Mother/Daughter Dresses, Epilepsy

I haven't written anything for my blog in a long time. I am still working toward getting my four-year English degree and that's the reason I've returned to my blog.

Folkart Class
One of the classes I'm taking this semester is about folkarts and folk artists. We've been discussing the worldview of folkart, outsider art and folkart, and other things. As usual, I'll have to write a semester paper. This time, I intend to interview my mother about a number of family traditions:

* the lean Christmas we had and how she talked a store manager out of a bookcase-style display of Princess Petite furniture, cut wood to make opening front doors on the display, and cut apart magazine pictures to decorate those doors to look nearly exactly like the house we lived in. She cut out more pieces of wood and attached them to each side, decorating them to look like our side porches. Then she covered it with a sheet and presented it to a very excited child (me) on Christmas morning. :)

*the same lean Christmas when she gave my younger brother a homemade game she'd made. She tells me that my older brother and I gave my younger brother some of our toys, but I don't remember it. Mom was always inventing games and trying to market them.

*the Babe-Snug (a baby kick sack) that she invented, patented, and sold locally

*the ceramic items she used to make and sell and the personal ceramic mementoes she made for us - the personalized Easter egg dishes that opened up, the plate she designed to look like me as a child...

*the father/sons, mother/daughter matching clothes she sewed for us to wear - and that her mother sewed for her own family

*the sea foam candy we made together when I was a child - different from divinity.

I have a lot of ideas for the paper, some that I might add to with stories from my mother-in-law and my own efforts to preserve my children's childhood memories:

*the quilts, dresses, and toys my mother-in-law sewed and created for my children.
*the books I wrote and illustrated for my children (using the Illustory kit)

There are other ideas I have for my paper, but the one I want to focus on the most right now is the one about the matching dresses. If anyone else has experienced the tradition (or knows of good resources covering the tradition) of the creation of matching father/son and/or mother/daughter clothese, please write to me. I would love to hear of your experience!

Another class I'm taking is about Celtic Myths. I'm not doing as well in that one as I usually do in my classes, but it is interesting and I'm learning new things so that is what is most important.

Epilepsy
Yes, I've now joined the ranks of parents of children with epilepsy. My wonderful teenage daughter passed out in class and was subsequently diagnosed with complex partial seizures (epilepsy). I was devastated when the doctor told us that she could experience a tonic-clonic seizure (what was once called a grand mal seizure), also. Happily, she hasn't had one of those yet. He put her on Lamictal and then the unrelenting migraine headaches began. It was awful for everybody. My dad had migraine headaches that were just awful, so I don't know if she would have still had the migraine headaches without the Lamictal or not. As a result, though, she couldn't get out of bed to go to school and her grades (normally A's and B's) plummeted to formerly unknown depths. The doctor switched her from Lamictal to Topomax and she was reborn. She had a great summer, but then she took left-over Lamictal by accident in the fall (those pharmacy bottles all look alike) and was once more laid low. She tried online classes, but she couldn't work because of the migraines. Finally,we caught her error and the doctor weaned her back off of the Lamictal and back on to the Topomax. But by then, she'd been hit with depression also so we had to recruit even more doctors to help her recover. At the moment, she seems to be doing better and she's trying to pull her grades back up. She is already registered to start college in the fall. I'm hoping that everything goes well. She has a wonderful team of doctors helping her and, as usual, two loving parents. Nobody can tell us if the medicine will control her seizures forever. On support boards, I've read of many cases where kids have tried multiple meds without success or they've been on meds for awhile and then the meds simply stop working and the search to find a new med begins anew. Kids die from epilepsy, also. It's a serious disease that affects the whole family. I pray for a cure for it.

Genetically, I suspect my daughter's epilepsy came down through my line. I had seizures when I was a baby and toddler, back around the 1950s. With little warning, my eyes would roll back, my arms and legs would become limp, and I'd pass out. For some unknown reason, my seizures stopped after I took a particularly nasty fall and I haven't had another one to this day. I was lucky unlike the many people who have to struggle with epilepsy throughout their lives. Could I ever have another seizure? Who knows?! Although the doctors back then contributed my seizures to a "misfire in the brain" and ruled out epilepsy, I sort-of think we know more now and it was, most-likely, epilepsy since my daughter now has it