hings to ask Kate. The scrap of paper is on the kitchen table. My 84-year-old mother is talking about the bloody government doing everything it can to help Ukrainian refugees. She looked at me and gestured to the void it had fallen into.
My mother's greatest fear is falling into a void. She finds the world confusing and sometimes wanders, as the spectre of dementia hangs over her old age. She often asks where she can buy things like that, and how to pay her bills, because Amazon has escaped her. The answer is always online. Online. Online. Online. Sometimes I show her, knowing she won't remember. I usually do it for her.
The topsy-turvy nature of this mother-and-daughter dynamic was something I thought about when I thought of a plan for dealing with a problem of my own. I wondered if my mother, who had made all our curtains when I was a child, could guide me through the steps so that we could make them together. The idea appealed to me more than just as a way of making my front room more cozy. I wondered if this project would give our relationship a boost of energy, a focus on creating something I could remember her by, as she was about to move 200 miles away to live with my sister.
I thought that she would remember how to make curtains despite her struggle to remember the past and take in new information. It's easy, you just sew the sides together and turn it inside out, like a pillow case. The rufflette tape is straightforward and gave me confidence. I've never been a seamstress, but I knew my way around the old Frister and Rossmann sewing machine. I was going to look at the material and measure the window space. I began to fall in love with the idea of my beautiful new velvet curtains, which would indeed deserve to be lined, after she reassured me of her investment in the project.
Would this project give us an injection of vitality, a new focus?
She advised against asking them to cut it, as they wouldn't do it evenly. I didn't pay attention to her on this. I didn't trust my measuring and cutting skills, or our mutual patience, and asked for the material to be, because I had three widths of curtain material and the same again of lining for each curtain. I was expecting her to forget her advice by the time the material arrived. She hadn't!
We laid the lining out on the bed in her spare room and began to pin. After we tacked, mum painstakingly and often triumphantly threading a new needle in the time it took me to sew the previous length of thread. We lifted the material on to the table with the Frister and Rossmann at the ready and I began to sew, winding the handle with my right hand, as my mother sat next to me. One of the linings was ready by the end of our first session. We were both happy. This was going to work.
The second lining was just as smooth. The top piece buckled in our third session, but my mom said it would be fine. I carried on despite the fact that one piece was longer than the other. She insisted it wouldn't matter. I couldn't face unpicking it all because she was proving so sure-footed about the sequence of steps and what needed to happen at each stage. Her reassurance was touching as well. Our roles had reverted back again. She was the expert.
The sewing machine that hadn't been used in decades made large, loose stitches instead of small, tight ones. As we were at a standstill, Mum suggested handstitching the curtains, as she had done with hers, to avoid the buckling. I bought special oil for the bobbin and a specialist told me to change the needle because I was draining my energy from the idea of handsewing. He said that it was difficult for a novice like him to work with velvet.
With her stick, she hotfooted it round to encourage me on
The workmen in her house were getting ready for the move. We relocated to the kitchen because the spare bedroom was too dusty and her bedroom was a squash. We sewed the curtain material to the lining, but the ends were not straight, and for the first time, mum was confused about what to do next. We had to put the project away again.
After Christmas, we were going again, and by mid-January, we had proof that she was still capable of being, along with her enthusiasm and clarity. We sewed on the rufflette tape after cutting the bottom to an even length. The final step was to measure the hems once up. Expectations were growing at home. We had been without curtains since the previous spring and the front room was very cold. My neighbour gave me a drill, my daughter's boyfriend put up a rail, and my son drove the curtains from my mother's house. I put 20 hooks in each curtain and stood back to admire our work.
The bay was covered in folds of gold velvet. It was wonderful. I was encouraged by my mother to get the tops to concertina as she hotfooted it round with her walking stick. The thread was caught in the stitching and I had to free it. I had been warned by my mother that she was worried too much, but I was convinced that she was just trying to do something. I couldn't help but think of the 50s housewife card I gave her on Mother's Day last year.
When she moved a few weeks later, we were all in tears, but now she is happily lapping up my sister and her husband's care. I look at my flawed curtains with a buckled seam and see what a fitting and poignant reminder they are of my relationship with my mother.
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