This is so not what I want to blog about, but I've got to get some of this out. I'll let friends know a little bit at a time, but thats about it. And, just to let them know why their stuff isn't done yet or I'm late for something. I just had to take a minute.

Life's been hard recently and just when I thought it can't get any harder, it did. Mom had been chronically ill and on her last days/weeks/months, but I had to put being with her on the backburner to work at what I could to make ends meet. I worked my ass off painting, promoting, etc. The day that Mom got really sick, I broke and told Stephen to do what he had to do to get whatever job he could. I literally told him to stalk the HR people where he's sent resumes and meant it. 

Then, good news: we got relief when Stephen got word that he was hired in Seattle. I can't even remember the name of the place... Its going to be a drive, but I am so relieved. I'm just worried for him travelling that much and being tired. It is so hard to be ripped apart by having to choose between making a life for your child/family or spend your last experiences with your Mom. I chose and now I don't have to. Thank you, God.  

Tuesday, Sept. 10, Mom was admitted to the hospital with with colitis- caused by the serious chemo-type antibiotics that is supposed to help win the war against Nocardia pneumonia she contracted in June/July of this year. Long term steroid use (which is sometimes just one course) creates vulnerability to Nocardia. She had to go to the hospital... they took her off the antibiotics for the colitis. The Nocardia had no speedbumps and then took off like a shot and sepsis ensued (the infection is in the blood then).

Then septic shock. Seeing her there, swollen like a blimp and leaking fluid from her extremities and on a ventilator, was too much. There is a point in illness when you had rather bear the huge loss of a loved-one rather than see them hold on through suffering for you. You can let your loved ones go much easier than watching them suffer. I think that is how parents of terminally ill children survive the aftermath. I could survive Devyn's passing better than seeing him suffer- oh God. Just please don't ever put me, him, us through that, please, no part of that. No parent should.

So, these days are filled with getting up with less sleep under my belt than I'd like, trying to take care of Dev as best I can, grabbing a minute for computer work and chores, trying to keep more patience than I feel like I can handle at the moment, going to the hospital and loving Mom, coming home, doing dinner, staying up late and working. Its hard and sad, but its supposed to be. And I'm not doing it alone, Stephen is here and doing the best he can, too. 

I'm so grateful to love what I do and have a passion for it. Graphics, promo for the Stanwood-Camano Arts Guild, painting, loving people through what I do. As a gift from God, it has been my saving Grace. 

They took the ventilator out today, but her other numbers aren't looking good, but we'll see how that changes with this new antibiotic. She woke up talking about Mary, Mary, Mary Magdalene. Her mind isn't here and she's in between places and the Angels, Spirits, Guides are helping her to let go here by forming relationships there. They know she won't let go because of the love she has here. That is what I think is going on. I really think they tried earlier and it didn't work- she's a clinger and she wouldn't let go. This time, they're taking their time and easing her into it- but that means her body feels more pain than we here want to see her feel. 

I can't wait to share the dream that Stephen and I had. It'll be a painting, probably one of my best. Just when I think things can't get more beautiful, rich, mysterious or unbelievable, it does.  

 

Don't read this if you don't want your mood to drop like one of those jets with bad batteries. Read on if you want someone to relate to or just out of curiousity.

I've got so much work to do, but I'm taking a mental health evening. I read Damn You AutoCorrect! and got a good laugh. I even had a nap. I needed a mental health evening instead of working at every available minute cuz Mom had to be taken to the hospital again at about 5 a.m. this morning via ambulance. She started vomiting and had other "issues", while her hands were tingling and burning like fire. Sounded like an allergic reaction to me. I didn't take her, but that didn't mean that I wasn't up bothered, tho. Yes, I prayed. 

Today was my day. Stephen and I started switching days (one day is his work day and the next is mine) and we get a bunch more done that way. I was glad today was mine; I got to paint. It didn't help with my attitude, tho, like it usually does.

I'm just tired. Bone tired. What triggers my depression is stressful events that just keep coming, like ocean swells knocking me down over and over, and I think thats whats going on.

Normally, I'm a conqueror- I don't worry, I deal with "it", attack whatever it is head on when "it" happens and I'm not afraid of much of anything. But this shit keeps coming. Just when I think I've got a little while to recuperate, I get hit again. And I'm starting to get pissed off about it. God, fate, bad luck, whatever it is, give me a freaking break for about two months. Just let me catch my breath and get a few steps forward, ok?

Not that I think life shouldn't be this way, that these experiences are unfair, it what it is and I could be anybody. I would feel better if I could get a leg up out of this pit that keeps getting deeper. Every time I get my stuff set up to go out and network with other art sellers/dealers/interior designers, something serious happens and all forward progress has to cease. I get a project going and momentum (you know, the "flow" where its coming together and you're in the zone) I have to stop to write some dry assed complaint form with the Mississippi Board of Realtors or Dispute of Settlements and Fees. Its both draining and distracting, then there's this recuperation time (that may or may not happen) and then shit hits the fan again:

continued below this line.............

So anyway, after watching Brene Brown, the painting's meaning finally became comprehensible. It is about how the outside world lives in a space of ego and armor and I didn't. Never have. I tried and it felt completely un-natural, so I shut up and shut down.

Because of this, the feeling of belonging never came to me (until many years later when I met fellow artists/sensitives). Until then, "Fitting in" was something completely alien, and never so evident as when I was in the throws of my breakdown. The scream came from the feeling of not being able to escape it, this emotional knowledge of the disparity between what is inside people and what they show. There is a real person in there somewhere beyond the armor and spikes. Although people's internal workings are none of my business, open-ness is a gift not many people give. Sad, because they get so much more out of the interaction.

The rabbit is the Velveteen Rabbit. Like the Velveteen rabbit, you become real once you have been loved to the point of pain (intimacy brings pain). Real relationships bring arguments and misunderstandings... the rabbit has a scar on its heart and also its wrist. Its in the shape of Edvard's original person, with the same acidic colors (agitated depression heightens adhd or any of your senses, everything feels like an assault). Besides that, check out the dudes walking up the pier. You can't get a read on them, they don't want to look you in the eye. The one without the spikes actually smiled.

In the background are the tell-tale trees painted by every MS gulf coast artist that shows. All the trees look the same, so since this is about not fitting in, I put them in there. Most of the artists of the region also painted shrimpboats and magnolias at some point, so I have a shrimpboat in the background (that didn't exist- due to Katrina) and after feeling shunned at several art shows there (and not from this painting, either, lol) I painted USS FU as the boat's name. 

The struggle of my entire life had revolved around this ONE topic. When no one lives in the space you do or is willing to take off their psychic clothes either, the hunger for intimacy of being real with another person like yourself creates a starvation, a famine of the soul. At the time, I didn't know why or where it was coming from, but the depression had stripped me of any psychic skin and exposed the real guts of the matter. God was part of this, but God had stepped into the background... I suppose to allow me to be taken apart to be put back together again. How many other artists cannibalize their creations to make something new and improved?

For more information about psychic upheavals and re-integrations, read here about "THE POSITIVE DISINTEGRATION THEORY"

How do we learn to fear being vulnerable? When do we learn to hide our feelings? One of the first times I remember something like that happening, I was playing with little neighbor kids. They were a little snooty, I was 5 or 6. I think I had mosquito bites and bruises all over my legs (being a tomboy) and they picked on me about it. Unrelenting in the torment, I went home crying.

That didn't change me, it didn't bother me that much: what stuck with me the longest was when I wrote them a note telling them how it effected me, my Mom telling me to stop crying and to tear up the note. It was the look on her face and the message "don't give them the satisfaction" and then something deeper... "how can she be so weak?"

My Mom is a strong woman who had a hard life. She cries for no one while they are alive and the only times I've seen her cry was for a pet, her brother and my Dad when they died. She has the hardest time crying (when she does) and her whole body shakes as if in a panic attack. So this is evident in her fear response towards anyone else's vulnerability. Cry if you fall down, sure, but the rest? Suck it up.

I'm not alone and neither are parents in these messages, given or received. So, that is how life went for me for 30 years. I never could understand why someone just couldn't be honest with their perspectives and perceptions and so I was completely conscious of keeping "it" all in. My art was the only release for the real me underneath so much so that I forgot how to talk about it. I had a realization something about me felt different from how everyone else appeared... and I wanted something unintelligible. Life felt like it had been inhabited by hard-shelled hostile entities, but I didn't know why. I felt de-skinned, ultra sensitive and exposed. 

Fast forward. Not only had I been dealing with invisible constraints and saw them in other people, I had also been dealing with a mild to moderate depression since graduation in '03, in '05 Katrina hit. The depression until then had taken the form of anxiety and agitated depression also known as mixed state or mixed episode (a very dangerous kind that infiltrates your thoughts, behaviors but with an anger and anxiety that makes one very scared of one's own capabilities. Most depressed people would kill themselves if they had the motivation, with mixed episodes, you have the energy, PLUS rage.)

Anyway, after Katrina, the need struck everyone everywhere and I couldn't help. People died, families were without anything, children didn't have homes, food, toys, anything. (I cannot stand suffering and have to do something.) At the time, I had JUST gotten into therapy. My father had just had a quintuple bypass (yes, quintuple. 5 arteries!!) and had lost everything in his home that had gotten 4-5 feet of storm surge.

The stress was too much to bear. One day, my Dad walked up to me in the kitchen while I was cooking chili for my whole family and instantly a tape played in front of my eyes in my mind of a scene of him with that expression, and I, when I was 3 years old. Front to back in complete clarity of me trying to talk him out of killing himself and trying to talk him into living. The "movie" included the sights, smells, sounds and emotions of that time. I was three, helpless, had no idea that the world existed outside my front door and that my dad's life--- and mine- were about to crumble.

That, my dear, is a flashback. And not the post-acid induced kind (which I never took, btw) or the fluffy, fuzzy flashbacks of romance movies. Its also symptom of PTSD.

For the first time since my teen years, I had been put in the position to care for my father. The first time was an unhealthy, parasitic version of exploitation in which I cared for his emotional health when I was only 3... the second was a natural progression of his own age and mortality, but the similarity was there enough to trigger the flashback.

I caught my breath, said nothing and finished dinner. It wasn't easy, but i did it. Throughout life in other areas, things had gotten progressively worse. People don't know that depression filters EVERYTHING that comes through your senses into your thoughts and heart and then filters everything that comes out of you into the world. It is like a black filter.

Something as simple as walking down a dock can be turned into an Alfred Hitchcock scene. As I was walking down a dock (we were looking at hurricane devastation), we encountered some fishermen on what was left of the dock. (what the hell???)

Instantly, I had the painting of Edvard Munch's The Scream flash before my eyes-- and I understood what he felt like. The people looked hostile (probably dealing with depression on their own, too, from Katrina) and had no friendly expression whatsoever. I got home and painted "Velveteen Scream". It was the pictoral expression of what vulnerability, and the lack of, feels like. Disconnection. Click the picture for more information on the painting and its symbolism.    

Oh, the memory mirror. It is a conglomeration of all the minutia I've accumulated throughout the years, and its amazing that something as common and ordinary as sticks or as grotesque and morbid as dead fish bones can be used and turned into something beautiful. For art,  I collect anything from driftwood to shells to glass beads (I've got a thing for cobalt blue ones), bones, broken glass,  ropes and hooks. In the above picture, you can see the glass rocks aligning the frame and the glass mosaic squares added for design elements.

Like the sea, the broken mirror pieces reflect aspects of who we are. On a nice day, we can be chilled and relaxed, having fun in a bathing suit with sun tan lotion on. On a terribly rocky boat, we are prone to getting sick and cursing the one who talked you into going out without checking the weather first. After a life changing event, we can become someone failing to hold themselves or others together. Which aspect is the real you? Which is the real sea? They all are. And we are as transient as the sea's moods.

Yes, this fits into the category of sentimental, memorial and mourning art combined. The mirror's name comes from the fact that the sea has taken so much, especially from those of us who have lived on the southern coast (and now perhaps the northeastern part, too).

The sea didn't take my house in Katrina, but it took my Dad's. No one realizes that sometimes its not the houses that get demolished, but the beliefs about who you were and what is dependable get washed away.

I'd always played the super-responsible and care-taking role, but I couldn't any more. I broke. Seeing so much suffering day in and day out, plus old memories of childhood being dug up had taken its toll. Truth told, I was dealing with PTSD. No one tells you that you don't have to be in a war to get that or that the things you do to cope with PTSD can compound it and make it worse. Things like: Having to tell my elderly father that I wasn't emotionally capable at the time of helping him rebuild. He was on his own and that was painful to see.

God does find a way because a church group helped him put his house back together again and he loved their company. That was 2005. Next March, a week to the day after my 33rd birthday, he passed away without ever getting out of the FEMA trailer and into his "new" house. That was hard enough, but he died with the belief that I didn't help him because I didn't love him. A bit of time later, the sea took the ashes of my father, too. 

But the sea, too, gives back. After the mess that Katrina was, both inside and outside my head, I was given the breath of freedom in a thought. "I had stayed in an uncomfortable place my whole life for other people and now was the time to get out of it". We had a baby son who I didn't want to grow up as skeeter-food or have to deal with the insecurity of possibly having his parents, house or toys blown away. Stephen was happy with the idea, too, because he was tired of the heat, bugs and hurricanes that is the Mississippi Gulf Coast. We packed up and moved our conglomerative collections to Washington state.  (more below the next picture)

It took us 8 days and 2 trucks to get us and our stuff here, but it was so worth it. The air smelled clean, the sun was bright and clear and who ever heard of seeing mountains from Wal Mart?? The first thing we did, besides see the houses, was go to the beach. Beaches here aren't like beaches in Mississippi, they have CLEAR water! The water doesn't smell and the ground is covered with colored rocks, driftwood and beach glass seen below. And I've been bitten by mosquitoes more in 15 minutes in MS than the entire 5 months we've been here.

I love the iridescent colors that show up where and when you least expect it. Nope, thats not a trick in photoshop or a trick of light, it really does have blue and green glitter that shows up sometimes, sometimes purple shimmer, sometimes turquoise. Just like the sea, this mirror has its moods, too. (And Pisces people, too, btw). Some of the shells are hidden, like the one in the lower right of the frame, painted and then highlighted with opalescent powders, some are natural.

What does the whole thing mean? The sea was the beginning of a journey and its the destination. One of my favorite things to do here is beach-comb.

The mirror's meaning: Its a pulling together of the various parts of my life to tell a cohesive story, a cohesive person. To leave out or deny one would take away from the beauty, complexity, depth and intricacy of the person AND the composition. Isn't that true for everyone?