Who Cares What Nansi Thinks?

I have mentioned before that Mom fixates. She'll bug and nudge and nag and obsess until she gets what she wants. A couple of years ago she was fixated on Christmas cards and stamps. Now *I* knew that my mother has never sent out Christmas cards. She buys them. Some years she even addresses them. But send them? Never. She bugged, she nagged, she ranted, she raved. She stopped people in the halls and BEGGED them to get her some Christmas cards. People would come to my office and say, "Hey did you know your Mom wants Christmas Cards???" So finally, I bought her two boxes of religious Christmas cards and four books of stamps. That was Christmas 2006. The other day I was looking for a particular address in her address book and the four books of stamps slid onto the floor--not one stamp used. It didn't take me long to find the boxes of cards. Totally unopened. She just wanted them.

Lately she's been bugging to go to a fabric store. My sister came to visit. Mom hadn't seen her in years. She wasn't there ten minutes before Mom was bugging to go to a fabric store. Mom tells people, "I don't know WHY Nansi won't let me SEW!"

Here's why: She can't. Someone, against my wishes, brought Mom a sewing machine last year. It sat in her room unused. Mom couldn't figure it out. She ran up $300 on my cell phone bill calling Sears. Finally Sears called the nursing home and asked them to have Mom stop calling. The sewing machine became a source of major frustration for my mother. She couldn't get it to work and believed that if she could she would be able to sew like she did when she was younger. When her whole unit got moved from the second floor to the first, the sewing machine magically disappeared. It took mom MONTHS to miss it.

The truth is, Mom stopped sewing in the mid 90's. She didn't stop buying fabric and patterns, but she stopped sewing. For the most part, sewing meant buying fabric and stacking it in a corner. Sometimes Mom would actually lay the pattern out and cut out the pieces. It's been decades since an actual garment has come to completion.

Mom thinks she stopped sewing when she went into the nursing home. When we cleaned out her apartment, I found fabric that I remembered from my childhood. Her serger was coated with a red sticky substance. I remember scrubbing Jello off her kitchen floor and cabinets a few years back, I assume the serger was nearby when she dropped the pan of un-gelled Jello. That Jello accident happened three years before Mom went into the nursing home.

Why won't Nansi let her sew? That's the question I prefer my mother to be asking. The question I'm trying to protect her from is: What happened to me? Why can't I figure out how to put a garment together when I distinctly remember being able to make fabulous things?

I'd much rather have my mom mad at me than have her come to the painful realization that the most important thing in her life is lost to her. Besides failing eyesight, my mom has painful arthritis in her wrists. Those physical drawbacks are surmountable. What is insurmountable is the loss of reasoning. My mother can't string together the steps it would take to go from cutting out the pattern to assembling the garment.

Today, on a whim, I took Mom to a fabric store. I was immediately taken back to my childhood. I remember spending HOURS in the store, flipping through pattern books, digging in the remnant bin, listening to my mom oooh and ahhh over the latest patterns. I learned early on that just because Mom was buying a pattern and fabric didn't mean the item would actually come to be. Chances were it wouldn't come to be. Much of the fabric that I found in her apartment were purchased when I was a young girl.

Mom thoroughly enjoyed her trip to Jo-Ann Fabrics today. She spent $30 on pattern magazines. Dare I hope that it will scratch her itch? More than likely it will frustrate her even more. We'll see!