Thomasina

I’m a nerd on a pretty large scale. I loved school and college. Business trainings were always fun for me. And my answer to the “If money were no object, what would you do?” question is always, always, “Spend the rest of my life in college, changing majors every four years”. Like Batman, but brains instead of muscles. Megamind with hair. You get the idea, right?

So one of my dorky obsessions is that I pick a new skill to master every year. It’s been a cooking skill since graduating from culinary school, and picking the coming year’s focus has been a New Year’s resolution of sorts for a decade plus. The family usually weighs in, since whatever I pick is something we end up eating a lot of in the coming year. (We all gained a lot of weight during the Year of Buttermilk – fried chicken and biscuits for months and lemme tell ya, I regret nothing, y’all.) I tried and tried to come up with something for this year and just couldn’t get excited about much. So I picked a craft instead.

2020 is the Year of Amigurumi, which is a Japanese method of crochet that creates cute little figures, animals, etc. It is time consuming as crap because I am an arthritic octogenarian when it comes to crochet, but that’s ok. Slow and steady. My first project is a giraffe and I expected to finish around Independence Day at the rate I move.

Then mom got sick. Amazing what spending eight hours in a hospital room will do for your crafting time. Since the finished product is under 8” tall, it’s super portable and came with me every day. My little giraffe entered the world last night and we’ve named her Thomasina. Bean is in love with her. Adorableness all around.

My mom is not a cutesy craft sort of person. She loves jewel tones and glass and lights and has zero use for adorableness. She hates amigurumi. She told me this was a dorky skill to pick this year and made fun of my old lady-ness. Every nurse who’s come in to help mom has asked what I’m making and mom universally replied, “Stupidness.” But when I finished Thomasina and showed her the finished product, she decided Thomasina was adorable and precious and a variety of other adjectives. I had to step into the hallway to cry for a while. It sounds dumb, but I wanted her to hate it. I wanted her to be the mom I know and not this stranger who suddenly likes chocolate and crochet, has conversations with dead relatives and tells me the same stories over and over. I wanted that signature eyeroll flutter, but that mom wasn’t available just then. There’s an invisible switch inside her head that flips silently and without warning and *poof* my mom is gone and this weird lady is there instead. The doctors don’t know if it’s from the strokes, the medications or just old-fashioned hospital-induced delirium, which is just another way of saying, “We don’t know if your mom is gone for good.”

The Year of Amigurumi is also the Year of Mourning. I’m grieving for a person hasn’t technically died, but at least part of her certainly has changed forever. My mom, who hates the word “fart”, who hyperventilates at Dale Chihuly glass, who uses phrases like “holy cats” and “seriously dork” is currently on hiatus and I am awash with tear-filled misery at the mere idea that she might not return. My kids deserve another twenty years of their Gram. My dad needs those twenty years, and so do I. Thomasina may be only seven inches tall, but she looms over me like a Macy’s parade balloon with all the possibility of what may never be again. The Year of Amigurumi. The Year of Mourning. The Year of Everything Changing.

So far, I’m not a big fan.