Tag Archives: Make Don't Break

Posies of flowers

5 Feb

This stitching is from the 7th day of my 100 days embroidery project. It was early June, and this is what I wrote when I posted this pic.

This wee swallow hasn’t changed much since yesterday, but that’s part of the point of this project I think. It just takes its own time and gives me time to unwind, to think, to lose myself in the slow stitching.

Mum was brought the most beautiful bouquet of flowers this morning by a friend who knows she has dementia. Mum loved the flowers but, somewhat amusingly, immediately sent her out to forage in the garden for more blooms to augment them.

Mum was so good at always having a wee posy of flowers from the garden in the house. After I’d left home, whenever I came back to stay there was always always a mini vase of flowers on my bedside table. I’ve only just remembered this… so tomorrow I must remember to put a mini vase of flowers on her bedside table.

Looking through and finding all these pictures of flowers from Mum’s garden reminds me of a moment a few weeks earlier. In addition to Mum’s dementia, she had also become increasingly frail. She required a walking frame to get around – she had one with 4 wheels which she called her Dancing Partner, and this helped her get about the house safely. But she hardly ever ventured outside any more. One evening I mentioned that as I had walked across to her house that evening, I had been overwhelmed by the smell of the honeysuckle which grew over the gable of her house, by her bedroom window. She missed such pleasures.

I took her secateurs and picked a small bunch of sweet sweet honeysuckle. When I came back in and placed the flowers in her hand, she seemed not to know what to do with them… so I held them up to her face so she could breathe in their smell. Her face immediately relaxed, and broke into the widest of smiles. That perfect, pure joy!

It felt that there were relatively few pleasures left in Mum’s life – she no longer painted, or drew; she couldn’t garden any more; she struggled to read; and because of Covid she had spent the last 18 months in social isolation. But she still loved her food, and she adored flowers from her garden. I can’t tell you how good it felt to find something that genuinely gave Mum joy at that point. I think, perhaps, we were all seeking some joy.

Knowing that someone you love has dementia, or might have dementia, is frightening. You fear the worst. And actually you don’t really know how it will impact your lives, though you are pretty sure that it won’t be good.

There is help and advice out there, including from Alzheimer Scotland, who provide a 24 hour helpline. Please help them keep that helpline free for anyone who needs it. You can donate here: Alzheimer Scotland, and I can tell you that you are an absolute star for supporting all of us who have feared the worst when faced with the prospect of someone we love having dementia.

Tags: , , , , , ,

A superb 70s hat

3 Feb

And here we are at Day 5 of 100 of the embroidery project. This is what I reflected on at the time:

I haven’t got much stitching done today… I really haven’t stopped long enough to focus on it all day.

But since we never get just one swallow here is the second one. And I’ve learned so much by doing the first one, so I’m tweaking how I do this one. Well no two birds are exactly alike are they?

As a wee bonus, you get mum and dad dressed up to go to some fancy shmancy do. We’ll never know now what it was, but I hope wherever they were they appreciated that hat. It was sort of autumnal colours, in the way that many things were in the 70s. Or was that just in our house?

One of the first really obvious symptom of mum’s dementia was that she never knew what time of day it was, even if she had checked a few minutes before (and she did check with us frequently). At most meals she thought it must be breakfast time – I guess if you lose your short term memory, and have no recollection of the rest of the day you probably think there has been no day yet, so if it’s a mealtime, it must be breakfast!

We bought her a dementia clock, which helped a bit, except that she was determined to position it on a bookshelf in the passage way between her bedroom and the rest of the house, a place she only walked through either when she was going for a pee in the night, or when she got up in the morning. So, for the rest of the day she still didn’t know what day of the week it was, or whether it was morning, noon or night. We bought a second clock, and she used it a bit more. She was definitely aware of this being an issue, and later, when she had an appointment with the doctor and she knew they were going to ask her some memory questions, she deliberately checked the clock just before he called, so she would know the day of the week.

But the thing that initially helped the most, was a simple pencil and paper solution. We wrote the day of the week, and the mealtime on pieces of paper and positioned them at her place at the dining room table. She would sit down at her chair, which had always been her chair, with her back to the Rayburn and she would read the label, usually with some delight. She still has not lost her appetite and has always enjoyed good food.

I say initially.

The final picture in this series (below) wasn’t needed at first. Mum would go to bed (generally at about 8pm), and then wouldn’t get up again till breakfast time, or if she did, it was only for a pee and then back to bed. But in the late Spring, she started waking at night, and believing it was day time. She always seemed her most vulnerable during these nocturnal moments. Somehow it felt as though she didn’t have the energy or the capacity to pretend that she was ok, and she was often tearful and upset, realising that something was wrong, usually believing that she was a stupid old woman. I had hoped that on these occasions the ‘This is Bedtime’ message might convince her that it was still the middle of the night (that and the fact that it was pitch dark outside and I was in my pyjamas)… but she suspected that someone (possibly the pixies) had come in and changed the labels just to confuse her. I so wish I had never joked about the pixies putting them out so they were always right!

Thank you to all who have already donated to Alzheimer Scotland, you rock my world! And if you want to donate again, or for the first time, then today is a good day to do just that. Thank you all, I REALLY appreciate your support.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Fly little swallow, fly

31 Jan

On day 4 of my 100 days embroidery project I wrote the following:

Fly little swallow, fly.

I love the slow, methodical process of embroidery. I mean it’s really just paint by numbers for Elizabethan ladies isn’t it?

Anyway, my first swallow on this project is complete. I might mix it up a bit and do something else next instead of another swallow, what do you think?

I’m actually feeling quite proud of this. When I first thought of embellishing this smock, mum suggested swallows around the yoke. I loved the idea, and decided i would do it without once considering whether or not i actually could do it. And then I kept thinking what other motifs I could add… and in my head it all grew like topsy. And it was only then, as I was about to start that I remembered I haven’t embroidered anything for about 30 years. And I was never very good. I was overwhelmed.

But.. I’m also determined to create something remarkable, inspired by Mum and by memories.

Her short term memories slip away before they have time to lodge in her brain these days. But she still has stories of long ago. And oh such stories!

Dementia is confusing.. 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 make this true. Please.

Tags: , , , , , ,

A Big Adventure

24 Jan

Mum was born in Scotland but before she was a year old she had travelled south with her mother and big sister to South Africa where her father had bought a fruit farm.

She lived there until she was 8 and WW2 broke out… and they made the journey back north to Scotland again. And at the end of the war they took that journey south again.

This pattern continued, back and forth from Scotland to South Africa pretty much until she married dad. I grew up hearing stories of the whaling ships she traveled on and it all sounded like such A Big Adventure.

No wonder we love the swallows that make that same journey every year.

The above was written on the Day Three of the 100 Days. I knew at the time that I should keep a diary, to remind me later what happened when, and how I was or wasn’t coping. But I didn’t. I just couldn’t commit anything to paper. It was easier to stab the fabric, to process things as I slowly stitched.

But, thanks to modern technology, I can look back at the messages I was sending my brother, and recall some of what was going on.

On this day, I discover that we were working out a new rota, given that we could now spend time together in the same house. The plan was for one of us to have a week on our own at Mum’s, followed by a handover week when both of us were there together, then a week with the other one going solo. I drew up the rota for the next few weeks, and took a picture and sent it to James, not knowing that none of it would actually happen in that carefully planned way.

I also noted that morning that there had been no nocturnal wanderings overnight. We were living in the house next door to Mum and had set up a motion sensitive camera to capture movement in the sitting room (so alerting us to her wandering around the house at night, rather than just getting up and going for a pee). At this point we noted that she was ‘one night on, one night off’ in the nocturnal wandering stakes. I was worn out, I’m sure Mum was too.

The District Nurse showed up mid-morning, to re-dress the bandage on Mum’s leg. She had fallen some weeks earlier, and had skinned her shin. Mum’s skin is thinner than tissue paper and also takes forever to heal. Another factor was the water retention in her legs, so the wound was literally seeping, soaking the bandage. The advice was to take advantage of gravity and for Mum to keep her feet up (we had tried water retention tablets earlier in the year, but Mum did NOT enjoy how they made her need to go to the loo very suddenly). So, each afternoon Mum would have ‘quiet time’ in her comfy chair with her feet up, and a blanket wrapped over her legs to keep her warm and cosy. Mum’s quiet time also gave me time to focus on work for an hour or two.

If you want to read more about the 100 Days Project, and to know more about why I’m embroidering a smock, go to Taking Smock of the Situation.

Thank you to all who have already donated to my associated fundraiser for Alzheimer Scotland, you are absolute stars! And if you feel moved to donate again, or for the first time, then today is a good day to do just that. Thank you all, you already support me in so many ways, so I REALLY appreciate you digging deep and supporting others when you make a donation.

Mum, with her big sister Jennifer

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Swooping swallows

23 Jan

It’s only 7 months since I first started embroidering Mum’s smock, and recording my progress each day with wee stories about our lives, her life. It feels like several lifetimes ago, and it’s interesting to re-live that time, and to recall how far we had already come in our journey with Mum’s dementia.

I am someone who likes to know facts, who feels better if I feel I have some knowledge and if I can put a name to things. So, having seen that Mum wasn’t quite her usual self when I started minding her in January 2021, I researched ‘early stages of dementia’. If this had been a tick box exercise, Mum seemed to tick all the boxes. A typical list of symptoms is here (this one from The Alzheimer’s Society)

  • Memory problems
  • Difficulties in thinking things through and planning
  • Language and communication, for instance struggling to find the right word
  • Poor orientation (this is perhaps the one that I never identified with Mum)
  • Visual-perceptual difficulties
  • Changes in mood or emotion

Soon afterwards I spoke to her wonderful GP, who was professional kindness itself and discussed what, if anything, we should do about this. The GP confirmed that this indeed did sound like it might be the early stages of dementia, and also confirmed that we didn’t need to do anything, or not straight away. I enquired what the advantages of a diagnosis might be, and established that they ‘might be’ easier access to some forms of support. I’m not sure I discovered precisely what that support would be, but I also wasn’t sure what further support we needed or whether anything would actually be supportive.

This was to become the constant quest – ‘what support do we need? what else would help at this stage?’

The GP had established that Mum was not in physical danger, that she was not so vulnerable that she could no longer live on her own, and had also asked after me and how I was coping, which kindness immediately set off my tears.

I cry most easily at times when I am trying to be brave and cope with stuff and people show me kindness.

A few weeks after this conversation with the GP I cried when the local postie (who I only really know to wave at through the window when he delivers the post at Mum’s) was kind, and understood when I explained that Mum may have dementia, and that really the junkmail wasn’t a good thing for her.

With hindsight, so much had already happened by early June, but so much more would happen in the coming weeks. But we will come to that.

So, on Day Two on the #100daysproject I wrote this:

Today wasn’t as chaotic and so all was a bit calmer. And I had a long meeting online at work where I could listen and participate and stab the smock at the same time.

Swallows have swooped in and around our lives every summer for as long as I can remember. They nest in the eaves of Mum’s car port, and they dive bomb us every time we come out the back door.

Embroidering this swallow feels a bit like stabbing skin for a tattoo. The back yoke of the smock will have several swooping swallows.

Spoiler alert: the back yoke only has two swallows and I think it’s unlikely I’ll add any more – if only because in general I only ever see one or two swallows swooping at a time.

I’d be forever grateful if you felt inspired to donate to Alzheimer Scotland, it doesn’t have to be much because I know that every single penny will make a difference. They have a 24 hour helpline to ensure that no-one in Scotland need go through dementia alone. This coming week, could you make a donation instead of paying for a cup of coffee (or some other small treat) one day?

If you want to start at the beginning of this story, go to Taking Smock of the Situation.

Tags: , , , ,

Taking Smock of the Situation

17 Jan
SheWolffe trying on the smock before the embroidery started

On 1 June 2021 I joined the 2021 100 days project.

The 100 days project concept is simple: you choose a creative project, do it every single day for 100 days, and share your process on social using a memorable and relevant hashtag.

I had joined for the first time in 2020, during that first lockdown year. Mum was interested to join in too – her creative project was to make a small painting each day, mostly of something from the garden. She would take a photo of her painting each day and then email it to me and I then uploaded it on her Instagram account. For most of 2020 we were not allowed to see one another, and this creative act brought us closer together and gave Mum a positive focus each day during those long locked down lonely weeks.

Then in January 2021 I went to stay with Mum. Within days I was concerned that she wasn’t quite herself, and at the end of April she was diagnosed with mixed dementia.

As I started the #100daysproject I reflected that my life was now very different from previous years… I shared caring for Mum with my elder brother; our routine was that we stayed in Galloway with mum for 2 to 3 weeks at a time, and then swapped. Because of covid restrictions it was quite an isolated time, those first months of 2021.

Anyway back in the first weeks of January 2021 I found this fisherman’s smock which mum used to wear when she was sculpting her pottery animals. She hadn’t worn it for years and gifted it to me. I knew right then I wanted to embellish it, to embroider it with life.

Each embroidered element would connect to mum in some way. I had no idea if I had the skill to pull this off and create something more beautiful and meaningful than the smock itself, but each stitch would be so full of love for the remarkable woman who made me.

I recorded the progress on Instagram, initially posting every day (the 100 days are meant to be consecutive) but for various reasons my days were not consecutive, and I have also now recognised that this is a marathon, and not a 100 day sprint. So, two years later I still pick up the smock some days and stab the fabric. I still upload to Instagram each day I add stitches and if you want to see progress follow #TakingSmockOfTheSituation and #Smocktales on insta.

I started a fundraiser as a sideline of the project. Of course I did, I’m a fundraiser at heart and couldn’t help myself. So, if you are moved to contribute so no one in Scotland has to face dementia alone, please click here and support Alzheimers Scotland. I really appreciate your support, but more importantly so will so many others who are struggling to make sense of either their or a loved one’s dementia. It is a bewildering disease, for all of us.

I’ll add the backlog of slow stitching progress, and eventually I might catch up with myself and by then will have formed a regular blogging habit so you can see it (and my other adventures) in real time.

Edited to add blog posts relating to this story:

The following are coming soon…

  • Another perspective
  • Matriarchy
  • A day off
  • Tranquility
  • The belly of the plane
  • Upcycling
  • The gate to happiness
  • Tidelines
  • Labels
  • Winners
  • Women on the shelf

Trying to care for Mum as she developed dementia nearly broke me on a number of occasions. 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.

Alternatively you could buy me a coffee some time.

Tags: , , , , ,

Newer Entries →