemed somehow more liberated at saying whatever was on her mind. And it certainly seemed a confusing place.

She seems quite settled now, and institutionalised, which is not surprising as she lives in an institution. She is treated with care, and knows she is loved. She even laughs when I tell her she is my favourite Mum. Well she is. And evidently I am her favourite daughter.

When I wrote this nearly two years ago, Mum had been living in the care home for just two months. It’s over two years now. Looking back I find it hard to recall exactly what she was like, what I was like… what life was like then.

Mum’s broken wrist was recovering… she hadn’t been able to move about while it was still mending, as she relied on being able to support herself with a wheeled walking frame, which she called her dancing partner. So her first few weeks in the home were spent sitting in her room, mostly entirely alone. And we were still in the grip of the second year of Covid restrictions, so our worlds were still pretty isolated. I say ‘our’ deliberately. The Captain and I live a couple of miles from the nearest village, surrounded by fields and woodland and could go for weeks on end during those Covid months without seeing another soul. It felt blissful if I’m honest. I, who had lived in London for half of my life, who loved being with old friends and making new ones, fully embraced this opportunity to be solo. And Mum? I never knew how the home operated before Covid so have no comparison, but I have a sense that her life was pretty solo too. And that her jumbling brain was finding it increasingly difficult after periods of isolation to remember how to make conversation again. it wasn’t just that she lost words, she seemed to lose the ability to connect sentences, or to respond to something someone else had said.

None of this mattered.

She might not have been able to excel in ‘our’ world any more, but we could usually slip into hers with her. So that is what we did… taking her as she was each time we spoke to her. There were good days and bad days, and there continue to be.

But the constant throughout these last years has been her ability to keep up that social veneer… she had wee phrases she would fall back on, that no doubt had seen her through her life, and had been said so often that the muscle memory brought them out despite the jumble in her brain.

“How lovely to see you”

“Thank you for coming”

“Thank you for calling”

“Oooh, your hands are so cold”

And then, more often, we were greeted with, “How did you get in?”

And quite recently, when Mum was becoming almost non-verbal, she told one of the carers that they looked tired. The carer told me this with tears welling up in her eyes, it meant so much to her to have been noticed by one of her charges.

Yes, despite her ailing health and her failing brain, Mum has remained her charming self.

***

Mostly on this blog I write about trying to care for Mum as she developed dementia, which nearly broke me on a number of occasions. Gentle meditative stitching her old Fisherman’s Smock probably saved me, giving me a focus and forcing me to carve out time when I could let everything go and just concentrate on those tiny stitches.

If you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.

Finally, if it’s not too much to ask (I know, it is, apologies) I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.

Tags: 100 Days Project Scotland, dementia, Mum Has Dementia, Taking Smock Of The Situation