Blaming Mom --the Good Old Days

Ah, the good old days. Having someone to blame. I had a wise counselor who, about eight months into therapy said, "Okay, your mother screwed up and you suffered for it. Your whole family made a mess of it. So now what are you going to do?"

I looked at her and blinked twice, mouth hanging open. "Well, blame Mom for the rest of my life, okay?"

For some reason or other this was not acceptable, and at last the healing began. I like to call it that because it sounds so nice. Growing Up is probably more accurate. I had to learn to simply be myself. Why can't simple things be easy, too? Feh. I had to be myself, accept myself, and--most importantly--take full responsibility for whatever mess I was making or had made and set about doing a better job.

I hate that. Having no one to blame. I liked blaming my alcoholic mother, philandering father, abusive brother. I liked giving full credit to my sister and other brother for "saving me." That's the thing. When you blame others and even when you are too grateful to others, well, you lose a sense of having been anything other than a passenger in your own life. At least that was what I did. Until I was in my thirties and well into my forties, I struggled with the novel notion that perhaps I was the one running my own life--for better, not just worse. The joy of that particular misery wound up being that, after the struggle of remembering, the pain of reliving some things, the difficulties with letting go of other things, came a time of remembering the good of my mom.

When I blamed her I couldn't handle her gifts. Now that she, along with all the others of my birth family, are gone, I have the luxury of remembering what I choose. It is no longer a matter of denial or blocking what is hard. It truly is a matter of choice. I choose to remember, to focus on her gifts: her proof of the existence of elves (for another entry), our credo "There's always something more important to do than housework," her kick in the butt after I had been assaulted, "You can get up and live or lie down and die, but I sure as hell am not going to stand around and watch you lie down and die. So come in the house." Her insatiable curiosity and her faith in the kindness of other people.

There are so many more gifts to remember than horrors. An alcoholic was the least of who she was, even though it's the part that killed her. She was the keeper of all magic, the font of most wisdom, with a smile that could take in Milwaukee, and a brain the size of a planet.

Until I stopped blaming her, I shoved all that in a drawer in the back of my mind, where it could not find my heart. Until I stopped blaming her. Yes, but now, now when my world dangles precariously near a precipice, when I cannot get out of my own way, when I mess up my own deadlines, I have to look at myself, without having Mom to blame. Bummer.

Man, I miss my mother...

All Things in Moderation--even Fear?

I have to start with saying that I realize I'm mistaken. My blog has been read, and it is more encouraging than I knew. Thank you. I'll let the rest of this entry stand largely unedited, however...

My very first blog, that no one has read, mentioned that desperation can force us to go after what we want. Maybe it's fear, too. Most of the time fear has paralyzed me. Why, this time, it galvanized me makes little sense to me. Perhaps over-analyzing would be a waste of effort. Regardless, I seem to have done what I needed to get the word about my new business, Paint, Paper & Pens. I have had inquiries after just a week of having one ad and a bunch of flyers on tables.

Furthermore, the inquiries sound as if the women are excited about what amounts to playing with art. Playing. Not hardcore, serious art lessons. I'm going to have water-based paints, glue, good quality tissue paper, and treated water color paper as the backing surface. I'll be helping people quite simply to lose their fear of "doing it wrong." At least, I hope I'll be doing that. My idea of success, from the personal angle? If people laughed and lost a fear of exploration, and if people choose to go on and take "real" art lessons. Financially? I want, one day, to pay my bills doing this work and writing again for universities.

I never thought that, with the credentials of writing for Stanford and for Northeastern, that I would not be able to write for other colleges or universities. The economy is what it is. If I were to be honest, here, I have to say that perhaps I have not always written the proper inquiries either. I'm too informal sometimes. That being said, I miss the writing and stimulation of learning something brand new every week.

Still, I have not allowed myself to go all out with my own creativity in more than a decade. Like millions of women and men, I have deferred what mattered most to me inside for what I thought I should do. We women like to think men always do what they want. Bunk. They may claim offices in a home so we wind up working in the dining room... and if they want the garage, they claim it. I ask you, though, how many men, if what they want to play with is art, allow themselves to do that? Look at the painting classes in night schools and community colleges. In our culture, it isn't particularly acceptable for them in most areas of the country. It should be. Blogs let us throw those thoughts out into the universe.

In my case, there seems to be little chance even a random pair of eyes will see. (WRONG) Yet I write. I am trying to think before I write and say only what I feel no problem with the world's seeing--regardless of whether or not they really do.

I am terrified of what I am doing because there's no net. I have no safety net. I won't let my son be that--I'm too young and so is he. I feel I need to have another twenty years of independence, for his sake as well as my own. Conducting workshops will make me explore my own abilities again. The prep work already has. I had forgotten that I do interesting pen and ink sketches. I had forgotten that I am even good at that! I will at last have the space to spread out and finish two paintings I'd forgotten I'd even started, let alone that I liked them. I will charge a quarter in my workshops for every self-deprecating comment, and I wonder whether I may be putting more quarters in than anyone else.

I'm starting the business, though! For real. I have cleared the studio space. I have a couple of enrollees who are not people I know. AND, I have my own blog started. I hope I'll figure out what to do with this in a more constructive way, but for now, I simply write. I tell the virtual world how happy I am for the first time since I moved away from my home state for two years, to Central PA, a beautiful, artistically vibrant area of our country. I began a solitary adventure then and found what it was to be part of a community, instead. Now I start on a journey to create a community here, and I'm doing it all on my own. Life is good; it is scary, but it is good.

Science and Elementary School

Why is it that we cannot try a new approach overall to teaching science to KIDS? Why is there so much focus on pre-school and on high school for so much of the money, but so little focus on how we can grab kids when they are so open to anything new--in elementary school? I understand that there are developmental issues that preclude changing classes all the time, issues that must be focused on. Still, we say we want more men teaching in our elementary schools. We say we want more children of both sexes to get involved in science.

What do we do? We find all sorts of news articles telling us to use computers to teach science. That's fine, as far as it goes. There still, however, is nothing like an actual person who LOVES science teaching it to kids. Engaging them. When I was in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, our grammar school (that's what it was back then) principal used her imagination and had her teachers focus on what they loved in the upper grades. My fourth grade teacher was married to a forest ranger and he brought animals into school to teach us about them. Each of the fifth and sixth grades had ONE teacher who adored science and liked math. So the other two teachers sent their students to those teachers twice a week, while the science/math gurus gladly sent us to the others for some of the writing and grammar stuff. It just made sense.

Why can't we have certified elementary school teachers with a specialty in science, or in math, or both? In schools that have at least three teachers per grade, what would it hurt to have classrooms switch off to the teacher who loves the subject. Cramming more information at the existing teachers and students will not make kids love science. Computers alone won't engage the imagination, spark the interest. ONE person has responded to my question. Just one. He said that there are too many developmental issues to do this. Why? I would have gone into elementary school teaching if I could have focused on science particularly. Most elementary school teachers treat science as the necessary evil they somehow have to get through. NOT ALL. But the curriculum is not much different in grades 1-5 than it was when I was a kid. This is wrong, it seems to me.

I won't write more for now. I am interested in the subject, though. I had thought things had changed more, until I started tutoring my niece and nephew and realized, even in their fairly affluent town, they were not learning a whole lot more about science than I did... until suddenly, in seventh through tenth grade, they were just dumped with huge amounts of information in short spurts. Why? for tests?

If anyone stumbles into this, I'd like to understand.

Barbara Sher and starting over

I think that anyone over forty — or under it, for that matter — would do well to check out her website and then find one or all of her books. I have to admit she helped inspire me to believe that I am not too old to take computer courses, start an at home business, or keep pursuing the kinds of work I know are best for me.

I tend not to go for things that are too "awaken your inner child" in language or intent. I am down to earth, for the most part. She is anti-power of positive thinking in her approach, but frankly, I think she is one of the most positive thinkers I ever saw. Forgive me Barbara if you Google yourself and read this. If you get a chance to attend a workshop through public television or anything else, be prepared to laugh and to go through some truly PRACTICAL networking and brainstorming exercises, unlike most others you go to. You get to dream out loud and have other people even show you how on earth you might go after that dream. She encourages people who are eclectic in their focus, who feel restless with their lives but don't know why. There. That's my endorsement.

I guess I believe that none of us makes it on our own, even if we think so. If we look hard enough, there are books, shows, random people who have inspired us, held out a hand for just a moment, smiled at the right time. As I develop this blog, I hope to post parts of my autobiography, and bits of how my business is going. I want to blither about whatever I choose, with the recognition that I may think I've deleted material, but it may be here forever. It's an exercise in restraint in some ways, and trust in others.... which pretty well describes some of Barbara Sher's advice about launching your dream.

Here's her website, for any random wanderer who drifts through my blog.
http://www.barbarasher.com/

Paint, Paper, and Pens--why bother?

When I was married I read A Room of One's Own until it fell apart. Then I got another copy and had this idea that if we all were in a house with an extra room, I'd have a place other than the dining room table in which to paint a write.

Wrong.

My husband took over the spare room as his study and dressing room, and he cleared a small corner of the room for my "Stuff." I had a rolling table with the then cutting-edge word processor and its paper, and for my meager drawing and painting supplies. To keep it in there meant my rolling it down the hall into the -- you guessed it -- dining room to use. So I put it in the corner of the dining room and thus had, once again, no space that was mine. The kids had their own rooms and took over the family room. Everything else was shared.

I was picking up and taking down and gave up eventually.

Now, in desperation, I return to a dream of my youth and to my late daughter's voice. We don't really lose ourselves, we just don't always locate the right voice for the right audience or the right time in our lives to let that "self" be expressed. Her name was Jessie and the business model in my head was "Jessie's Voice." For now I say "Reinvented Voices" to broaden what was HER idea, that we reinvent the voice we use to let ourselves out.

My first venture into helping people do this for themselves is Paint, Paper, & Pens. Running art workshops in the morning, afternoon and/or evening to help people be a kid. No. Not explore their inner child. Just be a kid. Make a mess without having to clean up. Paint a purple tree or a kitty that looks like a cow. A place where you are charged a quarter when you put your own work down and kicked out for criticizing others. Eight part workshops to start, with right-brain activities to warn up, some group painting exercises, and the last three sessions to create anything people want, together, separately, or some combination of the two.

I'm not an artist, but I can paint well. It's an exploration for me, though I've attended painting classes and creativity and writing workshops. I'm a writer who paints. I would like to see whether I am also a painter. In the meantime, I can work with others to help them explore and remember--remember what it was to paint or draw without worrying about the rules or other people's opinions. To be in the company of other people who want to do the same, and to laugh.

I think this economy needs laughter. I think many of us need some affordable activities that offer us the opportunity to DO, not be done to or to watch others doing. And for many of us, our uncensored creativity was squashed out of us the first time someone said, "That kitty looks like a PIG" or "You went outside the lines!" or "Trees are NOT purple."

Creativity from art spills over into other areas of our lives. I hope to post links to sites on creativity in the future. I hope that people who inquire about my workshops in Connecticut, start checking creativity sites themselves, or take a painting class at college, or move on to many things. Mostly I hope that I can make a modest living while connecting a creative, silly community in the land of Malls and sameness.