Death comes for us all

My mother has come back and gone away again. Taking care of her can be as hard thing as can be. Sometimes she moans on each breath and I say"Be Quiet!" As she falls silent I feel so mean, yet when she makes her constant piteous noises I feel like I am going insane along with her. She says she feels spread out over everything. She has lost herself.Sometimes she is more creative in her despair than she is when she is more aware. I bead silently on. I am making some great bracelets, I seem to have MRAW down and am getting mastery of the zig-wing. These are giant steps for me. I am making fewer mistakes too.
Now my mother is dead. People don't use that word. Instead they use circumlocutions;''she passed',"your loss', I want to say: she's dead, dead. The night I put here in the hospital, I left after staying with her in the emergency room and I felt like I could do anything.I still have that feeling, how odd, that a person's death could leave you with a feeling of accomplishment.
I seem to be better at everythingIi do. Goodness knows my mother wasn't capable. While she did a lot, it was all at the order of my father, he would depose and she would struggle to do.
What  I never really saw about my mother was how negative she was. All my life I had been puzzled because my parents always told me. "You can do anything" But I couldn't do anything. It wasn't till my mother came to live with me that I really heard the other message. She would say,"You can't do it Sheila, its too hard". She would say this even while I did all the things she was telling me were too hard for me to do. And so I realized I had internalized her message and it had left me totally unable to cope with life. But lately I came to realize, if you just do things that need doing, they will get done.

my mother on a good day

mom sleeping in bed. she stayed in bed for 3 years

So I came to outgrow my mother and her constant  negative messages. These last years, she became childlike and I became that adult in our relationship. Her death seemed fitting, a rebirth into nothingness, a subsiding into the place she came from. Her consciousness extinguished, her time on the earth  was over. I thought I would be lost without my mother, but instead, I am stronger than all that.

Meanwhile, my skill at peyote has increased, I can now read those charts that baffled me and I have an easy alternative way to start it. Long live MRAW

Mom in Hospital , All's not Well with the World

WELL, well, well.
 Mom is in the hospital and I've joined another blog hop. My mother is in the hospital ,confused and miserable. They want to give her electro-shock treatment. They want to see if she will agree to it. I can't imagine it being good for her in any way. She already feels really bad all the time. She is too fragile to go through the number of shock treatments that will be needed.  I was warned by the author of the book"Knocking on Heaven's Door" ; Katy Butler.  Doctors are in the life business while my mother and I are working on getting a death going.  In the meantime my mother holds on to me with all her strength and I feel like she is trying to clamber up me to escape her death, pushing me to the ground, inadvertently, of course, but that is the effect. She is so desperate, and for what, even she doesn't know?

The one bright spot in my life is this blog hop. I am too wasted to do anything else. I will have three days respite and then its back to caring for my mother.

quickie in NYC

Last week events in my life collided in a big way. My mother was taken to the hospital a few days before I was to go to New York, to see Kate McKinnon speak. Those of you who have followed my blog know that Kate McKinnon is my guiding muse, the style of beadwork she and her team of dedicated bead weavers have pioneered the style of weaving i aspire too. I had really wanted to go to New York to hear her speak and to meet her, and I got the chance to do just that when the New York Beading Society sponsored a talk by her at The Fashion Institute of Technology.
I arrived late for the talk, New York always overwhelms me. But I was in time to hear her inspiring words as she described how the new designs were discovered and found, in nature as perfect triangles, in our hands as we find the new shapes and colors, in our minds as we push forward into new territory. A new frontier in beads, who could have foreseen it. Most encouraging to me was hearing that even she makes mistakes. Many mistakes.
Last, as a treat, we got to have our pictures taken with Kyle?. I got up and grabbed the boldest piece I could find, a full neck wrap in black and white with memory wire and had a picture taken. I talked a bit with Kate, who graciously remembered me and gave me a copy of her book, to give away when I got my brand new copies that I had already bought.
Back home, my tiny mother deteriorated in Mt Auburn Hospital. Brought there for a fall, when I finally got her released she was in diapers and bedridden. Her deterioration has been so fast we are all in shock. No one else will change her diapers but me. Only  feed her. There is a family meeting scheduled for Sunday. What can we do. She is so helpless

A quick post giveaway from Lori Anderson, a Lark book about seed-beading that will fir right in here. But I never win.
http://www.prettythingsblog.com/2014/07/calling-all-seed-beaders-book-giveaway.htmlhttp://www.prettythingsblog.com/2014/07/calling-all-seed-beaders-book-giveaway.html