That Cold Finger of Fear

For the last seven or eight years, I've been looking over my shoulder.  This is kind of a secret, but kind of not.  Some people know of this fear that I have.  Some would call it paranoid or selfish to be afraid of contracting an illness from which my mother suffers, but it's hard to not do it.

In the beginning, when I started to notice that something was "off" with my mom, there were certain things that she'd do that were strange to her.  One of them was losing the ability to knit from a pattern.  She'd start off projects with gusto! and then peter off into abandoning them.  At first, it was a puzzle to me.  Her nicely wound skeins of yarn would turn into smaller and smaller balls that were hand-wound.  They would be all over her home, and then, they'd sit in a bowl on the table as a "decoration," never to be knitted from again.  Then we found out she had dementia.

The fear paralyzes me when I lose my spot in a pattern, can't find it again, and have to rip it all the way out (frog it) and start over again.  The hand-wound ball of yarn that I end up with is very unnerving.  I know that this is silly, something that happens to all knitters and as a metaphor to all people in their own way.  I'm hoping that writing about it and putting it on the blog helps me to banish the fear....