Headed to the Studio for a Bit ... Some Background Blogs in the Meantime

I actually am working on a book, and trying to figure out the thread of the focus. It won't be a litany of hurts, that's for sure; it won't be Pollyanna Grows Up In Hell but is GLAD,  either. I'm not good at perky. I think that essentially it is The Prince of Tides without the tiger. And it may be that I wind up having to fictionalize, for the sake of some innocent relatives, and, well because the sociopath is alive. Then, too, that might be kind of fun. While I would love to write a memoir, it might be that to talk about my personal journey, it should be fictionalized; to talk about my mom, however, might be something I could tackle. We'll see.

Regardless, painting dreams seem to be taking over for now, and it's time I paid attention. Often the two forms--writing and painting--feed off one another.

But I've been so lucky to get about thirty new followers in a short time, and some of my entries might make more sense if you look at earlier ones. They might illustrate more of who I am.

I dance on the edges of things, skating the curve between the yin and the yang, the dark and the light, where life and death touch. But the only way I survived all the pain was to cling to the beauty and try to let go of the horror, swinging toward that rainbow on these slender vines of whatever beauty I could see. Sometimes they broke. Sometimes they took me to somewhere safe for a time. Sometimes they took me directly into a pile of ... not good stuff.  I have lived between the extremes, but early on, it taught me to live BY extremes. Too much so often. 'Matt' once told me, "Your love, our love, this love between us was so big it scared me to death. You scared me to death. I had to run away."

SO... I did my best to kill myself off by inches in my twenties, until my broken back saved my life. It was a real, tangible problem to fight, to overcome, to conquer, instead of demons just out of my reach. And conquer it I did, for twenty years longer than they gave me to live or to walk, so far. T I'm here. I walk. I stand. But mostly, I live. And as I have said in previous comments, I use the elves and fairies, the wildflower days and the Lake, the beauty and laughter of Christmas, to cut the demons down.

Blog Entries for While I am Painting, not Writing--for those of you who are so inclined
For any of you newer followers who are interested, I've included some early entries--Losing Dad was the latest and about nine of you were around then, perhaps. I did not remember a thing about the abuse and violence until I lost my dad--Losing dad, finding therapy .  This entry talks about him in a little more depth than the Slayer of Monsters under My Bed.

I could not really start the process of having the distance to write about it all until after my  mom died. I was far too closely entwined with her, her struggles, her failures, her victory. HER life story. (Hence, I am kicking around tackling a memoir that focuses on her and on our relationship.) I could not separate myself properly. I include the following entry, which shows most clearly so far, the wide swings of feelings about her.
Losing Mom, finding my way

When I had lost both parents, then I opened up and began to write about it all, a bit at a time. But I let no one see. I let very few in that deeply even in talking. It took years to truly have it lose the power to  hurt me. But I had my breakthroughs, and life changed. I got new tools to use to actually enjoy pastels in life. Grays even. Balance without boredom was a brand new concept to me at 37, after she died.

I think one such breakthrough came when I stopped blaming Mom for everything, that was a huge step.
Underlying Premise--I cannot blame my mother, dammit.


This next is the beginning of it for me, and it is pretty horrifying, I think... Where the terror and the sociopath were born, but also where the love was born. This was the one story that made my therapist cry, but it is pivotal to the gift I was given to cope, through the Robin Hood Days, and through the days of jumping at the too small sounds in the night, when my other brother came.  Bear in mind I was perhaps a year and a half older than the me in the picture of my window box elves entry -- three and a half!  I don't know that I had more than two followers when I wrote this one. Grace by Any Other Name

I blocked the incident out entirely until I was about 36, just as I did the sessions with Jack, and the rape that made me start carrying a steak knife to my room at night. No one ever said a word about the knife, a small fact that makes me wonder still. I never tried to hide it. In fact, if Jim was in the living room, I made sure it was very visible... Still, my memories were only of elves, until my father died, and Pandora's box flew open, and the demons were let loose for good.

Out of that little bitty girl came a solution for most traumas, most pain. Love. Agape, not emotion so much as the gift. The gift of love.

It was what I used over and over before each of my nine back operations--I would say the names of the people I love, over and over and over -- it was far more powerful than thinking of people who loved me. After all, who would love a woman like me anyway? They all left so fast, and it was so very hard to believe back then that there was anything in me to love ... But there was nothing hard about my naming the ones that I loved, whether or not they loved me back. It helped me get through many situations which scared me.  Cover the fear with love

Funny thing is, most of those people DID love me back, and have loved me ever since.  It kept coming as a shock when these women united so often, catching me before I hit the ground, over and over again. The Women

 ***
I think losing my daughter in 1994, just two years after her father left, broke the final dam of some sort of resistance to share my core with others. I did not think anything could ever be worse than this. (That will undoubtedly be an entry one day--one of the most bizarre experiences, aside from the worst moment of my adult life. Hearing that she was dead.) I moved to Pennsylvania six months later, learned to paint, and simply breathed. Between 1987 and 1994 I lost both my parents, had my  ninth back surgery, went through psychotherapy for post traumatic stress, bought a house with my sister, had both kids leave for college, had my husband leave me for his student teacher who was Jessie's age, and finally lost my daughter.

When I wrote the poem to her in 2005 that is in the next entry, I had lost three best friends and my nephew and my brother as well. I was worn out from  losing people and starting over, but I also knew I was going to lose my sister, too (I wrote about her in January of this year). (From 2000-2006 I lost my minister -- and dear friend--to suicide, two close friends, my nephew who hanged himself, my brother and finally my sister. I was kinda tired. And I was losing my ability to walk. I was starting over for the sixth time in my adult life, I felt.)

This is just a bit of a tribute to my love for my Jessica. She is inextricably entwined in my path to wanting to write again, in wanting to fly if I cannot walk. My Jess

That's enough of the hard stuff. I understand if you don't want to read any of those. I am so grateful for the support you all give me in writing, in letting me know that you don't think it a crazy idea for me to write a book.  Of course, I'd have to write it anyway, because writing is what I do.  I could not stop it, one way or another, if I tried. Like breathing. Like praying, singing, painting.  Like loving. So if I write a book no one wants to publish or read,  I'll keep writing anyway.

If I do not just go down into my studio and get started on those paintings, I will lose my brain altogether, howver. I thought I could create a schedule where I would, oh, paint in the morning, write in the afternoon. Nope. I'll do both in spurts... but as long as I do one or the other every day, then it's fine.

Okay, for those of you newer followers who don't really want to just read the heavy stuff about me, I have other entries that show something else!

NOW About Fairies or Faeries, and other Kinds of Magic
What More you Really Should Oughta Know
For those of you who want the silly and the magic,  Birthing Fairies: the Honest Truth, not the Fake truth    is self-explanatory. Some of you may have not had this in your education and if you have small children or grandchildren, you might need to pay attention to this factual account. Jo over at Majority of Two can corroborate that this is how they are born. She found this out in Canada, so it isn't just me.

Beyond the magic of my mother, I was also given our summers. Huckleberina Finn is a sample of that. Then of course, there was Christmas....

Those three entries are some of the shiny parts of my life.Hence my comparison of my family environment as a rain forest: lush or rotting, with little in between.

As for me, one of the pictures I've dreamed is birthing fairies... a spot on the lake that shines so clear for me still. I finally think I know how to get what I want on paper--the overbright sparkles that get larger as they come to shore. We'll see. And I finally have the right fish for my coral painting... and--Well. I just have to paint is all.

I can't walk away for two months again. Undoubtedly new things to write will start nagging at me softly, then louder I will have to come back and finish them, if only to shut them up. Do you find that, too? That a work of art yells at you to get over there and DO it? That a  story weaves into your dreams and mucks them all up ? Or paintings arrive unannounced and fully blown?

Sometimes the muse is downright rude. Oh. And I've recently begun to write music for the Thursday night group of which I am a part. I never wrote music before in my life. THAT is calling to.

But the thing is? Now I am free. Free of the house that was too much for me, of having to consider anyone else in my days. I am free to fly. And that's WAY easier than walking. My friends dubbed me the Phoenix. I like that, as I said. It's mythical enough, and I am slowly working on a painting of that. Each feather is being cut individually. I work on it when I DO feel weak, when I feel that I cannot take any more pain or loss, or have one more hope placed in my hand to look at and cherish, only to have it taken away and thrown beyond my reach the moment I believe. I mean, really. Who doesn't want to be the center of her own myth? It can be useful when the darkness visits.

The demons rarely stay for long any more. And when the fires come, I FLY. Fly straight up and free.

I'll be back in a couple of weeks, but I will be following your blogs. It's how I start and end most days.

Then, too, I may be back writing sooner if new entries interfere with my dreams and then start yarping loudly at me as the paintings did!

In the meantime, as Carl would say, keep makin' art. I am so very lucky to have made blogging friends here... and I think it all started with Carl at Artistic Balance and Jo at Majority of Two.  And built from there.  If the blogs I follow are not familiar to you, I'd also suggest you root around among them, and give some a try! I know that reading such fine words and seeing such beautiful words  have made me think more, feel more deeply--and have lifted my spirits when I needed it.

Recalling My Jessica

Let's just say I gave birth to an eleven-year-old, but only after her mom let me. My stepdaughter's name was Jessica and her mom's name is Marilyn. Marilyn gratefully and gracefully allowed me to be a mom in the areas she knew she could not--so I got to have a daughter. The word stepdaughter from here on won't be used. Marilyn would agree; there was no STEP in our relationship.

I met her for the first time, when she was six, and huddled with her brother on top of a picnic table because of a BIG, black, scary dog. They were friends with other children I knew, back when I was the traveling surrogate aunt to all my friends' kids. I calmed down the dog and led him away and, for some strange reason, Jason, Jessie's brother, began calling me Santa Claus. Back then, I was not fat, nor particularly jolly. NEVER had a beard, not even now, at 58. But he liked calling me that. He was not yet 4.

Jessie had hair to her waist, and loved to run and to skate, her hair streaming like one of those banners behind a prop plane. "I am HERE!" her hair proclaimed. Most of the time, she was too shy to let people know she was there at all, except when crossed. Then her nimble brain came out in sarcasm and few kids crossed her more than once. The second time was to see whether the first was a fluke. I got her when she was hitting puberty. Some might think this was a mighty tough time to get a child. They would be right; yet Jessie didn't test me the way I've heard others test stepmoms.

The one time she tried to play her mother and me off one another ... Marilyn was picking up the kids from our apartment at dinner time, and I had made Jessica do a couple of chores. This was in the first months of marriage, and I was in a body cast. I needed help with things, and I was the primary caregiver most days. My ex-husband worked late from the first week we were married through that first year. I picked the kids up from school and sometimes fed them if Marilyn was late. This day, Jessie was annoyed that I had made her--dare I say it--empty the dishwasher.

She hugged her mother and was overly affectionate. Jessie's normal greeting was, "Yeah, Mom. I'll be ready in a minute," rather than, oh, say, "Hello." Today? "Oh, Mom, I missed you. I'm all ready."

She buried her head in her mom's body and Marilyn looked at me. I had a smirk plastered on my face. "Yes, she's ready. I made her empty the dishwasher."

Jessie came out for air, glaring at me. Marilyn took a step toward me and we looked at our child, together. She was so confident. "MOM. She makes me do chores. YOU would never do these things to me, right?"

I felt Marilyn's arm around my waist and I rested an arm on her shoulder. Jessie took her favorite pose. Hip out with a hand on it, the other hand behind her back. "Well. I can see THIS isn't gonna work at all!" And the smile broke across her face like dawn, and she giggled her way down the hall.

This was the thing about her. Her fears were enormous as was her anger. Yet she could find the humor as an escape almost all the time. Almost. We used to play "What's the worst that can happen?" with her fears, and it always end that she was homeless in the parking lot of K-Mart, without money for a Blue light special. And so it would end with us laughing.

When we had the "Feminine products" talk--that she would HAVE to learn to get them herself, and, to her absolute disgust, she realized that even grown women still felt a little ooky buying them from teenage boys, she said, "So growing up does NOT make all this stuff go away?"

I said, "No, we just learn to cope with it all better, that's all."

"Well THAT'S just peachy. What on earth is the point?"

"Beats me, Jess, but at least you won't be in it alone."

"In the words of my stepmother who shall remain nameless, BIG WHOOP." And she got out of my car to buy her first box of that which will not be named. I wrote this for her and left it on her bed a couple of nights later.

Jessica's Lullaby © May 5, 1989
Tears my heart, when cries her soul in the night:
Her tongue too loose
Too stiff her walk;
Her passion too slow
Too swift her mind;
Her courage too faint
Too stout her convictions.
All new woman feeling all wrong
In this wrong-feeling all new place;
Alone, afraid,
Hush.

Soothing words and enfolding arms,
Small comforts in her night:
Rest.
You are enough as yourself --
More than enough, though less than all,
A symphony in yourself,
Sleep.
Now stroke her hair and kiss her eyes: You are enough as yourself,
Dream.

Then rests her soul in the night,
With enfolding arms and soothing words.
But how long will comfort last
When she wakes to find nothing changed? Hush.
We are enough as ourselves,
Rest
Dream
Believe.

Jessie knocked on our door at about 1:00 a.m. the night she found that poem. I went into her room, and it was clear she'd been crying. She loved the poem, but there was something bothering her. (It seemed to me that Jessie had a law that nothing would hit her until after midnight.) I sat there and, as was our custom, I gathered her in my arms and rocked a while. Finally, she came out with it. "I can't seem to keep a grandpa and they are both dead now, and even my grandmas are dying."

My parents had died in 1987 and 1989. Her dad's dad had died in 1984. For some reason, it was getting to her. "What are they doing? Is there Heaven and if there is, maybe GRANDMA wouldn't mind flying around with a harp, but that would be kinda boring, right?"

"Well, what would their ideas of Heaven be?"

She thought and thought, then said, "Cards. First all three of them play and Grandma beats the pants off them both, but she gets bored and... she has a huge, enormous garden and she goes in it with the elves and a swing."

"Sounds about right. But the grandpas?"

She had an evil smile, that child. "Okay... The grandpas still play cards and tell very bad jokes to each other and Grandpa Jim tells Poppa stories that have no end, just lots of big words... and Poppa beats the pants off of HIM!"

We both loved that, because my dad had an ego the size of Milwaukee. But then Jessie took my hand and said, "But, you know, maybe Grandpa Jim LETS him win because, you know how they played with Jay and me every New Year's Eve? Grandpa let Jay win at least one game. I asked him why and he said, 'Because Jay's the littlest and I want him to like coming.' And I asked why did it matter so much and he said, 'Because you two are Heaven to me.' So... But we aren't in Heaven, so..." And then she cried more.

I said, "I don't know what Heaven is, but if there is any possibility for him to do it, my dad is seeing this and he's shaking his head at you and telling you, what?"

"None of this SCHMALTZY STUFF!"

Bits and pieces of my daughter. Her life. Her walk. Her gestures. They all seem profound now and so precious. I cling to them all and retell them in my head at night this time of year. Jessie talked backwards. She tried out for drill team FOUR times, until she finally made it. She was content to understudy for the musical and then got to be in it, finally, because a girl broke an ankle. She felt guilty being glad that she was in it. She wrote stories when she was eight, about Albert the Hippo who lived in a house on top of a flagpole, and whose mother would tuck him in after an adventure, and feed him chicken soup.

"As you may imagine, the climb up to home was not easy for a Hippo to make," she wrote.

She died when she was just 21. Her heart gave out from bulimia and alcoholism--she knew she had not licked the problems. She promised me to get help in September, but died in August. My amazing girl. My young woman so close to finding her niche in life, her reason to be.

Don't try to tell me she was not extraordinarily special. That her gestures and fears were just like those of other children. Oh, no. Don't try to say that Jessie was average in any way. Only superlatives fit our children. Period.

Mother and Child Reunion © August, 2005
Entering her empty room, I pause.
I hear her heart cry,
See her in her chair, long hair to one side
so she won’t catch it as she leans back,
arms bracing bridged body.
She struggles to retrieve a pencil from the floor,
Fully stretched, big toe reaching without leaving her seat.
Giggling, prehensile victory as she contorts,
Her knee pointed sideways, penciled foot chest high,
she grabs her prize,
looks up at me with tilted head and smiles.
“I guess now I’ll have to work,” she says,
More laugh than whine, and turns away.
I touch my chest at the dimming light of her hair,
Translucent image floating, still.
I reach.
I hear my heart scream.
“I guess now I’ll have to live,” I say,
More sob than sigh, and turn away.

My Jessie talked backwards, but she lived too full-tilt forward I think. There will never be enough superlatives to capture Jessie's heart.