Six years is a long time.

A child born six years ago would be starting second grade in september. At least here.

Today it has been six years since my mother died. A vein in her brain burst and flooded it with blood – there was nothing we could do. She died very suddenly, and not very peacefully – I do say she died in my arms, and I am not saying that for shock value. I’ve held her as I saw that little light vanish from her eyes. Her body might have lived longer, but what made my mother the woman she was died as I held her. This is not a sight I will ever be able to forget. Those images and those screams will haunt me until the day I die in turn.

I often get asked if it gets better. It doesn’t, not really – there is a void in your heart that nothing can truly ever fill again. But you learn to get up, to do what need to be done. It doesn’t get better, but you learn how to live with it. I was 21 when my mother died. I had to learn how to live without her at the same time that I had to learn how to be a true adult.

My mother was an amazing woman. Kind, generous. Strong in her own ways. She lost two children in between me and my brother, and nearly lost me as well, and would have if she had not fought so hard, put up with the forced bed rest, the tests, the medical interventions.

Her death forced me to learn that I was strong, too. I had endured a lot growing up – depression, bullying, mockery. I was the creative, shy girl that never quite belonged. The fat chick no one wanted to deal or be seen with. I was shoved into lockers, punched, spat on. I thought about killing myself more than once, but it was always my mother that pulled me though. She taught me her own strength, how to keep going.

I did not truly realize this until she was gone. I kept my father together as we suddenly had to organize everything and bury his childhood sweetheart – the only woman he had ever loved, the woman he had been married to for almost 40 years, the woman he would still be married with if she was still alive today. He was with her though the best and the worst, the laughter and the crying, the joys and the pains. My mother was very ill with other issues in her last few years, but he dealt with it all. Because he loved her in a way you so rarely see these days.

My father was six months away from retiring to be with her when she died. It is hard even now not to feel angry, not to feel like she was stolen from us at the time where my dad would finally have been able to lay back and enjoy his life with her to his fullest.

But… it is how it is. There is no other option but to process and accept it.

I realize you all come here to see jewelry and pretty things, and I apologize. But I feel like it needed to be said, to be understood, expecially with what I will show you next.

I never was big on the self-esteem. Change scares me horribly, and one of the things that scares me the most is to fail. I hate the thought of failing, the embarrassed, that sometimes it just seems easier to not try and spare myself of the whole thing. I resisted making jewelry because I was so afraid to fail. That no one would care. That no one would like it, or even notice me, especially since there are so many of us doing it.

And yet I am here, and sometimes it feel so strange still. I was always very creative, but I was never really considered ‘good’ at something. I can draw and write, but I am not super amazing at any of those things. The reaction to Wish Upon A Star floored me in the time where I needed it the most.

So thank you. Thank to all of you.

With all of the above in mind… Ladies, gentlemen, I would like to present to you…

Toki No Hourousha.

That said, I do not expect miracles. I don’t expect to quit my day job and support myself with this – but I can just support my hobby… Then that will be enough for me.

And if it doesn’t work, well, at least I can say one thing. I tried. In spite of the fear, of the doubts, I tried.

No hesitation.

This is what my mother would have wanted.