You are currently browsing the cancer category.
I would like to say thank you to everyone that commented on my last post, Motivation, Inspiration and chocolate, Send all three. Your kind and thoughtful comments worked, as they always do and I am feeling much better.
I was trying to explain blogs and blogging to a classmate yesterday. Explaining the functionality and the versatility of a blog as a platform for marketing yourself as an artist was easy.
But when I tried to explain the sense of community and the friendships that are formed via blogging I could tell that I had lost her.
In the lead up to Mum’s funeral the phone had rung off the hook and I found it very exhausting, there was a lot of tension within the immediate family as Veronica and I tried to do what Mum had asked us to do. Mum had left explicit instructions for her funeral and by following Mum’s instructions, Veronica and I became the focus for my brother and uncle’s anger and grief.
My story isn’t unique. My pain was my own but my story was very similar to a lot of your stories and via this blog you shared your stories with me, comforted me and gave me the support that I needed to keep on going.
This is part of the reason why I have my ceramic giveaways. It is a giving back to you my readers, my online friends.But it is also my way of asking for your help again, asking you to comfort me when I need it, asking you to help get my creative juices flowing again by thinking about your ideas for my work. Your comment could be the one that inspires a whole series of work, so please go and comment if you haven’t already and remember that you can comment more than once.
I sat outside in the sun on Thursday and spent all morning making pots. Only one pot actually worked but the process of experimentation was a good one. As I was working the clay my mind wandered off in tangents, I thought about your different ideas, some of them are far beyond my basic talents but most of them are very doable. All of them have given me something.
Your comments on my camera quandry post helped me as well even though I am still dithering. One day I have decided on a high zoom compact camera and the next day it seems a DSLR is the way to go. I will keep you posted.
The giveaway is here, click, click, clickety, click.
The lawyers rang me yesterday asking if I could come in and check the final lot of paperwork regarding my Mother’s estate. If everything is in order the lawyers will draw up the cheques and begin the distribution of assets.
I haven’t been able to stop crying since I received that call. Not non stop wailing and gnashing of teeth but an intermittant flow of tears. I am gripped with a horrible lethargy and my grief is raw and painful again.
I cooked up a pot of chilli for tea last night but couldn’t be bothered making the sides that go with it.I am supposed to go into the studio today but I can’t be arsed. The house is a mess, the garden needs some serious work and I just can’t be bothered.
‘The Spouse’ is nagging me to organise ‘S’ to get up here and prepare the foundations for my studio. I just want to scream at him, “to shut the fuck up, it is my stupid fucking studio and I will organise it later, tomorrow, next year.”
I forget that ‘The Spouse’ is also missing Mum and that he masks his pain by being busy and that his silence isn’t indifference it is just that men don’t talk, they retreat into their fucking caves.
I don’t want to think about my studio this week. The thought of building my studio was what kept me going all through the sale of Mum’s house. Remembering how insistent Mum was that I build my studio gave me comfort and kept me going. But now that the means to build my studio will soon be deposited in my bank account has made me terribly,terribly sad.
All I really want is my mum and it just isn’t fair. I listen to people whinging about their mothers and I want to tell them to stop it, to grow up, to shut up about their mothers but I just walk away instead.
So what do I do when I feel like shit and I need inspiration and motivation and when the pain of wanting my mother threatens to suffocate me?
I come here and write to you my dear internetz.
I saw this next line as part of a comment on a friends blog.
When everyone in my RL world is judging me too harshly, I come to the web for supportive communication
And that is what I am doing here this morning, I am seeking supportive communication.I am seeking motivation.I am looking for solace.
A friend has asked me to make her a holy water fount and I have made a series of test pieces, small ceramic thoughts and I am enjoying the process of fulfilling that commission, as part of her commission was to think about,
…all the hurts that you’d like to drown and all the newness that you look forward to.
So today, as I am feeling mournful for all that has gone before me and needing to shake the reluctance to prepare myself to take the next step in my life, I am going to have a giveaway.
I want to make you something.
I have had three giveaways now and they really cheer me, up as well as giving me a creative boot up the bum. Making the work inspires more work and I certainly could use some inspiration right now.
So now it is up to you my dear internetz. Inspire me. Leave me a comment telling me about something that you would like me to make for you. Tell me what you would like me to be thinking of as I make it. Bearing in mind that it will have to be posted to you so it cant really be a seven foot tall sculpture of the Goddess, or a 42 piece dinner setting for seven.
You can enter as many times as you like and comments will be open until this coming Monday, the 22nd of March, Australian time. This competition is open to everyone and anyone. It doesn’t matter whether you are a regular commenter, a lurker, a friend, a relative, a colleague or just a stray blog hopper that has landed here looking for zombie frogs.
I will use the random number thingy to pick a winner but be prepared. Petra’s platter took me nearly 12 months to send off. Jientjes cups took about 9 months and Liz is still waiting for her bowl.
So what are you waiting for, knock yourselves out, comment away.
Now that I have got that out of my system, I am going to turn the music up loudly and clean up this mess.(maybe)
Comments are now closed and I will announce the winner shortly.
I have finally decided on the spot for Mum’s garden. I had to think about it a lot before I was happy with the position.
The first spot that I had chosen was always going to be too hard to protect from wallabies and possums and it was just far enough away from the house so that I wouldn’t have watered it as often as it needed.
Mum had a stone birdbath in her garden and when we were cleaning out Mum’s things prior to putting her house on the market, the spouse brought her birdbath home. For a couple of weeks it just sat in the middle of the yard, empty and waiting.
I worried that it would get knocked over or broken, so I asked David to move it down closer to the house so it would be safe and this is where it ended up.
The birdbath sat there in front of my frog ponds and neglected flower garden, for a few more weeks.Slowly I began to feel that this was the proper spot for Mum’s garden.The spouse erected a climbing frame for me and David rolled over some tyres for easy planting.
It is not easy gardening up here in the hills. We have severe frosts in winter and sometimes a few inches of snow as well.We are in a low rainfall part of the state and we have just come out of a horrible drought.Everything is generally brown, parched and crunchy by January and the garden has to survive on the water I bucket out of the shower and washing machine.
The soil here is sandy bush soil on a rocky sandstone base, the soil repels the water rather than absorbing it and to say that gardening is challenging is a bit of an understatement.
But,I am an optimist and we have been gardening here for twenty years now so I have a fairly good idea of what will survive. I have my system for the ornamental garden down pat. I use tyres, old metal bins, baths and kiddies clam shells as garden beds and frog ponds and it all seems to work.
Normally I make the soil for the tyre garden by mixing together sheep poo and mushroom compost and half filling the tyres with it. Then I add a bag of potting mix and plant into that. Then I top dress with a layer of compost made at the local school farm. Finally I finish off with whatever straw or hay is available for mulch.
This time though I used bags of “pot luck poo” from the school farm, potting mix and powdered cow manure. I haven’t been able to find any decent mushroom compost locally and what we have found has been earmarked for the vegetable garden.I will have to wait and see how this lot goes without my favourite ingredients. I like mass plantings and so as well as the grape vines to climb over the frame I have put in an Italian lavender, penstemon, globe pumpkins, a giant sunflower and some petunias.
This year has been very wet. The drought is well and truly broken, everywhere I look the grass is thigh high and it is very easy to forget that it isn’t always like this.The roses are the best I have ever seen them and this is mainly because the wallabies have plenty of feed elsewhere and haven’t needed to eat them.
The spouse has been very busy up here getting ready for the bushfire season and I have just been grumping about the place building gardens and trying not to think about Christmas. We live in a very flammable part of the world and I have to keep that in the back of my mind as I plant out Mum’s garden.
It isn’t getting any easier going down to Mum’s empty house but I went down and raided her garden while the spouse mowed her grass. I dug out the Sweet Williams that were the last flowers mum planted and I have potted them up ready to share.
Mum’s friends have given me some plants and I am going to plant a red leucodendron and a white diosma in here. There are heaps of daffodills and irises in here already. I just need to pull out the grass and add some more manure to give the soil a bit of a boost.
So this is what I have been doing all December as I try not to think about Christmas.
If you walk around the corner from this photo you come to my kitchen garden.
This is protected from the frost by a roof of laserlite and finally after twenty years of struggling against the frosts I can grow capsicums and cucumbers.
And this last photo just makes my fingers itch. I have just cut back a crop of broad beans from here as well as pulled out a heap of old silverbeet plants.I used one of the precious bags of mushroom compost to give the soil some oomph and I will plant bush cucumbers in here later on this week..
I have just given the occupants of this garden a really hard prune. Two wheelbarrows full of clippings went down to the chooks.Normally I would freeze some silverbeet just in case, but I have just discovered Kale and it just crops and crops and crops so I don’t have a shortage of fresh greens for the table at all. Here is the kitchen garden after my big tidy up.
And here is Amy’s happy hen.
Yesterday we attended a memorial service conducted by the palliative care people.
While we were waiting for the service to start I looked around me at a sea of faces. People of all ages who were there because someone they loved had recently died. You could feel the sadness in the room and we were all silently sitting waiting for the service to start.
The service opened with a short prayer and someone read a poem. A little girl across the room from me started to cry and her tears set me off.
My husband sat beside me openly crying. My son sat on my other side, holding my hand and keeping himself rigidly under control. My daughter looked ready to shatter into a million pieces and my grandmother quietly wept.
As I sat there with tears streaming down my face a woman smiled at me through her own tears and I wondered who she had lost? I wondered if it will always be this hard? Will this ache, this longing for my Mother always be so strong?
Two hundred and twenty names were read out but I was only listening for one.
The first sentence of the opening paragraph sets the tone for the whole piece of writing that follows. This is even more true for a blog post where lots of people don’t actually read the whole post. The opening and closing sentences give the skimmers a point of reference to frame their questions or comments.
Sometimes I will sit here and the words just spill out onto the page faster than I can type them. The piece of writing takes on a small life of its own and all the words fit together nicely.
Other times I will be interrupted and lose my train of thought so many times that, I either just give up and save the piece to my drafts folder or I struggle along clumsily, placing all the wrong words in a crooked line.
Often I will read something my daughter has written and the powerful beauty of her words will take my breath away. I will start to cry as I nod yes to her words, and then with her pain ringing in my ears I end up here trying to articulate my own.
Veronica will be 21 on Thursday. Veronica’s 21st birthday was the milestone that Mum was aiming for. I am struggling to contain my bitterness that we lost Mum to a cancer she should never have had. I am so sad for Veronica that her birthday will be such a difficult day without Mum.
Normally we would have planned a celebration. There would have been lots of food and music, laughter and joy. Now there is only sadness and ashes.I am bitter that the joy has been stolen from my child.
Veronica and I are going out for lunch to our favourite Japanese restaurant tomorrow, just us two together.
Tomorrow is Remembrance Day (11 November) marks the anniversary of the armistice which ended the First World War (1914–18). Each year Australians observe one minute silence at 11 am on 11 November, in memory of those who died or suffered in all wars and armed conflicts.
I wonder what we will be remembering?
