"In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary." Aaron Rose
This quote was used as part of Pauline's Writing Down the Words: January 28 entry That particular quote made me remember the role that gardening has played in so much of my healing time of the last twenty years, the years of home ownership, and visiting without words.And it reminded me of the extraordinary friendships forged around ordinary routines.
When I was in my twenties I did a great deal of visiting over toddlers and folding laundry. I was single; my friends were not. (See "Laundry Eagles" for an understanding of what I mean.) I was a thoroughly obnoxious sort of friend. I'd watch their children for an hour or two when they had errands to run, hang around to help unload the groceries, the laundry, whatever and, when the little ones began to implode along around 3:00, I would smile so sweetly and say, "Ha ha ha, ha HA HA, I think I'll go HOME now." They all threatened me with much future suffering, but continued to allow me into their homes nonetheless. NOt only that, they fed me, listened to me, and held me close when my heart was broken and my body followed.
During that decade we visited with talking. Endlessly deep, profound and mundane conversations over coffee, stolen lunches out, when one child or another invariably slumped into her soup, sound asleep. When my parents went off on vacation, I would overrun their home and entertain the lot of them, husbands, wives AND children. I would make some Julia Child wonder of a meal, insist on no help and have everyone at the table together. The children would be bundled en mass onto my parents' bed, and the adults had hours to laugh, watch bad t.v. and discuss everything from politics to the dangers of the new something on the horizon called "Total phone" and the clunkiness of mobile phones. The best night was watching the Miss America Pageant and feigning disagreement over whether or not Miss Oklahoma's singing "I am Woman" while dressed in a ridiculously frilly apron and riding a tricycle trumped Miss Nebraska's attempt to sing "Send in the Clowns" while dressed as Bozo. I had served coq au vin with a magnicient four layer Boston Cream Pie (Made entirely from scratch) and flopped onto the couch, saying, "Someone peel me a grape." I was ignored.
Ten minutes later Andrea appeared with my mother's hexagonal silver tray with one peeled grape in its center.
It's the little things.
But our friendships were loud. We danced and had parties. We lounged by the pool, watching with one eye, the endless games of Marco Polo as toddlers grew to double digit children. I was the neighborhood silly mobile aunt. I loved it. I knew I should not have children with the back I'd been dealt. I did not have my first surgery until I was twenty-eight. I was diagnosed with severe problems at just 23. So I exercised like a fiend to avoid surgery. I did weights when it was not fashionable, and tried the weights machines, only to find that it made a difference that they were designed for men. I hurt myself. My PT guy said I was the only woman he'd ever met who overdid it in the pool to the point of injury.
What's this nonsense anyway about moderation being good? BULL.
I dreamed big. I Mean BIG. I would write the best novel ever and Oprah would have me on. I would be "Discovered" at a poetry reading by Coventry Lake. I would go to grad school and become an expert on Adult Learning, and write the definitive light reading books for adults--compelling and interesting, not glorified kids' books. So many dreams. My friends had them, too, and they were not so big. How was it, then, that my friend who spoke English as her second language got her masters in international accounting, and another became a nationally known and respected program director for Public Broadcasting, and another went to law school at thirty? I talked about the big dreams, and so did they, but when it came down to it, after all the talking and laughing and sharing, in my thirties I watched the others run after their dreams while I spent five years in hospitals, raising half-grown children in between the four to six-week stints? I felt my life slipping away, I thought. The noise seemed to die down, but not the chaos.
I did not lose these friends at all. On the contrary, I was the stay-at-home mom for my daughter's best friend. I was the one who would suddenly show up at whichever home "the gang was hangin" with a tray full of Slurpees® and a bright smile. As my son said, "It was impossible to, like, be that mad. I mean, you didn't stay. You sat down and you asked us about our days, brought the drinks and sometimes cookies and smiled and then left after fifteen minutes. And come back later because you forgot your wallet or something. You always forgot something."
I would smile at his recollection and then he'd say, "DAMN. You didn't forget, huh. But we NEVER knew if you'd come."
"Exactly."
The life was mundane and my pleasures were tiny, mostly. An unexpected hug from my son. Dinner time laughter that included Mark AND the kids. And, of course, hanging out with my friends for cookouts. Still, mostly we talked. And, sad to say, mostly I envied them their marriages, their vacations, their big homes. I felt that not only had I disappeared, but my family was not likely to move forward. Of course, it was my fault. I was disabled and brought in almost no money. I banked all of the kids', and used my own for necessities. I had no right to buy luxuries. The money was Mark's, not mine...
But somewhere along the line, I realized that I was not seeing my life. I had not held up the proper light to it. Others seemed to see me as a success. (Not my family, of course. There, my Aunt Joy summed it up when they were dissecting me as if I were absent. Joy said, "Well, Jean, she IS a wonderful mother. Let's give her that much.) My friends saw more, for which I am beyond grateful, but they told me I was either seeing myself and my life in a funny mirror, or I needed new light bulbs in my brain.
It began after the eight operation, when I was confined to bed because I had gotten up on my own to use the loo, and had lost my mind in a sea of blood in the bathroom. It was a new procedure, trying to avoid my normal hematomas. The fourteen inch incision was sutured very loosely so the pressure would not build, and blood could escape in a controlled way, but I went into the bathroom and, well, the thing exploded, splattering blood all around me and I had a flashback. My first. Right there and then, blood on porcelain and I was gone to another place. The sound. The sight. The fear. I remember nothing more.
I awoke tied to my bed, and life changed immediately. I did not then confront the flashback; it was too soon for that. Yet at last I knew that there was something to confront. As I looked next to me at my drug-addicted, far older roommate, a woman whose husband would come into the hospital and say, "Why don't you simply DIE, Annie, and help us all out?" .... as I looked at her, and looked back at my panic-stricken husband beside me, my life took on a new sheen. Our marriage felt strong and real. And I remembered something about Jessie.
One day she had come home with a papier maché daffodil from middle school art class. "I can't even show this to Mom or Dad. They'll laugh at it. I can't laugh at it. Jeannette, it's pathetic." Well, yes, it truly was. It had a stem the size of a Grecian column and a blossom the size of a thimble. It was lopsided and one leaf was fat and squat, the other tall and leaf-like. "She gave me a B out of pity and for the good leaf." There she stood, hair to her butt, one arm behind her back, the other holding this monstrosity toward me, eyes pleading for help.
"Well, Jess. I can't throw it out. My guess is you worked hard on it." Her tears were falling and she nodded. "I know, I'll put it on MY shelf in the closet and I'll think of you every day." She brightened up enormously, but every time she saw it in the closet she'd come out and look at me, shaking her head.
A couple of years later she said, "You really don't have to."
I always said, "I love it. Especially when I knock something near it and it falls on my head." She would laugh and kiss me.
But when the ceramic vase came home, lopsided and unevenly glazed, she begged me not to put in the living room. "No, REALLY Jeannette. You can't do it. There is nothing that you can make look okay in this. Nothing."
I'd said, "Trust me, honey. You wait." Jess ran into her room crying because she thought it would be humiliating.
I found some beautiful silk flowers and dried boughs of who knows what? I put it in the corner of the shelves, and you saw only the ruffled line of the lip of the shining forest green vase, and the curve of the base, and a profusion of delicate color, there in the center corner.
She looked at it and began to tear up and smiled, "You made something beautiful out of something ugly. You always DO that for me." And she hugged me, holding on longer than I did, and I was never as whole in my life. It was the sweetest compliment I'd ever known. An ordinary act of motherhood, I thought, seen through the eyes of an extraordinary child who did not know her power yet.
I lay in my hospital bed, tied down, thinking of her and a dozen other little sweet things that suddenly felt huge, and how I'd nearly blown up my marriage. And I apologized for the billionth time for the pain I had caused Mark, only this time he looked at me and said simply, "I want you home. I want you not to hurt so much. I can't reach where your pain is, Jeannette. It's always out of reach."
But he kissed it away just the same and I remember it as a series of the best kisses of our marriage.
Something changed. I was thirty-five and was about to learn the heaviest of life's lessons, but I began to listen to silence and look harder at the small things of my life. I stopped paying so damned much attention on the big successes of my friends, and looked at my small successes. I could stand when they told me I'd fall down. I was not an addict. And I was determined to stand STRAIGHT. I was able to do the laundry within two weeks, and for the first time in three years—I started dancing around like Rocky for the accomplishment. There, with no one to hear or see the mountain I had climbed, I danced.
Sometimes simply tying one's shoes is an extraordinary act. That's what I was showing Dad--that I could tie my shoes--while quietly and slowly the subject drifted away. I was always quiet with him toward the end. Noise confused him. But because I was happy to simply BE with him, I had the opportunity to meet the man behind the FATHER, even more than when we'd commuted together. He gave me the journal of his last months, a revelation of pain, selfish arrogance and humble regrets. Anyway, on this particular day, I'd told him how hard it had been to learn to do and how much harder it was to appreciate an act I'd done thousands of times, and he nodded. Then he said, "I've sung Ah Sweet Mystery of LIfe at Last I've Found Thee easily a thousand times. Why did I have to be dying to listen to the words? Love was next to me all my life, sweetie. Don't be like me. Mark hurt you. I know that. We know that. He isn't the man we thought he was. Dear, you can do anything. Listen to your words when you sing them. Listen to your life as you live it. Listen. I never listened." There were many small moments with them both, while they were consciously preparing to go. I'll save them for another time, but when they were gone, and we had bought our house, I began to garden.
The quietest thing I know, gardening. My friends gardened, too. Sometimes we would work together and say nothing, yet felt we had visited all the way through to our cores. Perhaps we had. We would be filthy, sweaty, make-up-less and aging. Yet sometimes I thought that Andrea was most beautiful with her hair unruly, her unmatching eyes glittering, her pale skin still shining from her sunblock. There seemed nothing ordinary to me about many of the flowers, especially peonies.
I mean really. Every peony is its own statement of life -- no, of LIFE, with flourishes of trumpet as well. Their coloring is as delicate as Dresden, but the flowers themselves? A subtle peony is an oxymoron. I was weeding in my lilac island when I thought about that one very early morning. I liked to weed when the sun still cast gold in the sky, there on the far side of my yard.
I was laughing at myself because I love their showiness, revealed only through the never-ending ordinary march of ants to soften their buds. Ants. What is more ordinary than an ant? The lilac island was my first garden, designed, planted, dug with my own hands out of the twenty-year-old perfect turf. My mother's and sister's favorite flower is the lilac and, since Jean Ellen lived here, I wanted to have my first garden be for her and for Mom, whose soul I had clearly channeled, against my will I tell ya, against my will! (I loathed gardening as a child, as I stood by her holding the trowel, the watering can, and some worms to put in the holes. Worms, it appeared, were the key to every garden success. They were the best thing about it all, because the rest of gardening seemed the most boring thing in the world. Put in some nameless tiny green thing and when you were done? It looked like a limp clump of weed. And a clump of junk we had to be careful not to let the kick- soccer- foot- or baseball get into.)
So I chose four different lilac varieties, then found the Miss Kim, and realized that I could have a whole month of lilac blooming with one of those, if they did not all bloom at once because of a hot spell. And I had to admit that subtlety had not been what I was going for here, either. The double blossom shrub was nearly bent to the ground from the weight of the eight-inch long pregnant blossoms.
That season we had had a hot spell, though, and I saw that every single bush was budded, from the doubles of the deepest violet bush to the white. None were in bloom, but they would be any moment. Oh, well. I shrugged and decided how beautiful our enormous vases would be with five shades of blooms, if only for a few days.
I shook my head a moment because a decade before I had planted them too close together, and had actually put a peony plant in there, not realizing how big both got. A common mistake for new gardeners. Furthermore, lilac island across from an open field, so nameless horrid weeds invaded all the time, including the Chinese vine I SHALL NOT NAME. I call it KUJO, for the killer dog. I had just finished wrestling one 20-foot obsenity out by its roots from the very center of my "grove", and had removed, painfully, no fewer than EIGHT thistle plants when, as I unbent my body to breathe, I heard the rain. I looked up and the sky was blue with the barest hints of rose and gold on the horizon.I stood very, very still; stunned, in fact. Gentle rain engulfed me, yet all was dry.
"A miracle?" I asked aloud.
No. An ordinary act of nature, the sound of lilacs blooming.
Clearly, though, I should have answered, "Yes."
Accidental Spring
"Accidental Spring" This began as the background for painting other papers, but became something else!
Friday, January 28, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
A Room of One's Own Redux...
I have linked the title to The K...... No Longer Silent, Kass's blog, because her entry inspired this one. (Yes, another long, wordy ramble that took me somewhere I did not foresee...)
For the ten years of my marriage I had no space of my own, let alone a room. I had a little t.v. cart on which I had one of those early word processors that my dad gave me because he knew I loved to write. Let's try for a little background color here on the situation of my marriage, since it would be really easy to blame my family, my husband, my back--anyone or anything. The truth is, I opted for the lack of privacy sometimes. In fact, I hid from myself in it all. What? Wait a second, this cannot be. I must have someone else to blame. Scratch that. It's all Mark's fault. Yes. Of course. Let's blame the ex!
Not that I was every particularly traditional in my choices. I got married in a body cast, wore a red dress and said my vows in front of my folks' fireplace. Mom's brother had given her an American eagle which she placed over it, though she HATED having it there. She didn't want to hurt his feelings. Most of the time, however, an obnoxiously bold white sign with a chain hung from the bird's neck and read, "Don't just sit there; nag your husband."
I had to take it down and HIDE the damned thing on my wedding morning, since my dad or brothers kept putting it there. So. I had on my bright red dress over the body cast, which gave me the svelte figure of a linebacker, and I had the Pacabel "Canon" playing. (Back then, it wasn't everyone's choice.) I managed to walk down the stairs without tripping or having a leg collapse, and got to Dad, by the front door. Unfortunately, the nextdoor neighbor's were painting their house to a boom box, and my Dad stepped out and screamed, "Shut up. There's a Gawdamned wedding going on!" Perhaps I should have known. My favorite pictures were one of Jessie looking up at my sister, Mark and I gazing into one another's eyes, and Jason looking away from us all to look out the window at our neighbors.
I spilled a bloody Mary all over the only woman in white and was shut off for the rest of the day. BEST wedding in history, and I remember every moment, but... (wait for it. A point is coming. Really. .. or not.)
My husband and I opted to have four kids come to our apartment for the wedding night. I was in a body cast, so let's just leave it at that. Besides which, I love kids and I loved having people over. I was not sure about my being married. I had also lost my engagement garnet in the backyard, so I was wondering whether I'd done the right thing. I thought perhaps it was an omen, though I had not lost my wedding ring, so... Yet I wondered whether I'd married for the right reasons and whether I loved Mark enough. I had made so many mistakes before, and I wanted to be right in this case. I SO wanted to be right. Yet inside I freaked at losing that ring and by the time we got home, I was genuinely scared. When in doubt, I hide among people. I do not have to feign happiness if I am among people I treasure, so the fear dissipated with the laughter of children.
Close quarters also helped in this.
We turned our two bedroom apartment into a three bedroom apartment because the dining alcove was so big that putting up some tall bookshelves as a wall left my son with a 10 x 11 foot room of his own. The seven foot desk was in Mark's and my room so we could both work at it together, only somehow his schoolwork took over the whole space. And naturally he needed quiet to correct papers at night. Then his mom had a "nervous breakdown" and we had his dad for three weeks--three days after the wedding. So all day I was with his dad, a lovely man, but one who had had a massive stroke the day Mark went to Nam, and was left needing care for the rest of his life. Jessie claimed the living room. I had the dining table which was in the living room where the only t.v. was located. And starting that first week, Mark started coming home from school at around five--he was part of the union negotiating team. Starting that first week of our marriage, he opted out.
Forget about a room of my own. I went from being single and a free spirit to a body-casted married woman with two children and a father-in-law to care for.And a husband who was not there.
They say that if you REALLY want to write, you write. And I did write at first, with many interruptions. I was recuperating from my seven week stint in the hospital at that time and was scheduled for more surgery in a month after my father-in-law left. My sister gave me A Room of One's Own. I did not read it so much as inhale it. Then a friend gave me Journal of a Solitude and I knew that I was in trouble. I highlighted these books and underlined passages. I felt they were my friends, not books. During the day I had to rest up to take care of child-rearing business in the afternoons because the kids' mom, on her nights, didn't come until close to six or later. I was the go-to parent. I did the carting and the listening and the homework helping and the dinner-fixing. Usually, by the time I sat down to write, vapidity filled my brain. Somehow I gave up.
And it seemed to me, when I spoke to my friends, they all agreed--nothing much had changed for women since Virginia Woolf's time. None of us had an office, though one had a sewing room. A couple of us wondered whether this had been our mistake. Had we asked for a "craft room" or a sewing place, perhaps someone would have seen validity. Before I was married, my husband loved it that I wrote. Afterward, not so much... He wanted me to wear my blouses buttoned up to the neck, and my soul as well.
Along the road it seemed as if every ounce of creativity was drained in the business of eight surgeries, raising two stepchildren with my husband usually in our room and their mom coming as late as possible to pick them up. I used to describe myself, by the third year of marriage as a panther in a tiny cage, locked in a crate in a closet in a room without windows. (Why use the one word "trapped" when eighteen words will do?) By the sixth year of our marriage, my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I was thirty-six. When I was thirty-eight, both my dad and mom were dead, and I was in counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder due to memories of abuse from a sociopathic brother...
And on my second copies of both A Room ... and Journal of a Solitude. Let's be clear, however; I was a lousy wife. That is the simple truth of it. I was a really good mom, but the wrong wife for Mark. The traditional role was alien to me, but I kept trying to learn the steps of a dance I did not like. And when it was too much, I rebelled by hurting him as badly as I could. I tried to do better, but he never was a forgiving soul. Doesn't excuse how he treated me or the way he chose to handle things, but marriages don't end just because of one person. There. And THAT is all the fairness I intend to extend toward him! Well. For now.
After Mom died nearly two years to the day after Dad, Mark and my sister hatched a plan that we could all buy a house together. It seemed a perfect plan. He was pretending that we were fine, but, as I later found out, it was pretense, part of a plan. He was already looking. Mark chose not to share with either of us that he was miserably unhappy with me. He decided that if we got a house--as he explained later, while informing me he was leaving me for his student teacher--that Jean Ellen would then be there to take care of me!
Anyway, we got a wonderful house, with a rec room downstairs for the kids who were of an age to be away from us, a real dining room, and an extra bedroom for a study. At long last I would have a peaceful place to write. Not just my own, but I had already chosen a desk for me, a space in the room for my stuff.
Nope, true to Virginia Woolf's prototype of the household, Mark claimed the room for his study. He put his clothes in the closet and his recliner in my corner and some weights under the window. Lo and behold, my office was, once again, the dining room! The pathway between the rec room and the kitchen, from the front door to the bedrooms and the rec room, the room off of which was the deck. The center of the home was my room. Nothing changed, I thought.
On the contrary, I had changed. I had overseen all the caretaking of my mother and father in their last months, despite a ninth operation six weeks before Dad died. I had done all the work to find and finance our home, overseen the moves of both my apartment and my sister's, and overseen all the contracting work for my sister's in-law space. I had been trying to get everyone's focus onto the growing eating disorder of Jessica.
I was angry, and found my voice.
I wrote with chaos all around me. I wrote as my husband made excuses to be gone. I wrote through my daughter's mushrooming eating disorder and alcoholism. I wrote while waiting for my son to appear with his friends at about 3:00 a.m., shutting off the light when I heard them stumbling to the downstairs rec room and I'd lay in wait for the inevitable raid of the fridge and simply say, "Boo!" and laugh as they scattered.
I wrote. I wrote the pain, the fear, the frustration at asking my husband the hard questions only to have him lie to me. I wrote about my fear for my daughter's life and the frustration of having her mom and dad tell me I looked for -isms under every rock. "I outgrew it," her mom said.
"No, you didn't. Since I've been part of the family, you have tried four different types of all-out changes of diet, and told me that you threw up when you overate!"
"Well, I'm here, so she'll be fine."
I wrote out my screaming to God to save my child. I wrote out my screaming to God WHY?
I wrote to forget, to record, to figure things out. I began a novel when Mark left. When he left, Jessica and Jay were both away at school at first. And I wrote in the dining room still, the center of my home, my big echoing, empty home. I wrote when my daughter was in treatment but lived with me, when I knew she was not going to listen. I wrote when they finally told her that Mark was not her father, that she was conceived in an alcoholic blackout.
I wrote.
When her mother sat that day they told her, when she sat, rocking back and forth in the middle of my living room floor and Jason called me and said, "I can't find Mom, but you're the one who will tell the truth, is dad really my dad or do I have some other dad, too?"
I wrote and I wrote. There in the center of my house, I wrote, with all those rooms from which to choose, I chose to stay in the hub. And I wrote when the funeral was over, when the children had all gone on with their lives, but my daughter's light was out, I wrote. I stopped the novel because her voice took over, but I wrote nonetheless. The poet emerged instead. I simply wrote.
And I learned about my own journal of a solitude and found my room at last.
The room of my own is inside my soul. I wrote to save my life.
And here I sit. And I write.
For the ten years of my marriage I had no space of my own, let alone a room. I had a little t.v. cart on which I had one of those early word processors that my dad gave me because he knew I loved to write. Let's try for a little background color here on the situation of my marriage, since it would be really easy to blame my family, my husband, my back--anyone or anything. The truth is, I opted for the lack of privacy sometimes. In fact, I hid from myself in it all. What? Wait a second, this cannot be. I must have someone else to blame. Scratch that. It's all Mark's fault. Yes. Of course. Let's blame the ex!
Not that I was every particularly traditional in my choices. I got married in a body cast, wore a red dress and said my vows in front of my folks' fireplace. Mom's brother had given her an American eagle which she placed over it, though she HATED having it there. She didn't want to hurt his feelings. Most of the time, however, an obnoxiously bold white sign with a chain hung from the bird's neck and read, "Don't just sit there; nag your husband."
I had to take it down and HIDE the damned thing on my wedding morning, since my dad or brothers kept putting it there. So. I had on my bright red dress over the body cast, which gave me the svelte figure of a linebacker, and I had the Pacabel "Canon" playing. (Back then, it wasn't everyone's choice.) I managed to walk down the stairs without tripping or having a leg collapse, and got to Dad, by the front door. Unfortunately, the nextdoor neighbor's were painting their house to a boom box, and my Dad stepped out and screamed, "Shut up. There's a Gawdamned wedding going on!" Perhaps I should have known. My favorite pictures were one of Jessie looking up at my sister, Mark and I gazing into one another's eyes, and Jason looking away from us all to look out the window at our neighbors.
I spilled a bloody Mary all over the only woman in white and was shut off for the rest of the day. BEST wedding in history, and I remember every moment, but... (wait for it. A point is coming. Really. .. or not.)
My husband and I opted to have four kids come to our apartment for the wedding night. I was in a body cast, so let's just leave it at that. Besides which, I love kids and I loved having people over. I was not sure about my being married. I had also lost my engagement garnet in the backyard, so I was wondering whether I'd done the right thing. I thought perhaps it was an omen, though I had not lost my wedding ring, so... Yet I wondered whether I'd married for the right reasons and whether I loved Mark enough. I had made so many mistakes before, and I wanted to be right in this case. I SO wanted to be right. Yet inside I freaked at losing that ring and by the time we got home, I was genuinely scared. When in doubt, I hide among people. I do not have to feign happiness if I am among people I treasure, so the fear dissipated with the laughter of children.
Close quarters also helped in this.
We turned our two bedroom apartment into a three bedroom apartment because the dining alcove was so big that putting up some tall bookshelves as a wall left my son with a 10 x 11 foot room of his own. The seven foot desk was in Mark's and my room so we could both work at it together, only somehow his schoolwork took over the whole space. And naturally he needed quiet to correct papers at night. Then his mom had a "nervous breakdown" and we had his dad for three weeks--three days after the wedding. So all day I was with his dad, a lovely man, but one who had had a massive stroke the day Mark went to Nam, and was left needing care for the rest of his life. Jessie claimed the living room. I had the dining table which was in the living room where the only t.v. was located. And starting that first week, Mark started coming home from school at around five--he was part of the union negotiating team. Starting that first week of our marriage, he opted out.
Forget about a room of my own. I went from being single and a free spirit to a body-casted married woman with two children and a father-in-law to care for.And a husband who was not there.
They say that if you REALLY want to write, you write. And I did write at first, with many interruptions. I was recuperating from my seven week stint in the hospital at that time and was scheduled for more surgery in a month after my father-in-law left. My sister gave me A Room of One's Own. I did not read it so much as inhale it. Then a friend gave me Journal of a Solitude and I knew that I was in trouble. I highlighted these books and underlined passages. I felt they were my friends, not books. During the day I had to rest up to take care of child-rearing business in the afternoons because the kids' mom, on her nights, didn't come until close to six or later. I was the go-to parent. I did the carting and the listening and the homework helping and the dinner-fixing. Usually, by the time I sat down to write, vapidity filled my brain. Somehow I gave up.
And it seemed to me, when I spoke to my friends, they all agreed--nothing much had changed for women since Virginia Woolf's time. None of us had an office, though one had a sewing room. A couple of us wondered whether this had been our mistake. Had we asked for a "craft room" or a sewing place, perhaps someone would have seen validity. Before I was married, my husband loved it that I wrote. Afterward, not so much... He wanted me to wear my blouses buttoned up to the neck, and my soul as well.
Along the road it seemed as if every ounce of creativity was drained in the business of eight surgeries, raising two stepchildren with my husband usually in our room and their mom coming as late as possible to pick them up. I used to describe myself, by the third year of marriage as a panther in a tiny cage, locked in a crate in a closet in a room without windows. (Why use the one word "trapped" when eighteen words will do?) By the sixth year of our marriage, my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I was thirty-six. When I was thirty-eight, both my dad and mom were dead, and I was in counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder due to memories of abuse from a sociopathic brother...
And on my second copies of both A Room ... and Journal of a Solitude. Let's be clear, however; I was a lousy wife. That is the simple truth of it. I was a really good mom, but the wrong wife for Mark. The traditional role was alien to me, but I kept trying to learn the steps of a dance I did not like. And when it was too much, I rebelled by hurting him as badly as I could. I tried to do better, but he never was a forgiving soul. Doesn't excuse how he treated me or the way he chose to handle things, but marriages don't end just because of one person. There. And THAT is all the fairness I intend to extend toward him! Well. For now.
After Mom died nearly two years to the day after Dad, Mark and my sister hatched a plan that we could all buy a house together. It seemed a perfect plan. He was pretending that we were fine, but, as I later found out, it was pretense, part of a plan. He was already looking. Mark chose not to share with either of us that he was miserably unhappy with me. He decided that if we got a house--as he explained later, while informing me he was leaving me for his student teacher--that Jean Ellen would then be there to take care of me!
Anyway, we got a wonderful house, with a rec room downstairs for the kids who were of an age to be away from us, a real dining room, and an extra bedroom for a study. At long last I would have a peaceful place to write. Not just my own, but I had already chosen a desk for me, a space in the room for my stuff.
Nope, true to Virginia Woolf's prototype of the household, Mark claimed the room for his study. He put his clothes in the closet and his recliner in my corner and some weights under the window. Lo and behold, my office was, once again, the dining room! The pathway between the rec room and the kitchen, from the front door to the bedrooms and the rec room, the room off of which was the deck. The center of the home was my room. Nothing changed, I thought.
On the contrary, I had changed. I had overseen all the caretaking of my mother and father in their last months, despite a ninth operation six weeks before Dad died. I had done all the work to find and finance our home, overseen the moves of both my apartment and my sister's, and overseen all the contracting work for my sister's in-law space. I had been trying to get everyone's focus onto the growing eating disorder of Jessica.
I was angry, and found my voice.
I wrote with chaos all around me. I wrote as my husband made excuses to be gone. I wrote through my daughter's mushrooming eating disorder and alcoholism. I wrote while waiting for my son to appear with his friends at about 3:00 a.m., shutting off the light when I heard them stumbling to the downstairs rec room and I'd lay in wait for the inevitable raid of the fridge and simply say, "Boo!" and laugh as they scattered.
I wrote. I wrote the pain, the fear, the frustration at asking my husband the hard questions only to have him lie to me. I wrote about my fear for my daughter's life and the frustration of having her mom and dad tell me I looked for -isms under every rock. "I outgrew it," her mom said.
"No, you didn't. Since I've been part of the family, you have tried four different types of all-out changes of diet, and told me that you threw up when you overate!"
"Well, I'm here, so she'll be fine."
I wrote out my screaming to God to save my child. I wrote out my screaming to God WHY?
I wrote to forget, to record, to figure things out. I began a novel when Mark left. When he left, Jessica and Jay were both away at school at first. And I wrote in the dining room still, the center of my home, my big echoing, empty home. I wrote when my daughter was in treatment but lived with me, when I knew she was not going to listen. I wrote when they finally told her that Mark was not her father, that she was conceived in an alcoholic blackout.
I wrote.
When her mother sat that day they told her, when she sat, rocking back and forth in the middle of my living room floor and Jason called me and said, "I can't find Mom, but you're the one who will tell the truth, is dad really my dad or do I have some other dad, too?"
I wrote and I wrote. There in the center of my house, I wrote, with all those rooms from which to choose, I chose to stay in the hub. And I wrote when the funeral was over, when the children had all gone on with their lives, but my daughter's light was out, I wrote. I stopped the novel because her voice took over, but I wrote nonetheless. The poet emerged instead. I simply wrote.
And I learned about my own journal of a solitude and found my room at last.
The room of my own is inside my soul. I wrote to save my life.
And here I sit. And I write.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Time, Memoir, and... I have absolutely NO clue what this is about!
I saw a Facebook thread which loosely talked about time. A friend said something to the effect that we might consider that the moment we experience as now holds many other moments in it. He was trying not to talk about past or future because thinking of time so linearly might not be the way to go. (Forgive me, David, if I have blown my paraphrase.)
I have no clue where his mind was running, but mine ran to memoir. To this blog and why I have schizophrenically included another. I may eliminate the blog, but fold the old entries into this. I am not sure. I was trying, at one point, to figure out where my past could end and my next path start--as if they were separate in any way! In fact, I think the point of the memoirs I love the most blur any sense of time, really. One writes in terms of events, of experiences and growth. We blur the sequencing in memory and often the details. And, truly, does that make one iota's worth of difference? I don't think so. We try to preserve the broader truths, and the enormous truths contained in details, but few of those have much to do with linear time.
Before I remembered events from childhood, I clung to a myth and to a bogglingly detailed memory of each school year, what I learned, who my teachers were, what the weather was. I had no gaps of time, I thought, because I knew the chronologies, events that surrounded the big events. I could reconstruct things in every year. It was the way I could surround the terror with detail and tell myself that I had nothing more to remember.
The healing came when I wrote the rest of the time line, in truth. What I called "Time line of Terror: Time line of Grace." In fact, I had HUGE gaps and blanks. I remembered almost nothing that happened in my home except at Christmas for probably ten years of my life. The trivia found its level, like water, filling in the cracks. So I had to let go of my ridiculous chronology by writing a different sort of chronology. There were not years listed. I had experiences, eras of pain without dates attached. On the left were the punctuation marks of pain in my life, and it was chillingly long, I thought, as I began. In fact I would not and should not subject readers to such a lengthy mess, I thought.
On the right, however, was a list easily four times as long. For every single atrocity I made myself list the graces that got me through. THAT was and remains the sheer wonder of my life.
I remembered the people, the Christmases, the little kindnesses and overwhelming love of some. I remembered silly events that made me laugh. My list of graces took up four times the space, but in numbers? I think they outnumbered the terrors six or seven to one. To me, to this four-year-old and eight-year-old heart, the graces were as tiny as a feather I found on a beach. They required little explanation.
What has this to do with time? I think that when I let go of worrying about what happened when, when I let go of this fear that I misremembered things, that I was not journalistic enough, the real growth began. Like Louise, these other pains held the yin/yang of my life. At every turn we can choose light/love/feeding life or the Other, whatever that is. Sometimes, if you are as lucky as I, you are given markers, nudges toward that love and forget to even LOOK at the other part of our circle. That's the thing; at every turn someone or other pointed me toward beauty.
I live on the edges of things. I've said that before. In the old days, Olympic skaters had to do compulsory exercises, one of which involved skating an eight on one blade over and over and over, repeating that same line. I think I aim toward that line in the yin/yang sign. I think I see life that way, and experience my own life that way. I want to skate on that edge, leaning on the side of the blade toward wonder and the things that feed our lives.
When I hit fifty I tasted my first fresh fig. Rivaled the pluot, I must say. It's not the time, it's the alliteration ... It's not my brother's foot on my tiny hand as I tried to protect a trapped mouse when I was four --the foot coming down on the hand, murdering a mouse. It was the choice presented like a gift to me, to guard future mice in traps so no foot would ever again end their days. I sat by the mice in the traps and I sang to them. It doesn't matter what happened before or after--it's the experience and what that teeny girl drew on to cope. Love. A gift. A gift that has never left me.
When I finish my book, I want it to be about flying and wonder, and my true goal is take my readers on a joyous, if somewhat terrifyingly beautiful flight with me. And I want it to be abundantly clear that none of us is strong all by ourselves. Those of us who survive the most appalling abuse, who have had to cope with pain and perhaps overcome many odds--to say we were just not quitters, or that we were somehow better than... I think that teaches nothing. It simply makes those who are floundering feel less than... as if we do not ALL flounder at times? Oops. Time. That word.
I was taught to look for the magic, to expect to find it everywhere. I was taught that love is a gift we give and may receive. It is not an emotion and we do not take it from someone. I was taught that the lessons were in the giving more than the receiving; in the receiving we found joy and laughter and wonder, sure. But to give the love when it was not easy? My parents believed that this was what made it love.
How do I say, then, that my parents are gone when their voices live so clearly in my heart and mind? Where does that past end, when its lessons still live? I named the pain Louise. That was easy. Embracing my mother was easier after my time line. Over and OVER, even when she was the terror, she was the grace as well.
And she still is. Jack, Jean Ellen, Jessie, Daddy, Mom, so many people not walking on this earth live inside of me. The years are meaningless. In the act of writing I don't let go of the past; I hug it to me and reveal its power. In these last few months, what I see is that I have let go of WANTING it to be "in the past." I let go of wishing I were someone else.
I don't; I would rather have had my own life than another's. I do not think things happen for a reason. I think the free will lies in whether or not we stand up and decide to use the horrors to create beauty or to enrich life, or whether we choose to hold onto our identity as ACOAs, or "Survivors" or something that sets us apart from all humanity, from this earth. We choose to continue on paths of self-destruction or bit by bit, we learn to choose life. But I don't think God or Anything in particular sends us pain, abuse, abandonment, loss, or even hurricanes for a reason. Whatever God is, or whatever Energy feeds and sustains life? It sends the magic and the joy to find ways to ride or even fly out of and above the rest. It's what allows us the capacity to be a phoenix.
Mind you, I have not arrived on that Tibeten Mountain Top there, with the great Zen masters. Not hardly. I'm simply thinking that past, future, where I'm going, how I thought of the future as "starting over," it's all bunk. I start over one way or another every day... don't you?
Memoir is self-involved, but somehow or other, the best ones have reached to all who read them. We search for what we all can share, regardless of the "niceness" of our families. We take our little teeny lives and find what resonates, we HOPE. That's the goal anyway. To find something beyond the littleness of ONE life, to touch and perhaps help or support or validate other lives.
Of course, then we can eat a pluot or a fig and simply live in the joy of juice running down our chin, and to HELL with reaching for anything more.
And if you can make sense of any of this ramble, you are "a better man than I am Gunga Din," as my mother used to say. It was fun to write it anyway!
***
This is unedited or reviewed stream of consciousness dribble. I just need to make writing my habit once again!
I have no clue where his mind was running, but mine ran to memoir. To this blog and why I have schizophrenically included another. I may eliminate the blog, but fold the old entries into this. I am not sure. I was trying, at one point, to figure out where my past could end and my next path start--as if they were separate in any way! In fact, I think the point of the memoirs I love the most blur any sense of time, really. One writes in terms of events, of experiences and growth. We blur the sequencing in memory and often the details. And, truly, does that make one iota's worth of difference? I don't think so. We try to preserve the broader truths, and the enormous truths contained in details, but few of those have much to do with linear time.
Before I remembered events from childhood, I clung to a myth and to a bogglingly detailed memory of each school year, what I learned, who my teachers were, what the weather was. I had no gaps of time, I thought, because I knew the chronologies, events that surrounded the big events. I could reconstruct things in every year. It was the way I could surround the terror with detail and tell myself that I had nothing more to remember.
The healing came when I wrote the rest of the time line, in truth. What I called "Time line of Terror: Time line of Grace." In fact, I had HUGE gaps and blanks. I remembered almost nothing that happened in my home except at Christmas for probably ten years of my life. The trivia found its level, like water, filling in the cracks. So I had to let go of my ridiculous chronology by writing a different sort of chronology. There were not years listed. I had experiences, eras of pain without dates attached. On the left were the punctuation marks of pain in my life, and it was chillingly long, I thought, as I began. In fact I would not and should not subject readers to such a lengthy mess, I thought.
On the right, however, was a list easily four times as long. For every single atrocity I made myself list the graces that got me through. THAT was and remains the sheer wonder of my life.
I remembered the people, the Christmases, the little kindnesses and overwhelming love of some. I remembered silly events that made me laugh. My list of graces took up four times the space, but in numbers? I think they outnumbered the terrors six or seven to one. To me, to this four-year-old and eight-year-old heart, the graces were as tiny as a feather I found on a beach. They required little explanation.
What has this to do with time? I think that when I let go of worrying about what happened when, when I let go of this fear that I misremembered things, that I was not journalistic enough, the real growth began. Like Louise, these other pains held the yin/yang of my life. At every turn we can choose light/love/feeding life or the Other, whatever that is. Sometimes, if you are as lucky as I, you are given markers, nudges toward that love and forget to even LOOK at the other part of our circle. That's the thing; at every turn someone or other pointed me toward beauty.
I live on the edges of things. I've said that before. In the old days, Olympic skaters had to do compulsory exercises, one of which involved skating an eight on one blade over and over and over, repeating that same line. I think I aim toward that line in the yin/yang sign. I think I see life that way, and experience my own life that way. I want to skate on that edge, leaning on the side of the blade toward wonder and the things that feed our lives.
When I hit fifty I tasted my first fresh fig. Rivaled the pluot, I must say. It's not the time, it's the alliteration ... It's not my brother's foot on my tiny hand as I tried to protect a trapped mouse when I was four --the foot coming down on the hand, murdering a mouse. It was the choice presented like a gift to me, to guard future mice in traps so no foot would ever again end their days. I sat by the mice in the traps and I sang to them. It doesn't matter what happened before or after--it's the experience and what that teeny girl drew on to cope. Love. A gift. A gift that has never left me.
When I finish my book, I want it to be about flying and wonder, and my true goal is take my readers on a joyous, if somewhat terrifyingly beautiful flight with me. And I want it to be abundantly clear that none of us is strong all by ourselves. Those of us who survive the most appalling abuse, who have had to cope with pain and perhaps overcome many odds--to say we were just not quitters, or that we were somehow better than... I think that teaches nothing. It simply makes those who are floundering feel less than... as if we do not ALL flounder at times? Oops. Time. That word.
I was taught to look for the magic, to expect to find it everywhere. I was taught that love is a gift we give and may receive. It is not an emotion and we do not take it from someone. I was taught that the lessons were in the giving more than the receiving; in the receiving we found joy and laughter and wonder, sure. But to give the love when it was not easy? My parents believed that this was what made it love.
How do I say, then, that my parents are gone when their voices live so clearly in my heart and mind? Where does that past end, when its lessons still live? I named the pain Louise. That was easy. Embracing my mother was easier after my time line. Over and OVER, even when she was the terror, she was the grace as well.
And she still is. Jack, Jean Ellen, Jessie, Daddy, Mom, so many people not walking on this earth live inside of me. The years are meaningless. In the act of writing I don't let go of the past; I hug it to me and reveal its power. In these last few months, what I see is that I have let go of WANTING it to be "in the past." I let go of wishing I were someone else.
I don't; I would rather have had my own life than another's. I do not think things happen for a reason. I think the free will lies in whether or not we stand up and decide to use the horrors to create beauty or to enrich life, or whether we choose to hold onto our identity as ACOAs, or "Survivors" or something that sets us apart from all humanity, from this earth. We choose to continue on paths of self-destruction or bit by bit, we learn to choose life. But I don't think God or Anything in particular sends us pain, abuse, abandonment, loss, or even hurricanes for a reason. Whatever God is, or whatever Energy feeds and sustains life? It sends the magic and the joy to find ways to ride or even fly out of and above the rest. It's what allows us the capacity to be a phoenix.
Mind you, I have not arrived on that Tibeten Mountain Top there, with the great Zen masters. Not hardly. I'm simply thinking that past, future, where I'm going, how I thought of the future as "starting over," it's all bunk. I start over one way or another every day... don't you?
Memoir is self-involved, but somehow or other, the best ones have reached to all who read them. We search for what we all can share, regardless of the "niceness" of our families. We take our little teeny lives and find what resonates, we HOPE. That's the goal anyway. To find something beyond the littleness of ONE life, to touch and perhaps help or support or validate other lives.
Of course, then we can eat a pluot or a fig and simply live in the joy of juice running down our chin, and to HELL with reaching for anything more.
And if you can make sense of any of this ramble, you are "a better man than I am Gunga Din," as my mother used to say. It was fun to write it anyway!
***
This is unedited or reviewed stream of consciousness dribble. I just need to make writing my habit once again!
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
WOO HOO
I have been awarded Social Security Disability. I am eligible immediately for Medicare. The first hurdle toward my reconstructed self has been CLEARED.
I have dreamed of coral reefs two nights in a row now. Time for a new painting, I guess, while I work on the two unfinished.
Such a New Year's gift. The judge wrote her decision BEFORE the Christmas break, only a couple of weeks after the hearing. She was clear and, well, it validated a good deal, this judgment of hers. I will be able to be financially okay for at least ten months and, hopefully my house will sell before that time is done.
I find myself hoping only to move forward, to not just reconstruct myself as an artist and writer, as one who creates solely what is in my heart and imagination, but to feel that I can tutor as well. I LOVE helping kids unlock their curiosity, finding the words that help them over their own hurdles. It is challenging and fun, too. I am only eight in my brain, so it seems a natural fit, no?
I want the new year to propel me toward simple peace, toward loving my friends better, toward more productivity and choices that keep me on the planet a LONG time. I want to write the wonder of my life, which was the gift that got me through the pain--the gifts of my mother, my father, and my sister, really. Each had their own whimsy and sense of the absurd that they gave to me. And the wonder that was my brother Jack's willingness to protect me the best he could from the violence of the other brother. And of our friendship as children and teenagers. In his own disease, he committed one horror, but ONLY one. Mostly, as his birthday draws near, I remember Robin Hood, calling to me as I hid in the closet. Calling to me when his own torture was over and the monster had wandered off, losing interest in causing him pain. "Maid Marion, Maid Marion. The Sheriff is Gone. It's safe to come out."
And I would untie him and bathe the cuts or the bruises myself. Jack gave me my very life, I think.
It is a new year. Some of the limbo has suddenly ended. I am acutely aware that I was given more gifts than my share, I think. I called my friends who had been long awaiting good news. It took three hours of laughing and crying and just being happy.
I have virtual friends in here, many of whom have reached out to me beyond the blog. I have thanked you all before, but I simply must again. The progress on the book is slow, but it has to be. I have made peace with many things in these months of chaos and pain.
Long ago, in the early days of biofeedback pain therapy, I named the pain Louise. My middle name and my paternal grandma's name. I may have mentioned this elsewhere. I did this because my grandma taught me many things as a small child, and I adored cooking next to her, eating lunches she made for Jude and me at the Lake on rainy days--we sat at a lace-edged tableclothed card table, on the screened in porch, eating egg salad sandwiches cut on the diagonals with the crusts off, off of special plates with a spot on them for the chocolate milk-filled glasses. And we had M&M's for dessert. Grandma would serve her two little wild girls as if we were grand ladies. It made us giggle, as we sat in overalls and t-shirts, barefoot. Huck Finn girls with Lady Louise. Grandma mourned the demise of whale-bone corsets. She showed me how to dip candles for fun and we churned butter.
But when I hit puberty I learned that Louise was mean to my mother. She spied on us. She was bitter. A vicious gossip sometimes. Louise was not likable, barely lovable, in fact--but she was my grandma, part of my being, part of who I was, part of my life.
The Louise of my body, born of spinal disease, has tamed my tendency to self-destruct. Pain is not something we want. I don't want it. But it's here. It is part of my life. Louise is here and saved my life and made it hell and I cannot discard it. I must live with it and use my heart and soul to find the ways to use it to FORCE me into going after the dream.
I never gave myself permission to paint, to sing, to write simply what I WANTED. To create from my own music for the sake of creation. Well, I can't do it on deadlines any more. There is no path left for me but to do what I want!
So, tell me. What sort of irony is in that? I mean, talk about a dope learning things the hard way!
I will be getting the first step of financial respite. I have accepted what IS in relation to my spine. I KEEP ON STANDING UP. But I know enough to sit down or lie down when I have to.
It IS a happy new year. Thank you to any of you who keep no looking for me to write. There will be more.
Woo HOO.
I have dreamed of coral reefs two nights in a row now. Time for a new painting, I guess, while I work on the two unfinished.
Such a New Year's gift. The judge wrote her decision BEFORE the Christmas break, only a couple of weeks after the hearing. She was clear and, well, it validated a good deal, this judgment of hers. I will be able to be financially okay for at least ten months and, hopefully my house will sell before that time is done.
I find myself hoping only to move forward, to not just reconstruct myself as an artist and writer, as one who creates solely what is in my heart and imagination, but to feel that I can tutor as well. I LOVE helping kids unlock their curiosity, finding the words that help them over their own hurdles. It is challenging and fun, too. I am only eight in my brain, so it seems a natural fit, no?
I want the new year to propel me toward simple peace, toward loving my friends better, toward more productivity and choices that keep me on the planet a LONG time. I want to write the wonder of my life, which was the gift that got me through the pain--the gifts of my mother, my father, and my sister, really. Each had their own whimsy and sense of the absurd that they gave to me. And the wonder that was my brother Jack's willingness to protect me the best he could from the violence of the other brother. And of our friendship as children and teenagers. In his own disease, he committed one horror, but ONLY one. Mostly, as his birthday draws near, I remember Robin Hood, calling to me as I hid in the closet. Calling to me when his own torture was over and the monster had wandered off, losing interest in causing him pain. "Maid Marion, Maid Marion. The Sheriff is Gone. It's safe to come out."
And I would untie him and bathe the cuts or the bruises myself. Jack gave me my very life, I think.
It is a new year. Some of the limbo has suddenly ended. I am acutely aware that I was given more gifts than my share, I think. I called my friends who had been long awaiting good news. It took three hours of laughing and crying and just being happy.
I have virtual friends in here, many of whom have reached out to me beyond the blog. I have thanked you all before, but I simply must again. The progress on the book is slow, but it has to be. I have made peace with many things in these months of chaos and pain.
Long ago, in the early days of biofeedback pain therapy, I named the pain Louise. My middle name and my paternal grandma's name. I may have mentioned this elsewhere. I did this because my grandma taught me many things as a small child, and I adored cooking next to her, eating lunches she made for Jude and me at the Lake on rainy days--we sat at a lace-edged tableclothed card table, on the screened in porch, eating egg salad sandwiches cut on the diagonals with the crusts off, off of special plates with a spot on them for the chocolate milk-filled glasses. And we had M&M's for dessert. Grandma would serve her two little wild girls as if we were grand ladies. It made us giggle, as we sat in overalls and t-shirts, barefoot. Huck Finn girls with Lady Louise. Grandma mourned the demise of whale-bone corsets. She showed me how to dip candles for fun and we churned butter.
But when I hit puberty I learned that Louise was mean to my mother. She spied on us. She was bitter. A vicious gossip sometimes. Louise was not likable, barely lovable, in fact--but she was my grandma, part of my being, part of who I was, part of my life.
The Louise of my body, born of spinal disease, has tamed my tendency to self-destruct. Pain is not something we want. I don't want it. But it's here. It is part of my life. Louise is here and saved my life and made it hell and I cannot discard it. I must live with it and use my heart and soul to find the ways to use it to FORCE me into going after the dream.
I never gave myself permission to paint, to sing, to write simply what I WANTED. To create from my own music for the sake of creation. Well, I can't do it on deadlines any more. There is no path left for me but to do what I want!
So, tell me. What sort of irony is in that? I mean, talk about a dope learning things the hard way!
I will be getting the first step of financial respite. I have accepted what IS in relation to my spine. I KEEP ON STANDING UP. But I know enough to sit down or lie down when I have to.
It IS a happy new year. Thank you to any of you who keep no looking for me to write. There will be more.
Woo HOO.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Some art, such as it is
Happy New Year one and all. Still looking to get a friend to try to photograph some of my work. I have had to do these two by scanning sections on my little flatbed, opening them in Photoshop and tiling the best that I can. The winter scene shows particularly that I did not adjust the rotation--tweak it so that the bottom of the cloud is at an angle. NOT SO IN MY PAINTING.
Enough of you have asked, that I at least wanted to offer a clue about my work. Both A Glimpse of Peace and the mountain scene were dreams. I once was at that crater lake in New Mexico at about ten in the morning after a February snow. My friend and I wondered what it must be like at dawn. There is NOTHING subtle about dawn on mountains. Once I flew into dawn, going to Europe. I was fifteen and remember being dumbstruck at the fact that there was an actual line between night and day. Somewhere in my little mind, the image of that endlessly mountain ringed lake and flying into dawn were mixed. The real picture's lighting changes depending on the time of day. While I use tissue and water color, primarily, I have some paints that offer irredescence. The waterfall and the mountains, when struck directly by any light, shimmer.
My Glimpse of Peace is a bit personal in origin. One person generated an overwhelming sense of peace, strength, and beauty in me. It is what I hold onto rather than anger. And I have ALWAYS loved Asian art, so I combined love and Water and some chinese work I have seen somewhere or other and woke up with that painting. Again, it is collaged.
I really do feel that the work in person is far better than what I've put here, but I guess you've all been so loyal in looking for my writing, I kinda wanted to show that, YES, I really HAVE been putsing along with the painting.
I await the ruling for my hearing on disability and once again we will try to sell my home. BUT, I am far more at peace with uncertainty again. I rebelled against it last year, I'm afraid. I had tried SO hard to build some sort of financial stability, to keep my home, to keep my legs moving. Everything fell apart at once and it took me a good long time to find my internal footing, so to speak. I have, though, regardless of what else may happen. I've lost my insurance yet again, and wrestle with whether or not it is worth shelling out the money for another month or so with coverage that is abysmal. High risk pool insurance is horrible now. Practical matters blowing up are the norm these days, but I've acquired an "Oh well" shrug at it all. Panic does NOTHING.
My back, as I mentioned stabilized finally in the late summer. I'm beginning to understand what makes it suddenly not function so that I fall down, and the very, VERY subtle warning signs. Do I always listen? Oh, PLEASE. This is ME. Jetty. Jeannette. Learn all lessons by bashing into walls, Jetty. That's me. Still, I'm doing better at not bashing into the same wall more than three times.
This whole process of adjusting downward in terms of mobility and lifestyle because of money has been interesting. I have the best friends in the world and they truly are my family. My wealthy aunt called me because her husband asked her to. She told me that her home health care aide has cost them all their extra money. I asked whether she had new meds. Nope. Or whether she was coming more than twice a day. Nope. Or whether she needed the visiting nurse more or had been in the hospital. Nope. Amazing how fast 4 million dollars can go. Then I asked, "Did Jack tell you to tell me this?"
"Yes, dear. The reason we cannot help you is all my fault. I have run us into the ground."
"Joy," I said. Yeah. She CHANGED her name to this!!! "Joy, I am never asking you for a dime. Nor do I expect the trust fund Jack promised. You know him. He doesn't want to feel he has to help me and he knows I am in a bad way. He has made you feel it's YOUR fault. It isn't. Listen to me. Don't worry about it any more. You are ill. You are dependent. He is lying."
"Well. I wondered. But you know him. And I can't... I depend on him for everything."
"Right. Let go of it. I'm fine, dear. I love you."
"Well call me please. No. Not often. I know you will never get better so I really can't take hearing that. So call, well, maybe every three, three, what is the word, three or four..."
She has Parkinson's. I gently said, "Four weeks?"
"Oh, N O. The longer one. MONTHS. OH no. Not weeks. I don't want to hear your voice that often. Just a few times a year. That's fine. Just so I know you are alive and where you move when you lose your home."
And there you have my family. A year ago, this sort of thing hurt to the quick. ALl the phony calls about my welfare. Now? I know she is trapped. And I was even able to talk to Joy for the only time in my life about how she's always run away from what made her uncomfortable, and like my mom, she was able to say, "We deserted you when your father died, when your mother died, when your husband left, and when Jessie died. We were angry at them all and we just didn't want to have to hear your unhappiness. That was weak of me, Jet. And I fear it was cruel."
"Yes, it was both. But I love you." And I do.
We all find closure in odd ways. Her husband is a truly cruel and cold man. But Joy? More a tragic figure who could not get out of her own way, who could not rise above her compunction to appear to be the Lady of the Manor. The appearance of affluence, sophistication, class. It mattered to her and now she is trapped in a chair in a room with a view. The most beautiful lake view I have ever seen! She looks back over Lake Champlain to the mainland mountains and can see the sunrise every day. She has her own beach. I told her this and she said, "It isn't the ocean... but it's all I'll ever have now."
I hope I do not grow to be so embittered, so afraid. I am technically alone. And I am poor. But I am so very, very wealthy in friends and in the two family members left--my son and my aunt in Alaska. And I can still walk. And write. And paint.
Mostly, I laugh... and my friends and I do all we can to make each other's lives as sweet as we can. Perhaps this year will yield some financial relief for a year or two and I can work like crazy on finding a way to make it a nother few years after that... WITHOUT letting myself forget to live in the current moments. Many of them are wonderful.
Again, happy New Year. I hope you'll look at my two pictures here and know that whether or not they are good, they give me pleasure--the process AND the product. I wish I could reproduce them here a bit better, but that's okay. This is a blog, not a gallery. Good health, happiness, and much laughter to one and all.
Enough of you have asked, that I at least wanted to offer a clue about my work. Both A Glimpse of Peace and the mountain scene were dreams. I once was at that crater lake in New Mexico at about ten in the morning after a February snow. My friend and I wondered what it must be like at dawn. There is NOTHING subtle about dawn on mountains. Once I flew into dawn, going to Europe. I was fifteen and remember being dumbstruck at the fact that there was an actual line between night and day. Somewhere in my little mind, the image of that endlessly mountain ringed lake and flying into dawn were mixed. The real picture's lighting changes depending on the time of day. While I use tissue and water color, primarily, I have some paints that offer irredescence. The waterfall and the mountains, when struck directly by any light, shimmer.
My Glimpse of Peace is a bit personal in origin. One person generated an overwhelming sense of peace, strength, and beauty in me. It is what I hold onto rather than anger. And I have ALWAYS loved Asian art, so I combined love and Water and some chinese work I have seen somewhere or other and woke up with that painting. Again, it is collaged.
I really do feel that the work in person is far better than what I've put here, but I guess you've all been so loyal in looking for my writing, I kinda wanted to show that, YES, I really HAVE been putsing along with the painting.
I await the ruling for my hearing on disability and once again we will try to sell my home. BUT, I am far more at peace with uncertainty again. I rebelled against it last year, I'm afraid. I had tried SO hard to build some sort of financial stability, to keep my home, to keep my legs moving. Everything fell apart at once and it took me a good long time to find my internal footing, so to speak. I have, though, regardless of what else may happen. I've lost my insurance yet again, and wrestle with whether or not it is worth shelling out the money for another month or so with coverage that is abysmal. High risk pool insurance is horrible now. Practical matters blowing up are the norm these days, but I've acquired an "Oh well" shrug at it all. Panic does NOTHING.
My back, as I mentioned stabilized finally in the late summer. I'm beginning to understand what makes it suddenly not function so that I fall down, and the very, VERY subtle warning signs. Do I always listen? Oh, PLEASE. This is ME. Jetty. Jeannette. Learn all lessons by bashing into walls, Jetty. That's me. Still, I'm doing better at not bashing into the same wall more than three times.
This whole process of adjusting downward in terms of mobility and lifestyle because of money has been interesting. I have the best friends in the world and they truly are my family. My wealthy aunt called me because her husband asked her to. She told me that her home health care aide has cost them all their extra money. I asked whether she had new meds. Nope. Or whether she was coming more than twice a day. Nope. Or whether she needed the visiting nurse more or had been in the hospital. Nope. Amazing how fast 4 million dollars can go. Then I asked, "Did Jack tell you to tell me this?"
"Yes, dear. The reason we cannot help you is all my fault. I have run us into the ground."
"Joy," I said. Yeah. She CHANGED her name to this!!! "Joy, I am never asking you for a dime. Nor do I expect the trust fund Jack promised. You know him. He doesn't want to feel he has to help me and he knows I am in a bad way. He has made you feel it's YOUR fault. It isn't. Listen to me. Don't worry about it any more. You are ill. You are dependent. He is lying."
"Well. I wondered. But you know him. And I can't... I depend on him for everything."
"Right. Let go of it. I'm fine, dear. I love you."
"Well call me please. No. Not often. I know you will never get better so I really can't take hearing that. So call, well, maybe every three, three, what is the word, three or four..."
She has Parkinson's. I gently said, "Four weeks?"
"Oh, N O. The longer one. MONTHS. OH no. Not weeks. I don't want to hear your voice that often. Just a few times a year. That's fine. Just so I know you are alive and where you move when you lose your home."
And there you have my family. A year ago, this sort of thing hurt to the quick. ALl the phony calls about my welfare. Now? I know she is trapped. And I was even able to talk to Joy for the only time in my life about how she's always run away from what made her uncomfortable, and like my mom, she was able to say, "We deserted you when your father died, when your mother died, when your husband left, and when Jessie died. We were angry at them all and we just didn't want to have to hear your unhappiness. That was weak of me, Jet. And I fear it was cruel."
"Yes, it was both. But I love you." And I do.
We all find closure in odd ways. Her husband is a truly cruel and cold man. But Joy? More a tragic figure who could not get out of her own way, who could not rise above her compunction to appear to be the Lady of the Manor. The appearance of affluence, sophistication, class. It mattered to her and now she is trapped in a chair in a room with a view. The most beautiful lake view I have ever seen! She looks back over Lake Champlain to the mainland mountains and can see the sunrise every day. She has her own beach. I told her this and she said, "It isn't the ocean... but it's all I'll ever have now."
I hope I do not grow to be so embittered, so afraid. I am technically alone. And I am poor. But I am so very, very wealthy in friends and in the two family members left--my son and my aunt in Alaska. And I can still walk. And write. And paint.
Mostly, I laugh... and my friends and I do all we can to make each other's lives as sweet as we can. Perhaps this year will yield some financial relief for a year or two and I can work like crazy on finding a way to make it a nother few years after that... WITHOUT letting myself forget to live in the current moments. Many of them are wonderful.
Again, happy New Year. I hope you'll look at my two pictures here and know that whether or not they are good, they give me pleasure--the process AND the product. I wish I could reproduce them here a bit better, but that's okay. This is a blog, not a gallery. Good health, happiness, and much laughter to one and all.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)