Friday, June 12, 2015

Blog 160 - A year can change a person...



Today is like Christmas. I am finding all sorts of shiny little toys that have been misplaced over the past year.

Some of my shiny toys are not actually toys, but projects that I have abandoned due to lack of a muse, or inspiration, or even motivation within the time that has passed. Projects that include and not limited to the following: My novels (writings in progress), the books that I have yet to read, my cross-stitch projects that sit untouched in the project box, this blog I write on now, and my YouTube channel that sits collecting spider webs in the corner. All of these things have been neglected in the past year, and with good reason.

I won't go into grave detail about why all those projects have been abandoned, because I don't want to bore you to tears. So I will just touch on the subject as a whole and make it painless (like ripping off a bandage).

Over the course of the past year so many things have happened good and bad. Some good things that happened were that my husband and I finally bought a house and did some cosmetic renovations and moved in. But there were other things that weren't so good. Just in the last six months alone I have lost not one but two family members due to cancer. In February 2015, it was my grandmother. She had skin cancer, but didn't catch it in time to save her. It hurt to find out that she had passed and traveling for a funeral doesn't help either. Though she was a loving, caring grandmother, she didn't do the best to take care of herself. For that I was briefly mad with her about, because her illness could have been prevented or dealt with if caught early on. I digress about my frustrations. My grandmother will be missed dearly. I survive through March and April by getting through my daily routines and work schedules.

Meanwhile, I have another family member, my mother, battling breast cancer. I called her every week, sometimes more if I felt the need to just hear her voice. In February, when we stayed with her while attending my grandmother's funeral she was doing okay. She had an oxygen tank but was still up walking around and talking. After returning home, I continue to call and text her as normal. My sister would call me when our mother went to the hospital. Sometimes it would be nothing and other times it would be because they had to drain her lungs of fluid. Being an emotional person, my heart ached for her. Not knowing what it feels like to have to go through that and/or not being able to be there to take care of her when she needed something. It hurts to watch and listen from the side lines. Soon after all the in and out of the hospital visits, they made the decision to make her "comfortable". The chemo was no longer working. I went to visit her on Mother's day, not knowing that it would be the last time I would see her or the last time I got to spend with her (even though she wasn't very responsive). They had her on morphine and the day after Mother's Day (5/11/2015) she passed away. No words can express how I feel in terms of losing my mother, yet a second family member in months time. She was not only my mother, but my friend, adviser, and someone I could confide in. She was my "go-to" person (besides my husband). Every day I grieve a little more when something small pops up. Not being able to call her, text her, email her, hear her voice, see her smile, feel her arms around me when she hugs me are just the little things that I know realize are the big things in life.

My advice to anyone who has a mother who is still living: Spend as much time as you can with them, tell her that you love her, show her how grateful you are for the things that she does for you (whether it is big or small), because there will come a time when you don't have it anymore. You will miss those little things when you don't have them. And remember you only get one mother in your lifetime, so love her everyday as if it were her last.

Now you guys can see why I have been away as long as I have been. I would also like to apologize for being away for so long. But I'm sure you guys understand.

But to make it up to you guys, I know you guys have been awesome and are still here with me, following my blog and checking it out for new posts, etc. I would like to host a couple of giveaways in the near future. I will be putting those together shortly and share the good news when I get it together.

For now, I would like to share in the new adventures that I will be posting about. In turns of coming back to blogging and You-tubing and all the other shiny projects. I have not yet fully decided what kind of posts I will be doing in the future, but I would like to branch out to other topics than just book hauls, book reviews, and of the related. I know that I want to try and start blogging about my journey with writing and proofreading my works and querying for agents and such. But I could also very well talk about my cross-stitch projects or my 3-D puzzles. I also have not figured out when I will post. Will it random days of the week or weekend? Will I create a schedule of what day I will be posting what topic? Who knows. I don't even know yet. But I will figure that out soon. This is where I would ask my mom for her advice and opinion and go from there, but I can't. So I have to take the knowledge that I have and figure it out on my own. So but I will post everything here. There are changes coming and soon. I will post about my various projects in the next blog.

I would like to thank everyone for stopping by and staying with me in this long absence. I do hope that you guys will continue to come by and read my blog and leave me comments. (I miss those comments).

Thank you
Blessed it Be

- Alisha