Part Five: Living with Chronic Lyme Disease: a long and difficult journey

Part Five: Major Life Style Changes—More or Less Stress?

My job as a special educational consultant in a large suburban school district was a stressful position, especially with my health being so compromised. Added to these stresses were those of my husband’s job lay-off as well as living in a city where cross-busing children to provide for racial balance in the schools made us think twice about our life style. A stabbing across the street and being shot at while strolling on a bicycle path pushed us over the edge. We considered a major move across country to the rural life of Vermont. If stress was increasing my health issues, perhaps decreasing my stress would improve it.

We had visited Vermont during a summer break following my husband lay-off and traveled with a camper, so as to take our beds with us.  We stopped to see relatives along the way, including a cousin in Vermont while on route to my husband’s homeland of Massachusetts. Vermont, we decided would be "the solution" to our problems and give us the peacefulness and tranquility of a more rural setting and would help me to regain my health.  A job offer in Vermont was not to come for several years but when it did come, we didn't hesitate to jump on it.

Decreasing our stress did, however, mean that my husband moved ahead of the family by six months, leaving me behind with two kids to care for, along with working  full time, as well as the job of packing us to move after my daughter and I finished the school year.

All was falling into place or so we thought, until my husband left town.  The deal on the house fell through, and being so desperate to sell and continue with our plans of moving to Vermont, I decided to sell the house myself and did so more aggressively than our realtor. Of course showing the house and selling it on top of everything else was enough stress for the most normal of people and I was anything but.

I learned to pray my way through most days and nights and my oldest daughter grew up too quickly being my right-hand helper in early grade school! I don’t know what I would have done without her help of watching her little sister as I methodically and systematically packed a few boxes each night before going to bed.

The house was sold and we were packed and ready to move as planned in June of 1990, when my husband returned to move us via a U-Haul truck with a trailer on the back. I followed behind in my VW convertible, loaded to the roof and I remember stopping every few hours for me to nap and giving my husband and kids a chance to stretch.

This move was a growing step for us all! Bursts of creativity came with it! I stepped through the bottom of the back of my car only days before picking up my husband from the airport when he returned to move us. Desperate to keep anyone else from stepping through the hole, I pulled out the strongest pizza pan I had and set it under the back floor mat, spanning the hole.  I thought it a temporary fix and was temporarily safe enough as the hole didn't extend under the seats, but was shocked to see that the car repair man simply bolted it permanently to the bottom!  Our humor and laughs were growing along with our creativity, both invaluable coping skills in the years that followed.

In addition to the hole in the bottom of my car, the starter went out as soon as we left Denver and so we had to park my car on an incline whenever we stopped and my husband had to push it to jump start it all the way to Vermont! Life, we were learning was a series of challenges and creativity and humor added to our ability to cope! (to be continued...)

The illustration above is done by Hannah McMillen and the figure drawing by Sarah Kate McMillen.

(*Caution: These blogs are not meant to be actual medical advice but rather meant only to empower others to face medical issues as equal partners with their medical providers and never give up questioning and exploring what alternatives may be available for conquering their illnesses.  Living life with a chronic illness is a daily challenge and it is my prayer that no one give up on  living their life to the fullest extent possible.)

And Now...

The Brycer has come and gone and I have pulled materials for my next projects.  I have decided to first finish 72 pairs of fleece socks for this winter’s craft shows.  I like to think of it as my “factory work”. When the kids were young and needed chauffeuring to different activities, I tied fishing leaders for a time. There would be dry spells with no work when I would fret and worry and then lay out on their poor ears a line they repeat to me to this day, "If I'm not here when you get home from school, I've gone to the factory!" I must add that they learned my Scarlet O'Hara drama well and the re-telling of this story along with creating their own dramas comes back to haunt me!

I never did go off to the factory, except to do flu shot clinics when we would simply go to vaccinate the workers with their flu shots for the year.  I did get a peek at factory line production however, and found something appealing in repetitive sort of work.  Perhaps after being a nurse and a special educator, I thought it would be fun to assemble something and count how many I had done, for I was never sure if I could count on my students to really make it to grade level in their reading and there were days that I wasn’t sure that progress of any sort was being made.  The same for my nursing days; despite great treatment plans I would inevitably end up reading about one of my patients in the obituaries.  And parenting, suffice it to say doesn't always guarantee predictable results either.

So in short, there is something quite satisfying about making fleece socks.  They are bright and colorful, fun to cut out and touch their softness, bright colors and prints and still more fun to stitch them up and count them when I am done! At last, satisfying factory work right in my own home.  

Stitching socks is but an interim job however.  It is a "warm up" exercise for what is to come next, as I sketch out variations of a new project and design patterns that I can hardly wait to try out!

The Brycer is Coming

We have a house cleaner named Bryce.  His name has become synonymous with “clean” so much so,  that we also use it as a verb, as he is coming to Bryce the house.

A reminder that Bryce is coming is also a threat and the dread spreads as it means that we all have to do our part to de-clutter and pre-clean before he gets here. Many times this means starting days before, picking up our piles and returning everything to its place.  We can be glad that he only comes once a month and stays only a few hours at a time, though we truly enjoy him and love his effect on our house. We are just not neat by nature!

The day before Bryce arrives began like many others, putzing a bit, and attempting to put order to the house.  It could almost be a lazy day as I have been feeling rather uninspired.  I started pulling books and patterns off the shelf and before I knew it I found myself with my notebook brainstorming and sketching furiously as one idea threw me to the next. I resisted running to my shelves in the basement to start pulling fabrics out and putting them together. The voice in my head that says "Jane, you have piles of pre-cut projects... you should be sewing" was quickly stifled, as my excitement and involvement in the creative process grew.

And then it hit me: Bryce will be here tomorrow.

So I make nice neat lists of what I envision these new projects will become and I resolve to do the laundry and continue putzing at clearing the clutter so that he can find the floors and the counter tops to clean.  I will join his cause for anther day, anxiously awaiting his visit and once it is over, let the living and mess making begin anew!

Uninspired Times

We all have them—uninspired times. I think there is a saying about inspiration being 10% and perspiration being 90%. I am terrible at exact quotes, but you get the message. I can be very creative in my head, but find that “the doing” isn’t always as fun, especially if my mind is focused on my do-list instead of enjoying the present moment, as I truly love to sew!

My organization is a strength for me and I love to design, choose combinations of materials and cut out projects and when I am on a roll, I will prepare many projects at a time and almost prepackage them. I can function more efficiently this way as I “group” like activities. This is what I do when I am preparing for a sale.

 I am excited to begin sewing my projects though actually picking a place to start can be overwhelming. If I am not feeling so creative I begin with doing some tedious parts and wait to do the parts that require more creativity and design until after I have “warmed up” a bit.

Being creative comes when I am more relaxed and enjoying the moment…like after doing some “tedious” work (as I love handwork) and get loose enough to try out a new technique. While making my flower-pot pincushions, I decide to try making some new flowers and decide to try out ruching! I try it with wool instead of cotton, and shape it into a flower. And then I try gathering a wool strip cut with a zig-zag edge, and suddenly I am making up my own flowers! Excitement, passion, inspiration and creativity all come together and I am doing something new!

 
New ideas are not always successful right away, and need to be developed. I will accommodate for what didn’t go so well at first and get it better the next time. My first attempts can be rather primitive, and I remind myself that these items can be equally as loved as my more perfected projects, just ask my kids!

Creativity is often born from the imperfect. So don’t trash all those beginnings that appear as disasters. I have learned that much can be done with a “laying tool” or picking out and re-sewing a stitch or two to get them right.

Inspiration and creativity seems to be a cycle. New ideas combined with risk, effort, heart and soul and a new creation is born and takes on a life of its own. It is a process.

Sometimes a short nap can do much to re-energize creative zeal. Zeldie, my cat has taught me that!

Other times when I am uninspired, I simply need to change my focus and work on a different project for a time. I am always surprised as to how many projects are finished by working on them only a couple of hours at a time.

I continue to sew with or without inspiration almost every day, for I have learned that NOT all parts of our sewing projects are inspired and creative. Some become “work” and that is OK. When a project becomes “work” I just need to persevere.

I get myself a big glass of ice water, gather what I need for a project and plant myself at my work table in the living room in front of the TV or radio and then pick an interesting program to entertain me as I work to finish a project. I like to start projects more than I like to finish them and some projects turn into UFO’s or Un-Finished Objects. Don’t all sewers have a collection of those?( But that topic is for another blog!)

From Brokenness to Creativity and Healing

I recently watched a program on CNN regarding the recent massacre of the Syrian people.  I woke up haunted by it. This isn’t exactly a subject for my Little House Blog or is it?

My eldest daughter has been teaching me about blogs and her rule number one stressed that I should NOT write about my political or religious beliefs (she knows me too well!).  My blog is about my day to day creations in my Little House Home Arts. And I am not breaking this rule!

This program was about the reality of our world.  It is not a secret to any of us that there is so much brokenness…broken hearts, promises, bodies, families, relationships, nations, governments. I thought this was merely a dark Lenten day for me, but I realized that the story doesn’t end there for any of us. There is healing through love and passion and that is what art is about….. taking bits and pieces of materials, with bits and pieces of time, and bits and pieces of love and passion to create something new and different. With it comes healing and a wonderful feeling of satisfaction.

My Little House Home Arts, from it’s conception has been about making a little house into a home stitched with love, healing and warmth. My “business” has come together from a collection of hope lovingly given to me by others who have shared the bits of their lives, often in the form of scraps.  Many were small and unmatched, and some came with shared patterns and their dreams of me making something beautiful out of their "little bits".  My husband would likely smile and comment about our basement being filled with rooms full of bins of "bits", but that is the way collections grow.  It is truly more than an assortment of material scraps. It is a vast collection of precious love that gets stitched into our personal creations.

I am not meaning in any way to trivialize Syria and the devastation there.  I cannot imagine what it would be like to survive under those circumstances, but I can speak to the healing effect of taking what we are given in life and creating all that we can from it and sometimes under some pretty difficult circumstances and/or health conditions. Our rich heritage of traditional arts was based on the need to do just that.