When Good-bye Means Hello

ADD girl has three separate pieces started for this week’s blog. Fortunately, the other two will keep because they aren’t going to seem any less current in a week or three from today and y’all will never know next weeks idea didn’t spring forth from my forehead the second I sat at the computer. (Oh don’t I wish!) I’m on day three of three off and I’ve kept myself busy with projects in the drafty, dark basement I ironically refer to--when I’m feeling expansive--”the studio”. We celebrated my birthday in fine style at my favorite drinking hole. Nothing like starting a dreaded birthday in a whimsically decorated room sipping a breakfast martini with two of your very favorite people on the planet.

I finished organizing all the lace, trims, linens and fabrics I have been collecting or inherited over the years this past week, too. I refurbished a few tee shirts, sweaters and made a dress this week, too. I’m not such a great seamstress, very slow and can’t get it perfect enough before frustration sets in but this week, I swear I was channeling my mom; a talented seamstress and designer. I was doing things I didn’t know I had forgotten how to do. It was very cool and Zen.

For about a minute.

So for the last month I've been working on repurposing clothing, using bits and pieces of antique textiles on reclaimed/used clothing. I thought I would love it. I thought I would just love love love designing the clothing, doing the handwork, piecing them together. The Girl thought she would just love love love the grunt work at the sewing machine.

Um no.

And that’s ok.

It felt like a chore except for that minute when I fixed a waistband the majority of the time I was discouraged or bored or both.

But this is the first time I have abandoned a project and didn't feel like a failure or that I was quitting because I was too lazy to finish what I started. Quite to the contrary. I feel liberated in the knowledge that I'm really not meant to design clothing from scratch.

Tis the week for beginning new things or putting to rest old things. A Happiness Project was launched by one of my new Facebook friends (love this woman. Love. Her. Sister of a guy I went to high school with. He was cute and wild and sort of dangerous back then. Apple doesn’t fall too far from that tree or so it seems.) Another friend is meeting with a group of architects and designers to discuss the feasibility of starting a career in design in this economy (I have one word for her: Slim) Finally, I know I have yammered about this to death but my father is getting married! I can’t wait to get to know our new family. Everyone has been so warm and welcoming, it’s grace at work. Besides this I have a great excuse to go to Texas Hill Country as many times as they can stand me.

I'm still putting together an Etsy store (if I'm satisfied with this spring's work, I'll open in July and the few pieces of clothing we did will be there. I have a feeling the store is going to be a mish-mash of all sorts of things I like to do. My biggest fear is I will end up on regretsy.

Today is the first day in a few I’ve been really happy--at the bottom of my soul happy--in about a week. Growing older was weighing on me; my exhaustion with nursing is at a critical point; and my son’s frustration with joblessness and boredom is weighing on me. Apparently, it’s so hard on him he can’t bring himself to clean his room or empty the dishwasher when asked…but that’s another blog, isn’t it? And OH. MY. GOD. his utter lack of sound judgment has me closer to running away than my job! The good news (?) I’m not alone in this and know more mother’s with kids like this than I care to think about with shutter over the future of the planet. His underdeveloped cerebral cortex is making me wish for a lobotomy or running away some place no one think to look for me like Vegas or Pittsburgh.

But isn’t it wonderful I know what makes me happy? Playing with words, ideas, paper, glue, paint, and little bits of stuff makes me happy. Cooking, nagging, and taking care of sick people: not so much.

This made me really happy today:

The Discipline of Joy
3/10/2010
Joy's a choice. Joy's a discipline. Misery's easy. Sometimes, you don't feel like you can handle the burden of joy, so you slouch and frump and sigh and feel exhausted. Joy can be a real pain,like doing elevated push-ups on your TRX system in the basement. Right now, the joy doesn't want to ignite. I'm feeling the pressure of writing against the schedule of outside things. Inside vs. outside. I have to rush back to school today--my writing day--to sit in a PhD oral defense. Tomorrow, I have to teach, though I can get in some writing after. But Friday, I rush away to Tucson
Festival of Books. Love Tucson, love my friends there, love the festival, and I
love fancy hotel weekends with Cinderella. But...Teresita...Tomas...deadlines...work. I can't get it done. So my decision
today is to embrace the discipline of Joy. Capital J. Because I'm feeling a li'l
beat. Luis A. Urrea


It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it this burden of joy.

Find some joy. Like me, you might have to look in the spaces between the words or the space between the beat of your heart but it’s there. I promise.

Faded Photographs

Even though I have a lot of blog worthy ideas swirling around in my head; I promised myself this week, before I launch back into the world of nursing, I will finish Wally’s scrapbook. It’s about time isn’t it? I thought it would take maybe six months of diligent work but it took me eighteen months! I kept hitting creative or emotional walls and then came summer with the advent of my other writing project and gardening. The picture on the blog is the last image in the album. It was a very weird picture of him standing next to my dresser in my messy bedroom when he was two. Why I took his picture at that moment I’ll never remember. What makes this picture strange is it is triple exposed and in the shadows you can see Christmas as well as a fragment from an image on a deserted highway outside of Taos. Even in the 90’s with point and shoot cameras it was hard to double expose film. This film was exposed three times. I remember talking to the guy at the camera store who told me chances are the film didn’t advance in the camera and it was a small miracle any images were visible.. Much less a collage of images which capture our busy life, and at the time, happy life as a family. The Beav came downstairs Tuesday night when I was laying out the last pages and asked me if this was Wally’s Christmas present. I laughed the idea off because, please, would a 19 year old really want a baby book and scrapbook of their school years as a gift? Beav assured me that Wally has changed so much over the last two months that he would probably think it was “cool” I had finished the book. When I finished this afternoon, I was a little choked up like someone who had finished their first marathon. It was a relief to have completed the task but at the same time I was really saying good-bye to the little boy.

One boy album down, one to go.

I think Beav is secretly hoping I start on his book this winter but I’m a tired of looking at little boy pictures so I think the next project will be to put the very old and very fragile family photos Dad recently gave me in an album. Just a simple acid free album, no embellishments and the journaling will be limited to identifying (if I can) people in the photographs. Some of these photos are unspeakable funny and sweet: my cousin and Sister playing with Hula Hoops, baby me pulling Sister’s hair, my mother and her sisters over the years grouped together, the body language apparent which sisters had just fussed with one another. Many of the photos I’ve seen over and over again but one picture was a surprise. It’s a candid snapshot of my father and mother standing together, he is standing behind her and his face is almost shadowed by her hair blowing back. They are bundled up and probably huddled close against a chilly Kansas wind. Their hands are gently intertwined one with the other making this beautiful candid photo sweetly intimate. I love stealing glimpses at the past before I was born. I also have a set of photos from a particularly rowdy party my parents had when I was about two. Who knows where I was that night, probably locked in my room with my eight year old sister supervising me, giving me Kool-aid and animal crackers when she wasn’t trying to convince me to stick my head between the very wide slats. I’m kidding I was probably not in a playpen but playing with a screwdriver and an electrical outlet [wink]*) Anyhow, those crazy kids were having fun, drinking their very strong cocktails and smoking their strong cigarettes. Those were the days, weren’t they when you could put your two year old in a play pen, get drunk and smoke. Damn, I was born too late.



*for the record, I was at my grandmother’s house and was no doubt being indulged by her and teased by my older cousins.

ATC Mania

It warmed up enough the last week or so for me to work in the basement aka "my studio" (say it with a haughty lilt because I am such an Ar-Teest). Anyhow, it wasn't Arctic in the basement and I made a few ATCs. I like to make them because they are fast and easy.

this one has made an appearance on the blog. The anatomically correct heart image was inspired by an ATC Jas Faulkner shared with me.



The background paper is from the back of a Nordstrom catalogue and the dragon fly is a detail in another mail order catalogue.


This ATC combines a fragment of Emerson and a detail from a page in Kahlo's illustrated journal.


More Emerson on an altered Tarot card.


An iris I actually drew and painted myself!


La luna card from my favorite new tool: a vocabulary game I bought at the Cancun flea market. Plus antique buttons and a transparent copy of the background in the first ATC.

Thanks to Jas for creating http://twopointfivebythreepointfive.blogspot.com/

(she might be sorry she told me about it!)

Inspire Me Thursday: "I am"

I'm just under the wire for Inspire Me Thursday's prompt of "I am"






I took this last night in front of our kitchen window. It gives you the feel of our colorful Mexican Fiesta kitchen and the lovely tree I contemplate when I wash dishes.

ATC

This is my response to this week's Arty Girlz challenge. My humble sun and moon ATC will cheer me this weekend when late winter returns to the Rocky's. The background is a card from a Spanish vocabulary game I found at the Cancun flea market this January. I used a hand painted design as the overlay. I decreased the intensity on my printer to make it my design more transparent and copied onto opaque sticker paper. The buttons add a bit of whimsy and sun imagery.

The last day

I’m waiting but I don’t mind waiting in the microcosmic sense of the word. Those short stints of waiting: in front of the school a few afternoons a week; in check out lines at the grocery store. I have a file of articles pulled from magazines to read in the car for the after school wait and I amuse myself reading tabloid covers at the store. If I’m waiting at home there is always some sort of ’net entertainment. I don’t like waiting in the macrocosmic sense. You know, waiting for the big stuff: like the end of the Bush era, or for vacations to start.

Why am I content to wait? I think it’s twofold: My job is terribly time dependent. Medicines must be given at scheduled times. Tasks and duties must be preformed within a prescribed time. They simply must.. Rather than being a clock controlled freak at home, I work at not over scheduling my life and if I have more than three things I MUST DO OR THE WORLD WILL STOP SPINNING on my days off, I‘m pissy and angry about it. Today for instance, is the last day of the year and the boys are with me. Wally stayed out until about God only knows when last night and is still asleep; Beav gorged himself on The Sims until about that time so they have both just now rousted themselves to a waking state at the bright and early hour of 1pm (hey, it‘s 0600 in New Zealand!). I was waiting on them to get up so we could do something together. Maybe see this movie . Maybe go to the mall so they could spend some of their Christmas cash

What did I do while I was waiting? I read a few blogs, chatted with friends; goofed off at facebook. I could have been in the chilly basement making scrap pages or revamping some frames I’m using in a home dec project. I could have even gone to my second favorite crack dealer--the fabric store--but I didn’t. The only thing on my To-Do list for today I’ve come close to tackling is writing a blog entry. The two more important things on the list involve thinking about nursing stuff and aren’t terribly interesting. They’ll get done. Eventually.

So am I procrastinator? I don’t think of myself as one because I have places in my life where things must be done. The boys must be places, I have to show up at work on time and preform my duties on time. When I was in school, I didn’t wait until the last minute to study for tests or write papers. If that had been my approach, I would be flippin’ burgers and living in a trailer park. I’m not smart enough to fake my way through school. My Quaker ancestors would think of me as a lazy but then that was the 17th century and I’m not growing my own food or clearing land or fending off Indians. So I have time on my hands to see what my invisible friends are thinking about today; bantering and/or arguing with them. What a lush life.

This being said, last week I made up my mind to be more productive in the new year because I’m about to morph into one of the a Wall-e character. I’m promising myself every day off I will do something physical. Physical beyond pushing the vacuum cleaner or opening the ‘frig door. This will require getting up earlier than 9ish. Working out, walking and going to yoga has been spotty for me but once I do them, I feel much better; my body and soul feel lighter. After the physical is accomplished, I will tackle the creative. The joy I felt those few days before Christmas when I made my sister’s gifts did more for my soul and my state of mind than hundreds of hours in therapy. She loved them by the way. Loved them! I have plenty of projects to occupy me without spending loads of money. Which circles my third goal to eliminate debt and save enough money to go here next year. My fourth goal, to develop a much needed habit of daily meditation and gratitude journaling will--from a metaphysical standpoint--bring me closer to the end of the debt and closer to Spain.

I know I can reach all of these goals. I’m mapping them out day by day. Besides, if I can quit smoking and wean off the nicotine patch the first six months of 2008 and I can do anything. It will take some adjustment to the daily
to-do list extending beyond two items. Fortunately, they aren't chores so it isn't like I'm resolving to poop scoop everyday!

But in the meantime, it’s still 2008 and I have time to check my email and poke around Craigslist before I get busy, right? The last day of my procrastinating life feels much like the last day I was a smoker who smoked cigarettes. Good. I am reveling in my hanging out. It feels good to wait. But unlike smoking I will be able to endulge myself now and again with hanging out and doing nothing. Unless I'm truly addicted to hanging out and doing the bare minimium and that would be bad.

Today’s passage from Manifest Your Desires starts with these words: “Be easy about all of this. Life is supposed to be fun, you know.”

It is supposed to be fun!

Ofrenda

Thursday is usually my day to blog but after Sunday's offering and a perfectly craptastic week on the home front I decided to not bother with blather about my life. Besides, it would look something like $^%@$^% Wally, *@**# being a nurse, ^%#@ oral surgery for Beav. You get the picture? Not a stellar week in my world and June is so edgy she is about to fall off the cliff; legs, arms and pearls flailing and windmilling all the way down to the big thud below.

I took a peek at one of my favorite blogs and was completely captivated by the challenge. The theme is Day Of The Dead. I was totally up for it given how much I love ofrendos and alters. The glitzier and more over the top the better. Not only did my ofrendo meet the inspiremethursday challenge but it went hand in handwith the artgirlz challenge. I feel much like I did my second go round with college when I mastered the art of recycling essays by tweaking sources and thesis statements a bit. So now I'm tweaking art challenges. You know what? My life isn't really that bad if I have the time, imagination and resources to spend a few hours crafting today.


Here is my alter constructed out of copies of photos and bits of my mother's old costume jewelry. I put sand from Mykonos on the floor of the box; all of the buttons came from clothing she made for me and herself; plus a button from a fancy bed skirt she made for me when I was six.
The front





The inside


The sides


I might not be ready for an Etsy shop but I'm having a good time!

Dithering

Color me pissy today. Hormones maybe? A safe guess given I burst into tears when I saw a bald woman outside the middle school today. She was younger than myself and no doubt a chemo patient. Crying did help burn off some of my frustration but seeing her made me ashamed because the biggest reason I’m pissy today is I didn’t accomplish a single thing on my “to-do” list. I’m pretty sure this woman doesn’t give a shit about her to-do list and would trade places with me. On top of the horror of not accomplishing Important Tasks, I had to cook dinner and I hate to cook. I’m a terrible every day cook, give me a dinner party or holiday to cook for and I will rock a recipe. I can make beautiful food but just not on days that aren’t special. Like most Wednesdays. On top of all of this, I had to wait on Beaver after school and rather than just sitting in the parking lot I visited my crack dealer (insert Michaels link here) to pick up a few things I couldn’t live without.
Once I get there, I sort of stumble around the busy Halloween and Christmas displays. “Oh! Shiny! Look ornaments! Pretty! . . .Why am I here?” I forgot what I needed. My errand served as beautiful illustration of how my day had been going. I was supposed to get up early, walk the dog, do my laundry and go to Pilates and none of things happened. I also had great plans to finish a painting and start a massive music download for a special mix CD. Didn’t happen. So what did I do? I dithered around with images to use as transfers on shirts. But I didn’t actually do the transfers onto fabric because moving the iron and ironing board to the studio felt Herculean. I opted for sitting on my ass in front of the computer and HGTV messing around with images.

My Disregard the Body Karma came up and bit my wobbly dimpled ass this afternoon when I tried to upload a photoshopped image to flickr for this mixed media challenge. (link here). I swear my computer is possessed with gremlins playing “Hide The File“. My guess is a nine year old would have figured out where the file is because I’m all Short Bus all the way when it comes to software. I never did outsmart the Photoshop and Vista gremlins, rather I had to make a copy the appropriate size and then scan that down into a special desktop folder designated “Collage” blatantly displayed on my desktop. Given this frustration, I think my silent meltdown was appropriate when I arrived at the middle school in my gym clothes (too lazy to change) and received the: “mom-I-have-to-do-a-project-with-Tanner phone call” exactly thirty seconds after I had just made my ten mile commute.
I wanted to scream at myself for leaving the house in gym clothes, Sure I could make good use of the time and run an errand but I was in flippin’ gym clothes! I’m a Texas Girl and we don’t do anywhere in gym clothes except a jogging path and the gym. Ok, I might go to the emergency room but somebody better be Exsanguinated
I confess, once upon a time I routinely took the children to school in my robe and nightgown but this was when I lived exactly six tenths of a mile from the school. (One of my favorite people on the planet does this but she tops the robe with a beautiful scarf and makes sure she has on lipstick. I was fooled for about a decade.) Anyhow, I’m sitting in the school parking lot fuming at my kid for having the audacity of being so responsible and doing HOMEWORK after school. (It’s all so ridiculous , isn’t it?) when it occurred to me to just go to the crack dealer’s, gym clothes be damned. And so I went only to be distracted and daunted by Christmas to the point of forgetting my gold paint.
Despite my terrible attitude, everything turned out well, no one fainted at the sight of me in my stretch pants and tee-shirt; five o’clock traffic was forgiving and I cooked without whining (out loud at least).
Meanwhile, Dinner wasn’t a complete disaster and I ended up making chili out of various bits of leftovers in the ‘frig. Recently, The Girl kindly asked me to never make Sloppy Joes again. I had relied on them too many times and burnt her out. (all Klassy all the time at Chez Cleaver!) So what do we have in the ‘frig among the leftovers? Sloppy Joes and I think I did a fine job of disguising them with Other Stuff when I composed my chili. I even hit a sort of Zen space where I forgot how much I hate everyday cooking and sautéed onions in tarantella salsa and beer which added a nice kick to my Whore’s Chili.
So now that dinner is made and the dishes are washed and everyone is home; I’m feeling a little lighter. Almost ebullient. My weekly housewifery chores were done yesterday and I have one more day away from the hospital and yes, I have big plans:
Up early for a ass kicking class at the gym
Walk the dog after the boys leave for school
Meet Ms. A for a gallery tour at ten
Begin Christmas projects
Make dinner.
Dinner! Argh!

Scrapping the Past

Six months ago, I took on the huge task of making scrapbooks for the boys. Huge because Wally is 18 and Beaver is 14 and neither of them even had baby books. They did each have a small box with cards, pictures, mementos. I suppose I could take the easy way out and just scribble their names on the sides of the boxes and call it done. Trust me, this idea has crossed my mind a few times as I play detective and try to remember when a specific picture was taken. The good news/bad news? I simply don’t have that many pictures. When I ran away to myself in 2000, I left the albums with Ward; I was a bad mother and didn’t deserve the albums. (Oh God is that pathetic or what?). It felt cruel to take them with me: I was the one leaving, after all. “Tearing the family to shreds” was one of the many accusations hurled at me. The family pictures must stay with the family. I was no longer in the family according to Ward. The albums proved to be so *important* to Ward, they now languish in a storage shed. Given his propensity to dithering it isn’t worth waiting until 2020 or his death to repossess the albums. Frankly, I have bigger things to nag Ward about than old pictures. What concerns me is from an archival point of view: I just sort of threw pictures into cheap albums which continue to expose the photos to the element. My frustration rests more in the damage being done to the pictures rather than possessing the pictures. I should have taken better care of so many things, these pictures are just a small detail.

Fortunately, I had the foresight to “steal” the extra pictures haphazardly put in yellow envelopes. The B team pictures--you know the ones--heads are half gone and if they aren’t half gone, one or all of us are sprouting poles or trees. If we aren’t maimed our smiles are goofy or nonexistent. I lucked out and have a few gems. When I shared my project with Mother, she gave me all of her pictures to add to my little horde. I’m lucky only one very favorite picture is lost and I discovered several I thought lost. One of the lost treasures caused an explosion of weeping. It’s the only puppy picture of our Kipper-Dog and it captures his goofy personality like no other picture. (insert picture here). I only have three pictures from our trips to Canada. Luckily, I kept trip journals and they are lucid, thorough and without naval gazing so those memories are preserved for my family. I even stumbled across a journal Ward and I both kept when we went to Yellowstone before Wally was born. Sweet gifts all of these.

Looking over these pictures has brought back so many memories but the fact remains there is much I can’t remember. I can’t remember The Beav’s first step (nor do I have a picture of it). My periodic depressions have also muddled my memory, too. Two significant episodes have blocked a lot of memories. Unfortunately, one of these periods is much of Beaver’s first year. Go Team PPD! The other episode was the summer of 1999. But this space in time is easier to remember because I received real and credible help and it was the beginning of my Real Life.

I do have stacks of self-serving crap masquerading as prose journals and I thought reading them would help jog my memories of the boys and help tell the story; in some cases it has. However because they are my personal journals and I am terribly self-centered, they are simply documentation of inner turmoil vomited into spiral notebooks. If I relied on my journals, my scrapbook journaling would read something like this:

"Isn’t this a sweet picture of you and Daddy? This was taken the week we got the demand letter from the IRS and Mommy had to find daycare for you so she could make money taking care of other people’s babies so the government wouldn't take away our house!”

“A white Christmas for the Cleavers! Gram and GrandDad took you out for a sled ride isn’t that fun? Good thing you were outside because Mommy was screaming at Daddy after she caught him red-handed doing something unforgivable!”

“Ahhh yes, the trip to Texas. Ward certainly was upset when I just loaded the two of you into the car and drove alone all the way to Fort Worth!”

Sometimes the desire to include angry snippets is overwhelming and my jaw hurts from pushing away the unhealthy compulsion. I did manage a sardonic touch on the page featuring the last picture: “Same Life, Different City”. How poetic my mother lopped off the top of my head reflecting how I felt at the time: my brain half gone; Wally tugging at me and Beaver squirming to get away.

Because my glass is sometimes half full, it took me a minute or three to remember the stop we made in the middle of nowhere New Mexico a few hours before the picture was taken. The night was one of those perfect dark nights free of clouds or moon. I was taking a break so I rolled the window down, smelling the twlight lit mesa and listening to the quiet. It was well after midnight and the highway was empty. Wally roused when he felt the car stop so I asked him if he would like to join me in the front seat and look at the stars. He clamored into the front seat and I held his sleepy body close to mine as we hung our heads out of the window, the night air brisk across our faces. He gasped as he looked out at the millions of stars. Then I exclaimed: “Wally! It’s the milky way! A magic cloud of stars!“ We ohhed and ahhed over the view for a few minutes until I felt his head bob and I knew I should finish the first leg of our trip. When I remember things like this; my love for the boys and even the way I once fought for happiness with Ward floods back to me in a brilliant instantaneous joy and peace.

Reading my journals has also been hard because as chance would have it the first entry I opened to was written the day we discovered Beaver was gravely ill--at 22 weeks gestation--and my own health was at risk. April 1994. I hadn’t read those entries since I wrote them and I still hold the cellular grief of hearing the hard news. “We have reason to believe there is a grave chance your baby will not be viable at birth. If he is viable, he will require surgery and at least twelve weeks in the ICU.” Hard news for anyone to hear. Especially a Neonatal ICU nurse, knowing what the outcome can look like and the slim odds of a favorable outcome. (obviously it was favorable, isn’t he a strapping fine boy?)

April remains a hard month for me and because I’m a bit slow, it only took about ten thousand hours of therapy to realize why I greeted spring with a dull sense of loss. I’ve learned to observe April with an extra dose of self-care and to find little ways to show Beaver how blessed we are to have him in our lives. Surprisingly, scrapping these pictures from spring/summer 1994 wasn’t as hard as I thought. I remembered how re-engaged Ward became when there was a possibility he could lose his wife and child; I reunited with my sister and forged a healthy and vibrant relationship with her after years of estrangement.

My memories make me wish I had been a better SAHM. My journals just make me wince over how truly terrible I was at it. The free floating resentment was so unfair to my boys. Staying home out of duty isn’t the way to do it. Had my earning power been on par with Ward’s he would have been home with the boys. Ward may be a lot of things but he is profoundly more patient and easygoing. I’m amazed my kids aren’t more anxious and screwed up.

I sound eaten alive with bitterness when I describe the pictures I include in this blog but after working my way through the bad bits it is easy to remark on what was good and right about the snapshots; and I am lucky enough to experience serendipitous healing. Not that my life is so terribly special. All lives are bittersweet and mine is no more or less than others.

So now I’m scrapping the past, and with each page the bitter is sealed behind the photo. The only thing you can see is the sweetness of two childhoods.