Deciding what I'm willing to take on

It's been a long, busy, hot summer--it's really just been this past week that I started feeling at all myself again. I still have very brief moments of amnesia (one symptom of grief that I'd forgotten experiencing after Dad's death until I fell into it again afer Mom's death) but they are fewer and further between--plus I've found some new coping mechanisms and am keeping much better track of work conversations and projects so that when I do find a blank spot in my memory I'm more easily able to backtrack and reclaim missing pieces of my life. I'm also feeling much more positive again--my usual fairly peaceful outlook on life has begun to return. I'm starting to feel back to normal.

Still sad when I read a quilt magazine or think about the next project I'd like to start, since I know I can't talk it over with Mom anymore. But as my husband reminded me, it won't be long before quilting stops feeling sad and starts feeling fun and healing again. And it already is--I just still have to work through the sad first.

Meanwhile, I found more UFOs of Mom's during the final clean-out of the house prepping for the estate sale a couple of weeks ago. 6 of them, if I recall the number correctly. These had been safely tucked away in a closet, not left sitting in her sewing room, which makes me think that either Mom particularly liked these projects or she had specific ideas in mind about who they'd go to or how she'd be finishing them. No clues left, of course, as to either concept. So now the tally of Mom's UFOs sitting in my sewing room is up to about 15.

15 UFOs.

On top of the 6 or 7 of my own UFOs that preexisted Mom's leaving us.

I came to a conclusion the other night as I was pondering my drive to finish Mom's projects on her behalf, and my desire to finish my own projects because I really like them, darn it, and want to have them done. And the fact that I'd really like to be able to start new projects and it was incredibly depressing and mind-numbing to think that I might spend the next year simply finishing UFOs, one after another, and not have the fun of starting new projects.

My conclusion was that I really didn't WANT to spend the entire next year working on UFOs. So my secondary conclusion was that I was willing to pay someone else to do it.

Today I'm going online to track down the contact information for long-arm quilters that will pick up and drop off at my local quilt store. There's a few of both my and Mom's projects that I don't particularly care how they're done--in fact, the faster and sturdier the better, as they'll be utility quilts here at home (mine) or at the cottage (Mom's). There are a few other projects that either I can pretty quickly and easily finish off on my own machine, or warrant a little more thought--that even if I do ultimately take them to a long-arm quilter, I'll want something a little nicer than your average pantograph design.

This may not seem like a life-changing decision, but in some respects it's a marker of my own progression through the stages of grief. When I'd been finding the first UFOs, I really wanted to finish them on my own so I could feel more of a partnership with Mom on them. Now I'm realizing that Mom didn't think she could even finish all of her own UFOs--she'd sent a lot of projects out to long-armers over the last few years. So I'm still partnering with Mom in that I'm doing what she most likely would've done anyway. And there's a few of her projects that I'll still be doing on my own and those are good enough for me.

And the biggest partnership is that I'll still be making more of Mom's quilts available to her children and grandchildren to enjoy. She'd be happy about that.