Notes on My Life

Letters of Remebrence

May 7th, 2023

Tomorrow is the Monday, the 8th of May; it is VE Day. I am home alone with the boys this long holiday weekend. Yesterday I realised that the service for my mother in Georgia is this upcoming Friday. My aunt, her sister, sent me a reminder via a message on Facebook. How painfully modern, in a time when a phone call is too personal, too intimate. It is somehow more appropriate to communicate with a distanced relative by social media message. We all just accept this disconnection casually, in the age of connectivity, never really present, but represented everywhere by a version of ourselves that we feel like we can share and not be bothered.

Having been reminded, I am overwhelmed with emotions, strong pain, and deep sadness. My default mode is avoidance, which pains me to say but at least by saying it I can be somewhat aware of its workings and try to fight it. The pain frightens me. I know that by writing, I will get into it and face it, bit by bit. I write slowly now, and with many pauses. Even the music I listen to now is slow, ambient and long, frequencies mixed with slow pianos and echoing.

Parenting is hard when I am also in this state, especially now that I am trying to behave in a new way, a kind and understanding way, that respects the individuals that my children are while also reining them in when they need to be herded. I am exhausted and alone. My body hurts. Still experiencing the aftershocks of that seemingly uncomplicated accident that happened already a year ago. As I write, I wear a brace on the left wrist, a stabiliser, which slows me down, too, forcing a deliberateness in my typing. No pain, though there, the pain is in my heel, on my left side, as has been every other problem. It is probably cause by a pinched nerve in my S1 vertebra, or sacrum. There is something here to be investigates, the Latin root that links sacrum with the sacred that I will have to look up after, as I am sure that the symptoms of this area of sacredness relate to the deepness of my emotional and spiritual experiences at the moment.

Inside I feel like I quietly screaming, all the time. My grief needs to and wants to come out, so that this silent screaming can stop. I cannot and do not want to ignore it anymore. Surely this occasion of the internment of my mother’s ashes into the earth (I think) in her ancestral home – the place of her mother’s childhood, where so much of the family still remains – is at least a catalyst for letting this grief go, so that she may be free of her earthly responsibilities. We must set her free, together, letting her know that it is safe to go, that we will be okay without her.

Earlier, I was drifting in my thoughts, thinking about the piece of paper that I found at Mom’s house that I kept and brought back with me home to France. It was old, wide rule, loose binder paper, the kind you write in in middle school. Typed on it, on an old electric typewriter, I think, was a short and beautiful poem about love and letting go. It was read, she had noted, at the funeral for Princess Diana by a Lady or sister, exactly who, I forget. Above it, in italics were the words In Memoriam. It was surrounded by so much blank space; the emptiness of the entire page just made its simplicity so much more impactful, with its solemness to bear witness.

On the reverse of this paper she had written out this poem, as well, as though she had taken pleasure in writing it out in her own hand, of feeling the words travel from her mind to her heart to her fingers, and then again as she read it as she went along. It was a beautiful thing to realise, as one thing that my mother could do, in her inner world, was to truly feel pleasure in the beauty of words and of poetry. She was a classic soul, a bonne vivante, who was born with the innate sensibility for aesthetics, an irony for someone who had no care for beauty in her outside environment with the exception of her garden, which she loved. Even when she had the opportunity and help to do so, she just couldn’t seem to understand how to execute it. She understood what really mattered in life, somehow.

Below the poem that she had written out was “the Corinthians quote about love”. I guess I saved this for just this occasion, her service, having tucked it away among the odds and end of paper things that I brought back with me. I read it again yesterday, after realising that the service was this week, not May 20th, which for some reason was the date that I had in my head for it. Reading it again sent me right back into it, the overwhelm, the panic, back to buying cigarettes today, falling back into old habits.

While I was drifting today, thinking of this poem again, knowing I have to share it, to send it through to one of the family members that will be physically there, so that it will be read and that she will hear it, because I know that she will be there. I also want to write a prayer for her, for the family together, so that we may each heal in our own way from the hurt and the loneliness that we all share inside of us that is recent, learned, and inherited. Also though, and most pertinent to this moment is healing from the loss of her, such an exceptional person.

I said earlier today, out loud, to myself, that I just wanted to go home and watch easy Sunday night television. It is the kind that reassures, delights, sometimes with humour, sometimes with wit, or with romance. It might relish in a time gone by and foreign or fantastic. It transports, that is sure, into a place of escape but also familiar. It is warm like a family afghan and lets the mind and heart be enveloped in security. I want to be home again, on a Sunday night, watching PBS with Mom.
Snow Day

Apr 20th, 2023

It’s April 20, and it’s snowing in Champagne. Big fat juicy snowflakes, and they have even started to stick. Over the hedge, I can see it falling against the backdrop of the distant forest, and the trees are just a grey shadow, and above them the white sky. It reminds me of home, of growing up, and of snow days, my favourite days of all. The world just seems to pause on days like this, and we must too, to watch the gentle beauty of the snow falling. The silence of the snowfall, too, is remarkable, a gentle reminder to be still and listen, to stop and enjoy, as soon it will be over.

Today I lie on the bed in my study to write, smooshed into my big oversized pillow with Miles Davis, Kind of Blue playing. This is it, this is everything I need. Snow outside, warmth inside, music playing, and writing. This is the continuation of the best parts of life, of living, that my parents created for me, this is why they bought the land, built the house, took a chance to create the life they wanted, not the life that they were told they should have. This simple beauty, simple pleasure, warm cocoon is all I need in life, besides food, family, and love. This they taught me, this they gave me, and for that I am forever thankful.

The snow is slowing down now, and who knows, it may be sunny again by the afternoon, for this is how the springtime weather works here in Champagne, it moves quickly over the plains, and then stops for awhile when it hits the ridge of the Montagne de Reims. It is not a mountain at all really, it’s more of a disruption, made from some sort of eruption, probably two plates hitting each other millions of years ago, or a result of the relieving of pressure from deep below the earth. In its wake it left a miles-long ridge with two sides which are perfect for growing the grapes to make Champagne for the world. Perhaps this happened when the land here was still under water, and part of the sea.

As for now, today, the snow as stopped, the sky is a little brighter, and the distant forest trees are taking on a faint shade of green again. What a beautiful reminder that snowfall was, to take time to just be, to enjoy, to savour the beauty of nature and the quiet aloneness that I have been given this week, to be alone in myself, to be at peace with myself, with my memories but also, and so importantly, in the now. This is the work, to be present, to be ok with what is, to not fight it, to not worry. For whatever has happened and whatever is to come, the world is a beautiful place, right now. Do not miss it, do not fill your head nor your body with worry and sorrow and miss out. Take a snow day, and enjoy, or it too will pass and you will miss out on the peace and quiet joy that is within it.
Express Elevator

Apr 13th, 2023

My dreams keep getting stranger and scarier, but at least I get to see my mom. She seems happy, too. Last night I dreamt again of San Francisco, of this strange apartment building that feels somewhat like a transient hotel. What is this coming from? Perhaps it’s a mix.

On my first visit to SF, I stayed at The Hotel Bijou in The Tenderloin, a seedy district with a long history of transience. The neighbourhood butts up against the luxury district that now functions with their windows boarded up to protect the goods inside against rampant smash-and-grabs. Here, people sleep on the sidewalk in front of Neiman Marcus and shit in front of Gucci. The Bijou, like many others in the area, used to be a single occupancy unit residence, like the ones you see in old movies where the unfortunate people live, the ones that are just trying to make it in the big city. The ones for which the Murphy Bed was invented, a device that made it semi-decent to invite the opposite sex for a visit, as it meant you could put your bed away, to hide the inevitable insinuation of sex that being invited into someone’s bedroom implied. Now even the cheapest charge $120 a night and you can buy any drug you want out of somebody’s car on the next block to the east. All of this is just a five minute walk to Trader Joe’s and Filene’s Basement where you can catch the shuttle to the UCSF Mission Bay campus. It is truly a crossroads, a rare find in this day and age.

The next time I stayed at The Rodeway Inn, as it’s closer to the other campus at Parnassus, and after several days of rooming in with Mom on the pull out chair bed, I needed a shower and to wake up in a place that didn’t smell of hospital. The Rodeway is the last stop before the Pacific Ocean and it feels like the world’s end. It’s an old Art Deco era motor inn that still has a beachy, Hollywood feel. If you ever go there, ask for one of the rooms in the part to the left of the office, those are the original ones and they feel like a tiny apartment. If I ever moved there, to the Outer Sunset, I would open a bar or cafe of sorts and call it World’s End and I would offer tonics with CBD and herbal remedies instead of alcoholic drinks. I’d make it strange and wonderful and homey. I’d sell second hand books and local canned food in glass jars.

My imaginary dream hotel also has this hint of New Orleans to it, which is strange, as I have never been there. All I have is my imaginary impressions of it, of the Victorian terraced upper level, creating a dramatic balcony, as seen in A Streetcar Named Desire. What are the common elements of all of these places, real and imagined? Desperation, perhaps, and the threat of poverty. Solitude, with or without loneliness. Mostly though, I think of these places, and of my dream hotel, as the last stop before completely teetering off the edge, and falling into nothingness, no going back, no more normalcy. They are the last stop before fading into oblivion, to live a faceless, nameless, unimportant and forgotten life, with no hope of ever coming back. I think this is my deepest and darkest fear – that I could lose everything at any moment, that any and all stability could be taken away from me, all at once. It’s the threat of the rug being pulled out from under me and it’s always been there, all of my life.

Now, I can bet that I took on this feeling by osmosis, from my mother. This was probably how she felt as she tried to adjust to the mania of my father, a man that would have been happy in a tent, with his dog. He needed nothing, maybe that was the Indian in him, I’ll never know. What I do know now is that my mother was the young sophisticate, growing up in cities, to parents that both worked, and took pride in that, with a mother that had been highly educated, and had left rural Georgia to live her life. She was in New York first, I believe, but I will have to ask my Aunt about that, an Aunt that I need to write back soon, among others. My mother learned to pretend that everything was fine, when it most certainly never was, not during my whole lifetime. Her world had been shattered in the years before I came along – shattered by violence, by silence, by decisions made for her that she didn’t want to make, all taken, all committed, all hidden by the men in her life. Then, without recovering, she married my father. He was probably the first man to come along after all of this, he likely seemed gentle by comparison, and warm, and simple. I imagine he was a safe and an easy place to land, and so she did. They married quickly, and eloped. They’d thought of a ceremony in a sunken garden in full bloom, but for some reason or another the families couldn’t agree so they eloped in October of 1974 and a year later I came along in November. I often wonder if that is the real story, or if they actually got married when she was pregnant with me. I’ve never seen a picture of their wedding, nor an announcement. I don’t remember who told me the story of the sunken garden, but when I heard it I imagined a whole different life for our family, one of beauty and grace and hope, rather than feeling as though we had always reached a dead end, a rut that was just too deep to get out of. I wonder how much of what I think of as my personality, my temperament, is really the years of unspoken exchanges between my mother and my father, the tension, the problems, the disagreements that had seeped into and been absorbed by every cell of my being. If you grow up surrounded by love, you feel love but if you grow up surrounded by this, then what is to become of you?

Back to my dream, I have gone so far off topic, as I do. We were in this hotel apartment, my mother and I, and we needed to go somewhere urgently to do something, I cannot now remember what it was but I think it had to do with administration. Constantin, my son, was there with us too, but younger than he is now. He couldn’t come with us, so we found someone in the building to watch him. I wasn’t too sure about leaving him but it wouldn’t be for but an hour or two, so it should be fine, I thought. We went to a building, of administration, or police, I’m not sure again, perhaps we were there to let them know that her death had been a mistake, as she was still alive somehow, even though she’d been cremated. There was again this brutalist architecture outside, in a terrain that reminded me of the streets of downtown St. Louis, the long empty street with some abandoned building and some vacant lots, fenced in with barbed wire. We made it into the building, with its smell and look of administration, of old papers in tin file cabinets, of cleaning products, of old polish and time. We did what we needed to do, got separated for a bit, as we always did in stores and buildings, as one of us would always wander off without alerting the other, each inevitably in our own worlds. We found each other, finally, and got on the elevator to leave the building, but the buttons made no sense, they were confusing, so I made a guess, perhaps chose the basement, and it was from there that the voyage commenced.

The elevator did not go to the exit floor. Instead, it took off horizontally, then it turned to glass, and sped out of the city towards the ocean airport at a terrible speed. It moved with such velocity that I was terrified, as I felt the glass exposed me. I feared that I would be triggered into one of my episodes, that I would lose all control and leave my body, and that I would never get back to my son. Everything was exposed now – the sides, the floor, and the ceiling of this glass elevator – leaving no protection from the outside world racing by at an incomprehensible speed. I crouched in a corner and held on to the rails, hoping to find a position of security, but there was nowhere to hide, to feel safe. I watched the world speed by as we left the city. The highways seemed to crawl in reverse and my vertigo increased as we got closer and closer to the ocean and the airport. Somehow I have placed these two things together, on some sort of peninsula, removed from the city as they often are. The elevator makes no stops, zooms by platforms where there are people waiting. I am reminded of a platform in another dream, underground, missing my stop, trying to get back to where I should have been. Maybe this is all me processing the what-ifs, the could-have-beens, if I’d only made another decision, taken another exit, not missed my stop. Always travelling, but never arriving, never settling down.

On this express trip I am crouched in the corner, terrified, as my mother is somehow calm, with her serene smile, a smile that only a WASP can have, as it gives away nothing, means nothing, and hides all. Only now it seems real, as though she is completely, and reassuringly, unbothered. It doesn’t reassure me though, as I know the further I go, the further away I am from my son, and the more time it will take for me to get back to him. I cannot leave him, this was not anticipated, he is not going to be ok if I am gone too long. Worst of all, he will be scared, as he wasn’t expecting this, and he will think that I have abandoned him.

The worst thing really is, though, not the dream, but the reality of me, me being a mother, me not being able to handle my kids in the way that I so desperately want to – with kindness, understanding, and love in my actions. I’m instead yelling at them to be quiet, breaking promises, losing my shit, and threatening to take away toys and so on, to try to get them to comply with my demands. I’m currently sick, with Covid, and the irony is just horrible – after all of those missed hugs and avoided kisses with friends and family for how many years now, three? I finally relaxed, we had people over on Easter Monday, and I kissed everyone hello, as you do in France, and goodbye. That very evening I felt funny in my throat and my ear and the next day thought to take a test and voilà, Covid positive. It is exactly one year after the day my mother, two days after Easter, tested positive as well, when the boys and I were there to visit her.

Fast-forward a day, and I’m home with my kids as I am every Wednesday as there is no primary school on this day in France. I am alone, as my husband is working in the UK, and I live too far away from town to have regular help, so I’ve no one to call on. I’m tired, more crabby than usual, and trying to keep them from fighting with each other and out of the mud that they love so much outside. Gone is any attempt to greet their frustrations with positivity. I lose it in the car, scream my head off when they can’t be quiet so that I can call a doctor’s office. I call them names and say terrible things. My son in the front cries as now today he wont be getting the skateboard we were supposed to go and pick up, he calls me a liar, and my son in the back apologises for upsetting me. I see my daughter turn her head to hide her face in the crevice between the seat and the door. Her gesture especially stays with me. What have I done, what am I doing to these poor children? How do I stop unleashing my madness upon them? This is the last thing that I want, to hurt them like this. The worst thing is, I think that I’ve begun to desensitise them to my yelling, which means that they’ve heard it so often that it’s become normal. This makes me shudder to my core. This is what it was like with my mother. I have to stop this, but how?

Back in my dream – The elevator finally stops, but we are on the ocean, on some kind of inflatable platform on the water, like a big bouncy castle. I must step out of the elevator onto a big bright blue cushion of sorts, it’s huge in all directions, but I am still scared that I will slip and fall into the ocean and never get back to my son. I never should have left him. My mom goes ahead first, not at all concerned of these things, and with no fear. Now she is just enjoying it all, finally. I see up ahead that there is a solid part of this terrible structure, a staircase made of metal that leads up to a part that can be crossed to get to the other side, where the express elevator can be taken in the opposite direction, back to the city. I struggle to get my footing on the stupid slippery blue thing to make my way towards the platform, and back to my son.

Then I wake up. I catch my breath. I thank god this was a dream. My son is just down the hall, I haven’t abandoned him, and his brother is next to me, sleeping peacefully. The sky outside is a dark blue; it is almost morning. I keep myself awake a few moments to make sure I don’t continue this terrible nightmare, just as Mom taught me to do when I was small. It was nice to see her, though, and to know that she is finally enjoying herself.

I must remember though, this feeling of the terror of uncertainty and instability, of teetering on the edge of some giant horrible inflatable thing that I could slip off of and fall into the bottomless ocean, of racing further and further away from who I want to be with, of being terrified and out of control, and how I took on this feeling from her. Now I know I must give my children a different and better feeling – of love, safety, stability, stillness, and peace – instead of just passing on to them that which my mother gave to me.
Anti-Hero

Apr 4th, 2023

Last night, my husband and I were having one of our typical exchanges. I get mad at him so easily, and this time is was because he had asked to do a ‘diary check’ as he calls it, which is usually just a data dump of what work and personal plans he has scheduled for the coming weeks and months. It’s hard for me to not be bitter during these sessions, as it is never me who makes plans without asking first. It is a bad habit, getting mad like I do, as he travels for work. Because this is the norm, we’ve carved a deep groove from the pattern of his trips being justified by work, but they nonetheless demand my time, as I am home, with the kids, while he is away. This requires additional mental and physical work on my part, that for which I do not see compensation. Just because I don’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there, as I am compensated, by a house over our heads and food to eat. Activities, cars, groceries, clothes – these are all paid for by the job that requires him to travel, and for that I must be grateful. But my work, my load, my vocation – of mother, wife, cleaner, shopper, cook, and so on – these contributions are not so easily measured. He sees me as living a free life, I can do whatever I want, he says. This is not how I see it, at all. This is at the core of many a disagreement. It enrages me, honestly. I have tried to go back to work, first as an English tutor, part-time, only during lunchtimes two days a week, as the only other time available was after school hours, and that wasn’t possible as I was then, and still am, the default parent. He works, he travels, I pick up the kids, do homework – in French – then dinner, bath, bedtime. I juggle the needs of three kids close in age, two of which are twins.

Now I am trying to work as an independent consultant, to get clients to pay me to tell them what to do. Essentially I try to tell everyone what to do anyway, so I thought I might as well get paid for it, and paid well enough that people will listen, as it is quite an investment for them. I have chosen this new path not only because it makes sense for me but because I love it, to think of holistic solutions to complex problems. Also, I have chosen it because I have accepted my lot as the default parent, the mother, the stay at home while he travels. My role has already been well carved out by years of pregnancy, loss, more pregnancy, birthing, breastfeeding, sleepless nights and co-sleeping.

Here I am, lucky, grateful, and fortunate enough to not have to work, as we have chosen to live in a country that supports and protect us, as parents, as people, as children, as families. Our health, our basic standard of living is protected and if and when needed is provided by the government. Daycare is affordable for everyone and obligatory preschool starts at age three, arguably too young, but this backdrop provides a safety net for all families and children, as they will be taken care of, provided for, and if you have three or more kids, or multiples, things get even better. So I have not had to work, even though the system is designed to get mothers back in the work force and away from their children as quickly as possible. I have been fortunate, but that’s not what this is about, today.

Now, as I try to work again, to focus, to reinvent and reestablish my career, I am struck down by how difficult it all is, and how my basic, core wiring is not made for all of this juggling, at all. I struggle with executive functioning, distraction, and staying focused. I need a wife of my own to cushion the fall, to take on some of this load so that I can truly thrive. For me, I’m either hyper-focused on one thing, something people nowadays call deep work, or I am frantically yet rhythmically multi-tasking, doing several things at once as though in some sort of strange choreographed pattern. You can’t interrupt me, offer suggestions nor instructions to me when I’m doing this,. You could ask my mother about this if she were still alive, as I will shout at you for distracting me for my mind jumps rapidly from task to task and back again, in an ecstatic, hyperactive pinging from one element to the next, organising, categorising, bopping like a pinball machine, eventually reaching its goal. I will do many things simultaneously, arranging spaces – sorting, comparing, then organising, categorising, prioritising, and then finally placing things in their right place though some sort of strange sixth sense. This is my gift. Give me any complex problem, and I will see a complex solution inside of it, and I can turn it inside out and put it in order But ask me to clean up as I go, whether in the kitchen, office, or closet, and I simply cannot do it. This, this is my curse.

So to be in a situation where I must not only do, but create, invent, plan, administer, execute, and manage, well, this is a nightmare. It is so only because, on top of these many complex elements, I have a family and a house to manage, and the deep, well-worn, and unforgiving grooves of the last almost 10 years of being either pregnant, trying to be pregnant, and having and caring for very young children who quite simply must come first. Even now, there are fevers, flus, falls, fights, all of them needing my time, care, and concern. I feel almost no progress in my professional life, even though I know that a year ago I wasn’t where I am now, and neither the year before that, and before that, and so on. But I am oh so very far from where I want to be, stuck in a hole that I can’t get out of. I wish I could do better, could return easier to where I left off each time I must walk away from my work, from the endless incomplete to-do lists, with so few things checked off. I can’t seem to find a way to manage the organisation. I always promise myself the nextday and the next will be better, come easier, but does it ever? So many days when my husband leaves for work with the kids to be dropped at school, I don’t even know what to do with myself. I feel lost, and I just want time to stop so that I can be still and recover from all of it. Maybe this is what can finally happen now, if I can keep doing the work, maybe I can recover from all of this and really just enjoy the banal beauty of my life, as the children are wonderful, beautiful creatures, and I can see that now clearer than ever before.

Parenting has not come natural to me, it has been a struggle. I know now that it is so in great part to me being so very broken, and in need of repair. As I continue to work on myself, to work towards emotional sobriety, to reparent myself, I am only now able to really enjoy being with my kids, instead of fearing and dreading my time with them, afraid of what might burst out of me, having such a low threshold for their noise and unpredictability. Now, I am just sad that I wasted so much time being so out of control. Now, I am grateful that I have taken a new path, finally, before the damage had become irreversible.

Now that I am on the right path, I also see bit by bit how much damage I have truly caused along the way. I am also realising that old patterns are hard to break. It’s like driving down a country lane with grooves in the dried mud that pull the wheels down into them as you try to cross. You need bigger tires, new ones, the good ones, or you’ll just slip down into those grooves again and again, even though you try your damnedest to get through the ravine, cursing the car, the tires, and the mud the whole way. But it’s me, my fault, for not learning the lesson all those times before, making those grooves even deeper, instead of just filling them up with a good load of gravel and getting the god damn new tires.

I’m at that point, I’m getting the damn tires. But how? I’ve got to take accountability for how I’ve made the grooves in the first place. It’s not god’s fault, or my husbands, or my parents, or the mud or the rain. I knew there was a problem, many problems, in that ravine of my soul. Alcohol was just the escape, the bad medicine, the relief I so desperately wanted from the fucking storm that brought the rain, again and again. I knew the storms were coming, they always do, so why didn’t I prepare for them? Why did I hope and wish them away instead of getting off of my ass and preparing for them? Well shit, I guess I just didn’t know any better at the time. I guess this what it means to not be so hard on yourself, myself. I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. But still, what a fucking waste.

How may years of my life have I wasted? How many hopes and dreams have I let die, let rot on the vine? How much music is still in me? All these clichés, these sayings, are so because they are true. So now that I begin to see, what do I do? A searching and fearless moral inventory is step 2, I believe. I may not have done the writing yet but now I can feel it, what it means. I wasn’t sure before if I could do it, but now I have miraculously turned a corner, after this same fight, argument, discussion with my husband. Stop having the same fight, stop pointing fingers, stop expecting him to love me differently if he doesn’t know how, and stop expecting him to know what to do if he’s shown repeatedly that he just doesn’t know. Stop having unrealistic expectations for everyone else, and excuses for myself. Stop looking for someone to blame, and start taking accountability for the mess that I am in.

As we were going round and round again, in between my angry explanations of what my husband had done wrong, somewhere in my awareness I began to take notice – we were both saying the same thing about the other person. He/I hadn’t done this or that, had been this way or that way, hadn’t shown love, or hadn’t been receptive to or even noticed being shown love in the way it was given. We were each blaming the other, instead of looking inside of ourselves. I was screaming out to be loved, instead of loving. Acting angry and cruel, instead of acting lovable. Justifying my actions, instead of apologising for them, and then expecting something positive in return, when coming forth with nothing but negativity.

So easy it is to slip back into old patterns, deflecting, instead of taking accountability Avoiding the painful truth about ourselves instead of looking in the mirror at the person being in the reflection. In a Sunday meditation group, I came to understand that I must be the way I want to be – kind, patient, understanding – if I want to be treated in the same way. Long gone are the days of the excuses of a child – I was tired, hungry, frustrated that things didn’t go my way. When I went downstairs to have the ‘diary check’ with my husband, I came down with a peaceful heart, but was triggered at the first sign of disappointment that he wasn’t acting how I expected him to, and lost it from there. How did I think he would respond? Have I such a high standard for everyone else that any deviation from perfect is not good enough? How dare I have such impossible standards? And what could I possibly hope to achieve through this behavioraul mechanism? Why oh why am I like this? I saw a clip this morning that reminded me of what I already know – this is a child wound. The wound is still there from being let down, not getting what I wanted or needed as a child, and not knowing how to deal with those emotions. At least now I know, and I can help my children to deal with the same types of inevitable disappointments, help them to figure out all of their big emotions, and reassure them that even through those big emotions, that they are going to be ok on the other side of them.

The big question is, where in my past did I learn this? Was my father this way towards my mother and vice versa? Was there constant psychological punishment in my home due to some damaged interactional play between the two of them? I guess I will have to reflect and learn to unlearn this. Enough of giving everyone such a hard time. Everyone keeps telling me to not be so hard on myself but honestly, when I hear this I know that they mean well but also that they are wrong. I must continue this deep introspection. Maybe I am the problem, it’s me. Maybe this burden of my past has become such an integral, driving force of my personality that it has taken over who I really am. But I do know, this I know deeply and truly, that it is time for me to lay this burden down, as it does not serve me and my loved ones at all, anymore.

—

Anti-Hero

Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby
And I’m a monster on the hill
Too big to hang out, slowly lurching toward your favorite city
Pierced through the heart, but never killed

Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism
Like some kind of congressman? (Tale as old as time)
I wake up screaming from dreaming
One day I’ll watch as you’re leaving
And life will lose all its meaning
(For the last time)

It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me
At tea time, everybody agrees
I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror
It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero

Taylor Swift
Separation

Mar 30th, 2023

I’ve gotten out of the habit of writing. I miss it. I must make it a habit again, return to the urgency of getting it out and being alone with myself. There is a relief to putting down the otherwise fleeting thoughts that are so often pushed out of awareness by the pressing necessities of life. Schedules, work, kids, meals, life and god forsaken cleaning. Had I known that so much of life would be just sheer maintenance, and how much I would struggle with that, I might have actually chosen a lucrative profession. But how could I have know this, given my examples. I often wondered why my parents hadn’t chosen success for themselves, for to me, it did seem a choice. They had all of the elements as I understood them, they were college educated, came from decent families, so what was the matter with them, were they just unlucky?

I am often surprised what comes up when I sit down to write. Sometimes, like now, after only a few sentences, a path reveals itself. I have been writing like this since September last, so not that long in comparison to my life in total, or for any habit really, but I can now start to steer slightly, to return to the reason I sat down, rather than be pulled off the exit ramp by a thought or a subject like the one above. No, I will not go down that road tonight, I am too tired. The last few days, since the hazy Sunday morning of the last time I stopped to write, have been too full to dive into something new, not now. Now I am just letting myself be here, free of expectations, free from judgement, to languish in the tepid bath of grief that I’ve stepped into.

While our mother was dying, it was just me and my sister with her, and our friend Betty. She came for a few days to support us all and to help us however she could. She loved mom dearly, she still does. She’s become another sister to us, one free from the emotional burden of Sue’s shortcomings as a mother, and she has allowed us to see her through fresh, untainted eyes. Then Betty had to go, to say goodbye to all of us, but mostly Sue. Then it was just us three. No one else was coming for some reason or another, whether it was respect, fear or uncomfortability, or just plain not knowing what to do or how to be, it was just us three. As soon as mom died, it was just me, and just her. There was no longer us. Somehow we were broken in two by our mother’s passing, as if everything since our great falling out had ceased to be and we were back there again. I don’t know where this will end up, but I know that it will have to be different, for neither of us is happy with the way things are now. I just have to have faith that they will be at all. I am only now learning that it does matter how I feel, not above how others feel, but as well, and independent of others. This is entirely new, and it is because of not drinking that I am finally beginning to have the clarity to have a long, critical look at the addictive systems that have ruled my life for so long – the lacking, the longing, and the pain. It is ok for us to have problems, to not agree, but when we can’t agree and can’t have peace, when we fall so easily back into sick patterns of blame and fighting and hating each other, we can’t be in the same space anymore. We must separate.

This holds true for my marriage as well. I feel like I am poking my head above water to finally breathe again. Or perhaps peering through a keyhole, having locked myself inside a closet, hidden for so many years. Like that feeling when, as a child, you wake up to your family dinner party, you come through all sleepy, to see what is happening, you hear the murmur of adults laughing, speaking of things you do not know. In a smoky haze, you peer through heavy eyes to see a world you do not know, yet. But you see it there, and realise that it is your future, or something like it. As you go back to bed, you fall asleep to dream about what is coming, when you are grown. I am there, yet I am not a child. I am me, finally, again.

Now I am constantly dreaming about a place of my own. Day dreaming, especially. I think that I have found the place. It is on my favourite route into town, the old way I used to take to school before I realised it was five minutes faster to take the highway. It’s the way that is covered with trees, and then by the canal. It’s tucked back off of the main road, by foot it goes by the thousand year old church with the beautiful gardens. It’s cheap, with three bedrooms, and who knows, maybe they’ll get sick of it and let us buy it from them. I thought perhaps the solution would be the other way around, that he would go, and later, but after yet another weekend of suffering through the moods and casual violence of my husband, I know that the time to go is now, and I must leave, for he doesn’t see the urgency nor the damage that he is doing. It all makes sense though, with my health conditions of vertigo and seizures always looming and the fact that he is always travelling for work, leaving me alone to care for the children. I have to be safe, to be able to take cabs and walk places instead of drive, and hire help around the house – all of these things require living in the city, in a pied a terre, in peace.

Now, just like with quitting alcohol, I am starting to understand what I haven’t understood so far. How much of this has been terrible? How wounded were we both, what did we expect to happen? In his story, I am the villain, through and through. I wasn’t enough, I didn’t do enough, and so on. Once he told me that he married me for stability. I was shocked by this, seeing as I’ve always been the most unstable person I’ve known. Well, not anymore. For the first time, this week, I have felt a peace in my soul like never before. Action, informed by logical deduction, love, and faith that doing the right thing is always the right thing to do, will lead me to the solution. And perhaps, God is sending me the solution as a tiny, three bedroom rental just next door to that beautiful plot of land that the city is finally turning into a park. One step at a time, one foot in front of the other, I will figure it out.
The Purge

Mar 26th, 2023

Last night I dreamt that you were still here. You were very unwell again, something had gone wrong, mismanaged, and I had to leave to get to you immediately. This time it took chartering a plane to reach the wilderness North of San Francisco where you live.It was cold, snowy, a storm coming. The terrain in my head is a bit more clear now, this combined wilderness in my dreams, where my life story arc has a set of locations, wound into one imaginary region. The wilderness is a blend between the Redwoods of the North and the Pines of the Lake Placid.

One of the best days of my life was spent there, around Lake Placid, on the rolling roads of the New York State highway, going up, around, and to the left, around the region. I can feel my aunt’s spirit now, that day we spent together just in the presence of God and nature. My aunt, like my grandmother, is very conceinscious of how someone is feeling, and doesn’t force words. The silence speaks for itself, that’s where the truth lies. This is the Indian-ness that I spoke to Camille about as she has it too. I think I do too, it’s why I nervously chatter sometimes, or even try to may people feel more at ease.

I feel it so strongly, the silence. I feel the squirming of others in it. So I fill the space, as I really don’t know what to do either. Why speak unless you have something of value to add to the conversation? Mind your manners, be polite, but what’s the point of it all? Well that’s polite society, without these exchanges we would just be savages. So what if we are mean’t to be so? Perhaps that is the whole point of it all. Maybe trying to get back to the land is just that, to return to where we should have been all along. Not in cities, or on air bases, or travelling from town to town. Maybe we never should have left in the first place, been moved, or taken. Did anyone I come from leave the countryside for a better life? Or did they leave the city to come to America in hopes of a bit of land of their own?

Some of these questions can never be answered, that is sure. Though I know there are records, and documents, how can one know the intention of the people of the past? Maybe this summer I will find some answers, when I go back to California to a home that is now mine, though it will forever be the home of my mother. For that I am truly grateful, to have a place to go to, as it has been so long that any of us have felt at home. I don’t know how this was so difficult a concept for our Uncle to understand, that we now had a home, together, as a family, and nothing in the world, in our world, was more important than that. Now he sends us emails to help him find a contractor as he wants to paint it. Not sure why he must be so involved, but thank goodness he is.

There are so many clues in the house, so many boxes as yet unopened, which have answers hidden here and there. It is a house and an archive, one which has had no secretary to take charge for 20 years or more. There are at least two books about my Mother’s side and her sister has done research as well. The questions remain about my Father’s side, the past, my childhood. Hopes, dreams, fears and worries all swimming around together in a pool of yuck. The more I wake up to myself the more questions I have about where I came from, why I am this way, and where else I could have ended up. I guess everyone feels this way on some level. The question is, how much of this can you let seep into your daily awareness, and change who you are when the insight comes? To break free from the past, to move forward as an integrated and whole being, in thought and action – this is all I want to understand.
Travelling Again

Mar 11th, 2023

These dreams always seem to have something to do with San Francisco. Not surprisingly, as this is where I travelled to and from for the last almost two years since mom got sick. This was, except for my first flight, where I foolishly transferred at LAX, was my port of entry and departure for all my US flights. Before this I hadn’t been home since May 2011, for a wedding and to pass my MA exams. So this was my new home, of sorts, where so much would transpire. The city, though, is always a patchwork of other places too, in my dreams. Scruffy neighbourhoods, long train or bus rides, memories of London’s terrain, both over and underground. Always racing to get to the airport. This time there was also, strangely, I think, memories of drinking, of parties, of a decadence in the truest sense, of this decay of my inner self, in an upstairs lounge, probably over another daytime commerce, as was the style often in DC. But next to this lounge was a room, more like a large closet, filled with my things, and it had no door, anyone could wander in and take what they wanted. Maybe this is because I lost an earring yesterday or something, but it was like I was realising in the dream that my stuff was just exposed to anyone and everyone. I tried to gather it up, decide what was the most important that I could fit in my arms, it spilled out. At times it felt like this lounge was on a boat, a yacht, a large one. Maybe that’s because boats are travelling too, unattached to land, homeless in their own way. Maybe this was all one big metaphor for my life, my soul, exposed, unguarded, there for the taking for all of those who passed through.

Then there was the studio apartment in a residence, one that has appeared in my dreams before, the one with the scary elevator. This time it was next door to an office, where one of my friends or older mentor type woman worked. I was still rushing to get back east, almost missing trains, or taking the wrong train in the wrong direction. I remember passing Palo Alto, so I knew I was way to far south and would miss my flight. Maybe I rescheduled the flight, as the next day, I was off again, from the same studio (but with high ceilings) apartment, with bags packed but overflowing, too much luggage, too many things, not enough decisions made to know what to do or what to pack. Just time to go, leaving things unresolved, going back to another part of my life. This time there was also a dog to be cared for, work, and office in the same building, just down the hall. Perhaps it was Laura who’d come into this dream too, I was worried for her, but then found that she’d been given a job, helping in PR or something like that, and would be ok. I was glad she was taken care of, but also a bit jealous because she was secure and got to stay.

My jealously of her, what was it? She was such a magnetic person, gangly, skinny, young, with her drawn on eyebrows and funny little banged bob. What was it about her that made her so likeable? She was hilarious, we laughed so much together, roared, acted like kids together, which was such a welcome relief for me, and I would think for her too. I think she also understood so much in life, probably from having lived so much already at such a young age. She was on the fast track to nowhere, to so much trouble, when I met her at 14, she was already kicked out of the ‘alternative school’. She must’ve gotten her GED at some point, as she did go to college, but more on that another day.

Back in this familiar dreamscape and its scruffy neighbourhoods, I say this with love, as every neighbourhood worth its salt is a little bit scruffy. Like the Sunset (Inner and Outer) in San Fran, it’s only scruffy from years of being lived in. With row houses that are probably lovely and cosy on the inside, the streets are concrete. With not enough trees on them, how could it feel anything more than scruffy? Even down the street only a few blocks, where it meets the ocean, it is respectably scruffy, with the run down Rodeway Inn and the surrounding cars and campers where people live, and the best view on the ocean you could ever imagine.

Always travelling, scrambling, late, worried, is this just revealing how I’ve always felt, my whole life? Not really sure what the goal was, the aim, I just kept going, carrying my sadness and loneliness with me wherever I went. To the next apartment, relationship, city, job I went, dragging my baggage behind me.
Sour Times

Mar 9th, 2023

Grief is hard. It is a thing, a noun, an entity, at once fluid and smoky, heavy as stone and light as a breeze. I have to write now to move on from this morning, when I took a deep dive into it, into the losses of both lives and of what could have been. So much digging in the muck, in the filth of the past. My god, how have I survived even as well as I have?

Who was the first? My Grandpa John, he was in and out of hospital, but left us so suddenly, or at least so it seemed to an 8 year old. Then my cat, Uncle Andre Kitty died suddenly and it tore me apart. I sat at his kitty grave in the garden, next to a cross I made for him out of sticks I lashed together. My mother’s cousin died suddenly, she was sad and reclusive for a day or so, she said it was a sudden aneurism, but maybe it was suicide, who knows, and now I can’t ask her. Finally, my other grandpa, my mother’s father, who’s stroke and alcoholism put him in a home, on a drip, and he never returned home from that. I tried to visit him once, but it was too scary, and he died when I wasn’t living at home anymore and I didn’t go to the funeral. He had been dead to me for so long already, so different than the man in the photos, pictures taken while travelling, while he was alive and happy. To me he was always the corpse in the chair, at the table, checking his stocks in the paper, smoking, drinking, and occasionally spouting nonsense at the holiday dinnr table, ruining everyone else’s time. How narcissistic it is, alcoholism, with the ill person at the center of everything, always, even if they are not participating. It is covert, at its best, and hatefully destructive at its worst. Unfortunately, I have known al kinds. I didn’t go to his funeral and even when I last saw my Grandmother, at her 80th birthday, she was disappointed I didn’t show and told me as much, but how could she not understand why, even so many years later? How could she not see how his drinking had ruined things for everyone, even me?

These deaths could all be seen as normal or expected, in some way. But then the overdoses came. The first was Jajo perhaps? Or Terry’s brother? Then Emily. Then came Laura, who wanted to get out but just couldn’t help herself. She died on the way to LA straight from leaving rehab, Promises, Sober Living by the Sea. She was on her way to Jessica’s to see her for her birthday. She never arrived, and we all knew why – she’d stopped to get high and that was it. The silence was deafening, we all waited, but there was no news. Finally the call came, days later. Her body was found in a transient hotel in downtown LA, and her mom had to fly out to identify her. She was 24.

Who else? To make a list is so painful. Then was my Gramma, the biggest hit of all. She was my world, my only motherly love, the warmth, gone, so suddenly. Killed by pancreatic cancer, it was just six months between her diagnosis and her death. Destroyed me, and also my father. He was shaken to his core, as she’d been the one that had always held everyone together, and they all fell apart after that. I remember the morning of the funeral, we were at her house. All of us had gathered the night before, after the wake, telling stories, searching for comfort. In the morning, I realised that the carpet needed vacuuming, she wouldn’t ever have received guests in such a state. So I vacuumed, realising that no one else was going to do it. From that point on, I felt like I was the matriarch, at least in my branch of the family.

Then, in California and so suddenly, there was Brody, my brother’s best friend he’d probably ever had, the friend that showed him a softer side of masculinity. I swear I felt his spirit leave this earth as I drove into the sunset on the 91 on my way back into LA from Corona, where the family was living. A family already broken, this loss made everything come crashing down. We all knew and loved him, so it hurt us all. Then came the death, the slow painful death of my parents’ marriage. With me having to step in to try to save my baby sister, who was still so young, just in high school. Mom had her arrested for breaking curfew in the early morning hours, after leaving the house to get some air after they’d had a huge row. I paid for her to have a phone, in case the phone bill wasn’t paid for by one of our parents as part of a responsibility row. One day she called me on it, as mom was about to have her arrested again. I had to talk to the cops to explain that there was something wrong with my mother, and to not arrest my sister. I moved my sister to live with me in DC, realising that living in squalor with my father in an apartment in Corona, with her boyfriend sleeping over and barely passing high school, was not going to end well. I moved her to live with me, in my single girl apartment in DC, making a bedroom with a curtain out of the dining room.

Then Dad got really sick. He’d had a gastric bypass a couple of years prior and was no longer obese. Quite the opposite, he had withered away to practically nothing. Plus, he was drinking, and it went right through him. The story goes that Mom told Camille that she’d seen him driving around town using a grapefruit to hold his head up. That’s how weak he was. He’d been in the hospital, and back out again, from something or another. Then he went back in, after Mom didn’t show up to take him to the doctor, when he couldn’t get there on his own. I remember waiting for the bus to come to go to work in DC, and called her in California see how the appointment had gone. Well, she’d slept through her alarm and didn’t seemed too fussed about it. Then he went back in the hospital, the local community hospital. He needed to be moved for treatment but couldn’t be, because the COBRA hadn’t been paid, the coverage that you pay for to continue coverage after you’ve left or lost a job, in Dad’s case it was the later, as he was too weak to work. She could have paid it, but she didn’t. That’s when I knew I had to go.

So I left to California, to try to save dad. Long story short, it didn’t work. Two and a half months later, on February 9th, he was gone.
College Admissions

Mar 9th, 2023

Sleeping in the night is difficult these days. I am tired, and love to nap, but at night come the dreams. It is hard to dream, to go there, as I never know what awaits me or what I will uncover. The stress of the packing and travelling dreams is so real, I feel so much in them. Rushing, trying to get prepared to go somewhere, always falling short, forgetting something. Panic. Fear. Sadness. Stress. But wait, I have to do this, or that, get here, or there. Why, what does it all mean? I am alone in this world. No more parents. No more adults to look after, instead of them looking after me. So now what?

I’ve slowly realised that I am watching the film of my life in these dreams. Some of the locations have changed slightly; of this I am not sure why. But I recognise a version of the high-rise apartment building in Chevy Chase, just across the DC line in Maryland, my last home in the US. I dreamed of this place for years after I left the country while living in tiny spaces in London. I also visit versions of the apartment I had before that one. It was just a couple of miles down the road on Wisconsin Avenue; it was here where I was the happiest in the seven years I lived in the area. It was mine, it was doable. I could walk to the Corcoran print lab, the Georgetown building, where I spent so much time learning to make things again, after stopping for awhile, having abandoned my artistic pursuits for an easier life, one with a job and money. On the way was a cemetery, where in the early spring I would stop to be in peace, in nature, on my days off, and take pictures of the tiny, easily overlooked flowers with my first digital camera that was a gift from that same boyfriend who didn’t understand my self-portraits. I would fill the frame with these flowers, in wonder of their beauty. Then later, in the lab, using photoshop, I separated these photos into their four digital colours -cyan, magenta, yellow, and black – printed them in negative onto clear plastic sheets, made a screen-printing screen for each colour, and printed them by hand. I had found something new to make, it was beauty for the sake of beauty, and I was at peace with it.

It was a lovely apartment, with a chandelier that I bought at Home Depot with my own money to class up the place a bit. Behind it on the wall were two large vertical canvases that I painted a textured gold and displayed on a shallow shelf, and in front was a shaker style round wooden table and chairs. Between the chandelier and the canvases, the room radiated with a warm golden light. It was the perfect single girl apartment. There was no view though, and the heating/AC unit smelled of DC mould, but other than that, it was ideal. The rooftop deck looked out on all of Washington. I wish I had enjoyed it more, just as I wish I’d enjoyed the rooftop pool in Chevy Chase. Once, a unit opened up on the top floor with a view on the city. Perhaps if I’d moved to that apartment, instead of selflessly recommending it to a sad, single colleague who was in her forties and living with her parents, my life would have gone a completely different way. Perhaps I would have never moved to the two bedroom in Chevy Chase, stolen from my sister to make her help me pay for it, and destroyed her trust in anyone, forever.

I think again of the airport photo, and the others I did to finalise my studies, after I was told to do something else, and I did, but the prof didn’t like that either. The project I did for her was about time. Not images, but time. I took all of the ends, or maybe it was the beginnings, of the rolls of film that I had shot of my friends, my life, my memories, and I printed them as abstract vertical pictures. You see, when colour film is exposed as you are loading it, it gets a bit of light exposure. The class was a colour class, and I was in love with the range of colours you could make when printing just by turning the dials one way or the other in the printing lab. The balance of green, blue, and red light when filtered through the film, creates the opposites – magenta, yellow, and cyan – when hitting the paper. It is the additive mix of just these three colours that make up all other colours and when you put them all together, they make black. When printing the abstract composition from the bit of the film that hits the light, you get a random display of colour – uncontrollable, surprising, sometimes shocking – but to me, always interesting and beautiful. These pictures to me were abstract accounts of my life, artefacts even, that time had passed; time, light, colour, and memory. Memory of what? How I felt, what happened, the symphony of dysfunction that were my friends, my associates, the others who had all fled something to come to the city in search of something else. We were all transplants, refugees from lives we wanted to leave behind. In those days, there was not a lot of self-awareness among my friend group. When you put together a bunch of people who never really felt like they belonged anywhere, you get a sort of chaos. The only thing that calmed us was creation. To make something is to externalise your inner process and inner self, demons and all. I think that most of us were really searching for something, not the least for a sense of belonging. Not sure if we really found it, but many of us found a portion at least, of ourselves along the way. For me, moving beyond self-portraiture and snapshot portraiture was a big step. I didn’t only take pictures of myself at that time. As photography students we were encouraged to take our cameras everywhere, so that we could photograph at any time, when the urge hit us, so that we could discover our subject. So we did, and for me, my subject was my friends, my life, as it was for many others.

It was the age of Nan Goldin, an artist I was introduced to by my friend Laura. She lasted just one year, or maybe a year and a semester, and I think I’d forgotten that she was even at school until now. We’d both wanted to go to Columbia. I don’t know how she discovered it, but since my senior year I’d wanted to go there, since I had the box of college info that kept arriving to my house, a box that sat in my room. It had filled up quickly, full of hope, promise, and the future. It sat, looming. I had no idea what to do or how to choose. I was interested in Columbia as it was in Chicago, the big city of my childhood, one that I loved deeply. The building, the arts, the museums, the cosmopolitain feeling of my grandparents apartment; I loved it all. It also felt safe, familiar. The brochure tempted me, it seemed like a place full of interesting people and programs, a world away from my past experiences. It also had open admissions, so I was very unlikely to fail if I tried to go there. With a campus in downtown Chicago, it was the antithesis to the sprawling University campus that everyone else seemed to be so interested in. No thank you to that, being surrounded by sororities and frat houses seemed like a version of hell to me. More fitting in, more boxes, more conformity. No, thank you, I’d had enough of that already in my short lifetime, no way. But I didn’t know what to do, so I let the box sit through the first semester of my senior year, and then the second, and then through the summer of ’93. It just sat there. While my friends had their parents making sure that they met the early admissions deadline for their top choices and their back-ups, my box just sat there.

It was a miracle that I had a full box of choices at all. You see, my grades were pretty mediocre in high school. I had stopped trying after about my sophomore year. School had always been so easy for me before. In primary, grade school as we call it in the US, I was levels ahead in reading, writing, and math. I was in the ‘gifted class’ in my first school, and I got to leave class to do fun stuff like number games, where you figure out the next in a sequence of numbers, which required an understanding of how the first few numbers related, and then continuing the sequence. I loved that game. There was a lot of spatial arrangement games too, but I don’t remember those much. I remember when I changed schools in the third grade, my mom and I went in before the year started to meet my new teacher and have an informal evaluation. She didn’t or couldn’t believe that I was reading at the level I was. She searched for and brought out the lesson books to ask, you mean this you’ve already done, and this one too? Yes, exactly, we answered. So off I went to the upper classes for several subjects, away from my peers, who were not so welcoming to the girl that they assumed thought she was better than everybody else, when if fact, she didn’t think about them really, at all. Oh and how cruel they were.

I perceived my family as incredible poor, which as you may know, is a sin among sins, a default like no other. Poverty is the greatest disgrace one can have, especially in a place like ours, a rural farming community that had been settled there for generations. I think it was and perhaps still is this way, because if you are poor, that means you haven’t worked hard, haven’t stayed the course by working hard, saving your money, buying your home, staying put, and making the expected life with a wife and kids, and survived. This was not a rich land by any means, but it was one that demanded a certain standard of existence, one of weekly church-going white Christians who dressed themselves and their kids well and cared what people think. We were not that. My parents were hippies in a way. They, or perhaps just my father, wanted to homestead, go back to the earth, and drop out of normal society. He’d been raised in a military family, living on or near bases his entire young years, with time spent abroad as a child in Germany, France, and I can’t remember if they were in Japan before the kids or with them, and perhaps Italy. Anyway, he’d been scarred deeply by the violent alcoholism of his father, which was likely a trauma-response to the PTSD of war and the things he experienced during the reconstruction after. My mother, as I’ve recently come to know and understand, was oh so very different, she grew up an elegant young thing, in cities, with working parents, both of them, which painted a much different picture. I am sure she was ignored at home in a way too; her mother was cold, and perhaps her parents were both drinking then. She told me once that her parents were part of the cocktail culture, where drinks and smoking every night were par for the course, but that her mom at some point stopped drinking, while her father continued on. She had experienced a considerable trauma just before meeting my father, and it had broken her completely, as would be expected. She told me recently that she thinks that she just wanted to get married, and my father asked her, so she said yes. There was not much reflection or consideration there, how could there have been, she was probably completely disconnected to her body at that point, and perhaps stayed that way for may, many years, if not forever. At least now she is free.

My father was likely bi-polar, in retrospect, and through no fault of his own. He’d been made to sacrifice a lot in his formative years, and was probably rebelling against that too. So the story goes, he heard of a parcel of land one day, went to see it, and the same weekend asked his parents to borrow the $10, 000 needed for a deposit on it, and bought it. He did this all without my mother knowing, or so the story goes. Knowing her affinity for re-writing history to erase any fault or complicitness, I am not sure of the truth of this, but there it stands. On this land he would build our family home, but it took years, and we lived in a one room shed with an outhouse for a toilet for at least a year or two, maybe more, before we moved into the house, still and forever unfinished. He was a creative genius, always drawing, designing, making and building, and was decades ahead of his time. If he were my age, now, he would be flourishing. But he is not, he is fifteen years dead already, a casualty of oh so very much, but most likely, of his own unresolved misery and a deep, deep sadness for a life not lived as it should have been.

The box of college mail was there, in fact, not because of my grades, which began to slip as school got harder, as I became less interested, as I needed more help, more parenting, from my parents, and they couldn’t step up due to their own deficincies. It was there due to my high testing scores, specifically the ACTs and PSATs, one of which I took while painfully hungover, one of my very first. I may have still been a bit drunk at the time, as I had no tolerance then. Other parents would have made sure their kids were home the night before, well-rested and fed. But I had lied and said I was staying with a girlfriend the night before, when I was in fact at a small party with a group of friends, mostly boys, at the house of my boyfriend. He lived across the street from the park where we had our first kiss. He was at least two years younger than me, so cute, a skater boy. We started out as friends, we liked spending time together, I could be myself with him. He was funny, goofy, and quiet. No father around, he lived with his mom, who wasn’t around much either. I think I drank Purple Passion that night, and I think I threw up outside in the early morning after sleeping on the couch. I’m pretty sure my boyfriend met his next girlfriend that night. She was 19, older than me, and stole his affection and friendship from me, right out from under my nose. Losing him broke my heart, and made me feel always on alert for danger from other women. The point is, I took this very important test still drunk, but I still did well enough to convince a whole lot of schools that they wanted me, and my money, to go to them. Enough colleges to fill a box with materials that would never be looked at by my parents, not once.

I thought about Bennington in Vermont. The classes were very progressive, and they had no grades, only pass fail. I liked this, it not only felt safe, but I liked the idea that you either did it, or you didn’t, there was no in between. I liked that concept. There were small class sizes, which meant manageable social situations, discussions, a way of learning that I’d always enjoyed. Vermont was enticing; my first love, my long distance boyfriend lived most of the year there, and would visit, with his cool younger sister, his dad in Edwardsville for the holidays. We met during one such visit and fell in love as only two lost, lonely, sensitive, and intense teenagers can. We’d talk every Sunday night, taking turns on the long distance charges, with an intimacy and calm that I don’t think I’ve known since. He snowboarded, and was from Burlington, Vermont. He was actively anti-racist, part of SHARP, skinheads against racial prejudice, and liked music I’d never heard of. He sent me mix tapes full of love, longing, and angst. One of my first times getting high was with him. We watched snowboard videos and I spent a great deal of time wondering how their feet would detach and then reattach to the board in mid-jump. Finally, I realised I was just high.

Later on, while in school in Chicago, I came to realise that Bennington College was the first choice for spoiled rich kids from New York City with a penchant for clubbing and casual heroin use. My ‘friends’ Ali and Jessie went there, I believe that she was kicked out for drug use, and sent to rehab, one of many stints. Oh how I would have been eaten if I had gone there, so far away from home and anything I’d even known. Or maybe I would have actually met some good people, not the rejects who came to the Art Institute as their second choice, their easy way out. The Art Institute of Chicago to me was a dream school, the kind of school that gets you gallery shows and easy access to an MFA program, the fast track to the art world. To them it was just a place far away from home where they could shore up in a high rise and do drugs without interference. This is where Laura got turned on to heroin, when she got together with Jessie. He had a New York pedigree with LA money. His dad was a songwriter, I believe his biggest hit was ‘Natural Woman’. He was an asshole, an addict, with the safety net of wealth and escape. When rich kids get a drug problem, they take a vacation at Betty Ford. When other kids do, they prostitute themselves and end up dead.

I ended up at Columbia. Luckily, heroin wasn’t my thing. I tried it once, snorted it with Ali and got high as fuck. It felt amazing. We just went to the posh late night coffee shop next to The Three Arts Club where I was living, in the Gold Coast. I literally lived in a neighbourhood called The Gold Coast and still felt poor. I lived just around the corner from the real estate developer at the time he was murdered by Andrew Cunanan, who went on to murder Gianni Versace before killing himself. It was the original center of wealth in Chicago city. I still felt like I was not enough, and couldn’t even enjoy living there, I felt like I had failed by not having my own place, instead of feeling like I was living a privileged life in an historic residence for women but it felt like the sorority I’d never wanted to be in. I never once painted in the light-filled top floor studio there. At least I did use the piano room, the stage, and the art gallery for a photo shoot.

After that night, I went to see Laura the next day with some coffee, to check on her and maybe see if she was still going to go to school, as she was on the verge of failing out. She was living with her asshole boyfriend at the time, a relic from the group of Chicago Hardcore dickhead promoters we were hanging out with at the end of our raver days. These guys once though it was funny to start a fight at a 4th of July party we all went to together on one of our visits from St. Louis. Her guy was why she really moved to Chicago, to live with him. I first went out with one of them. I was at first taken by his kindness, but after a few months I was bored with his limited intellect and penchant for meth and violence. That relationship ended with me throwing his jeans out of Laura’s mom’s 4th floor loft in St. Louis, followed by a jar of Ragu pasta sauce. I loved a dramatic gesture like that, probably inspired by films and soap operas. For Laura, Sage, an ironic name for such an asshole, it was more than that. It was her first tough guy boyfriend, the strong silent type that would protect her, or so she thought. First Jessica moved to Chicago with her man, who was fleeing imminent arrest had he stayed in STL, as the DEA had gotten wise to quite a lot by then. Laura left soon thereafter, to be with Sage in a shitty apartment in sketchy Humboldt Park. I think the abuse started there, and Jess was the one who figured it out.

By this time, the late morning of me bringing her coffee, they had moved into a loft in further downtown, where she befriended a kind guy named Michael who lived next door. So I show up with coffee, and while still holding it, she made some remark in our normal bitchy tone, probably about her dick of a boyfriend, or something else that injured my ego. Anyway, she pissed me off, so I threw the coffee at her. I was frustrated and coming down, so I didn’t think twice about it. It was emotion straight to action. She was shocked, I immediately apologised, she threw me out. I’m sure I said something about him hitting her but sure, I’m the asshole, or something like that. She forgave me in the next few days, but something changed after that. Maybe it was me, her affair with Jessie which I learned about shortly after, or the heroin that she used more and more, with them. I never did it again, after that, luckily.

I later shared an apartment with Ali for a short six months, a cool loft style back house in the Old Town area. I can’t imagine why I though that would be a good idea, but it probably had to do with her convincing nature, and my desire to get the fuck out of that posh club, to be somewhere where I could be depressed in peace, not having to cross paths with a doorman all the time or fifty other women when I wanted to eat something. We inevitably fell out, I hated her drug use and her bitchiness. She was such a mean and spoiled cunt. Laura and Ali were closer now, and there were others more important than me, too. It all revolved around heroin, but I didn’t see it so clearly then. I remember when Ali moved out she called me fat. I wasn’t fat, she was an asshole, and my response to her was, well I can lose weight but you can’t fix ugly. I’m pretty sure she stole my new camera the first few weeks I knew her, probably to sell it for drugs. She was poison, through and through, but it took me almost a year to figure it out. Legend has it that when our friend Emily was dying or already dead from an overdose, she and Laura stole her jewellery and some clothes from her apartment. I saw her once after that, a couple years and lifetimes later. She had spent some time in rehab in Florida and was living down the street from me in Pilsen on the South Side of Chicago with her boyfriend, a total douche that was part of the group from the 4th of July party. She had chased him for so long and finally trapped him into living with her, he was likely gay and covering it up by being an asshole to everyone all the time, trying to be the biggest, manliest dick he could be. She was miserable, and trying to finish her degree and get out of there, get back to New York in time to still try to marry well. I felt nothing for her. Laura was dead, and she was still here, and all I could think was that she finally got what she deserved, an empty, miserable, pointless life.
Travelling Dreams

Mar 7th, 2023

I hope that writing will help me to remember more. I am sitting in a coffee shop in Reims, next to where the kids go to school. I thought I forgot my wallet again, but I didn’t, so I was able to buy the small but good, overpriced coffee to sit and write. I keep having these packing dreams, airport dreams, what of them. In them I scramble to fill suitcases, in the rooms of strange, large hotels, quite suburban fancy but often a bit worn down. In one recent dream, the building was more of a residence, but the elevator, there was something very wrong with it. The floor was unstable, wooden, and balanced precariously, with gaps at the entrance and the rear. I think of all of the gaps, how they’ve always scared me, that idea of falling through the cracks. Terrified that I might just disappear completely.

I remember my airport photos from art school. They were so good, I thought. I still think so, honestly, but no one seemed to care then. An ex-boyfriend told me they looked like they were student work. I should have told him to fuck himself – what had he done better? Or at all? Sure, he dropped out of school and started a company and to build supercomputers, but what did he know about art? His definition was way different than mine, and that was fine by me, even interesting. Did I critique the primitive nature of the work he was so moved by? No, why would I, what would I gain from that, and what did I even know about what he was into, not much, except that it was science based, in a place between analog and digital, and I loved that. What did he know about feminist self-portraiture? About as much as everyone else – Cindy Sherman and her film stills. That’s all anyone ever had to say about my work, the work I fought to make, against the documentary and lighting profs who thought they knew what they were talking about. If you know, you know – it is the artist vs. the photographer. They are not the same, or at least they weren’t in the 90’s. I had the chance, the luck, the timing, to be in art school at the dawn of digital, in the years of change, between the future and nostalgia. I know what it means to make a photo, the lighting, the film, the developing, and the printing – the chemistry, the science, the analog algorithms that dictate what you can and can’t do. I was fascinated by the science, but from an artist’s mind.

I was an artist, first and foremost, and had identified as one since maybe around 16 years old. It was when I was first really grounded that I started to paint. I got a month for something, maybe my suspension from school for defacing an ex-friend’s locker with tampons and vaseline, maybe it was stealing money from my parents. I can’t remember now. But I do remember the peace and quiet of staying home and painting in the night, of being with myself, of knowing what to do by my own intuition, being guided by myself, my eye, my god, who knows, but I just knew what to do. During this time I painted when I wanted to be still and danced and when I wanted to be moving. Either way, I was alone with my music while my family slept upstairs. I was staying out of trouble, not drinking too much with strange harmless boys, or getting angry at idiot girls, I was just alone with myself, and it felt wonderful, peaceful, whole.

My parents must have grounded me that time for habitually stealing money from them, from their checking account. Having gone unnoticed for at least a month or two, they got Quicken. In the days before digital banking, apps, easy access to information, you had to do it yourself, on your big clunky beige PC stuck in the office corner. So they did, and they discovered a big hole where I’d been. They’d given me the PIN code once for a cash card, and I’d taken to taking money out when I needed it, for gas or cigarettes, a bit of food, perhaps. They had never taken the time to figure out an allowance. I’d had a job for awhile, my first, as a maid at a local motel. It was awful, I can still remember the smells. There there were two types of rooms, the redone and the not redone. They were both pretty awful, smelling of stale cigarettes, toxic cleaning products, misery, and desperation. I remember the girl I worked with on occasion, she was around my age, local, and probably never leaving. I knew we were different, worlds apart, even if I couldn’t put my finger on it then. With that job I’d had my own money, to fill up my little white car, but it was only for a summer and wasn’t sure what to do next. There were no conversations with my parents, no suggestions or guidance on what to do. I was just sort of there, existing in the same house as them, my basic needs provided for, but that was all. I still don’t understand how or why they were this way, and any hope of having conversations with my mom to understand is gone, forever. Now it’s just up to me to figure it out, to go back there, to unpack that, too, if I want. I would say that I do want, seeing as it has come up so easily today. So now what.

I think the thing that stands out to me the most, it surely did then, but without the awareness that I have now, is that my parents just weren’t that engaged with actual parenting. I did things I needed to do to get by, and I was lazy, not driven, but also depressed from everything, not the least being their laissez-faire attitude about being parents. Where was the pushing, the punishments, the overbearing, smothering guidance of the other parents, like those of my friends. Why were they so differen? Why were they so detached? Why didn’t they care enough about me to do things differently? What was the matter with them?

Now I know more, I get it. Things that I’ve learned, but also how the story continued, how it played out, how it has ended. I see now that it was not me, not at all, it was two very deficient people, together, in a very deficient situation, both too concerned with their past injuries to be present. Then, in turn, they caused more damage to each other, and to us, as kids. None of this can be changed, but I can try to look at it with open eyes, learned eyes, and see how I can stop repeating the same pattern, now, in my own family, and with my own partner, and children.

But hey, back to art school now. These streams of thought are so precious though, as if I let myself go, I can go oh so far to get somewhere deep and hidden. Hidden, but ever present, informing even today my actions. Free writing, arrives at the point so very quickly, wham – there it is. Now here I am, in a second cafe, this time in Rilly, and Bob Marley is on, stuck in a moment you can’t get out of it. How cent percent appropriate. So now, back to art school.

Cindy fucking Sherman. As if there is only room for one woman artist taking pictures of herself. One fucking woman artist. Meanwhile, here’s me, 19, 20, 21, in art school, after hitting not the but a rock bottom, after taking 2 years off, as I would later define in, between high school and college. In reality, it hadn’t been as much of a choice as a default, my only choice was to not participate, to drop the fuck out. I had been on a slow slide to rejecting the world around me my senior year of high school. I wanted nothing to do with you, all of you, your bullshit, and your unfair rules and practices.

In high school, my senior year, was kicked off of the dance team for having a nose ring in uniform. On my way to the parking lot from the football field, my coach crossed my path and saw, repeating to me that it wasn’t allowed. My answer to her was to take off my warm-up jacket, slapping it on the chest of my friend with me to take it and saying, there, I’m not in uniform. I was furious, it was 1992, and my face jewellery was seen as something that made the team look bad. Along with my alcohol consumption, and perceived sluttyness. My sexuality, because I was, even though completely inexperienced and inactive, was seen as flamboyant and unappoligetic. My mere existence was offensive, this is the message I received. Kids these days, they have no idea how different it is now, how much more they are protected. I am really showing my age now. There is still so much to do, so much progress to be made. In part, I am still that girl, that young woman, being told that her mere existence is not ok. Fuck that, fuck them, and fuck you for not letting me exist, to fight for myself as being just fucking fine exactly as I was, as I am. The irony being that there were so many others, doing so much worse, but they fit in, worked their whole young lives to fit in, and had parents show up and smile and have their backs. They fought to have a safe sexuality, a digestible femininity. I did not. I fought to express myself and my passion, my drive, my femininity and sexuality to be loud and proud, after years of being told I was the ugly girl by the same assholes that were clinging to any and every thread that attached them to being normal, I said fuck it, I’m going my own way. This is what it got me. Three days later I was called in a kicked off the squad. Three of my cohorts, my friends, my confidantes, quit too, in protest. That felt good, but I was still sad. I had lost the one thing that to me proved that I didn’t have to fit in to shine.

Two years before I’d seen the girls dancing at games and assemblies, while I sat in the bleachers up top and to the right, with the band. I’d thought, I can do that. I dance my ass off at home, I know the music, I have the moves, I can do that, too, and I made it. To my surprise, the veterans took me in, showed me what to do, and made sure I made the final cut. The second year, my senior year, I was made co-captain with three others. A few months later, I was kicked off, gone, forgotten. The worst part though, is that my parents didn’t have my back. They did nothing. My argument was that it was just jewellery that happened to be on my face. This argument would have allowed me to still be on the team but my parents didn’t even seem to react, to rise up, to protect me, to fight for me. They did nothing. I have sworn to myself to always stand up for my children, for their right to be who they are, in their world, to have acceptance. I am this way because I know that my expulsion was about way more than my nose ring. It was because of my audaciousness, my resolute belief in my right to be myself, this was the real threat to the status quo, and couldn’t be allowed in any way, shape, or form. And so I was cut.

This story goes on, but now it’s too much, too far away, too painful to remember. I feel this is the work of my life, It’s my work, just as mom had her work, her deep diving, as the hospice nurse explained to me. I am doing this work now, in hopes that I might have a better life while still here on this earth. It doesn’t pay very well, but it is the most important thing, the unpacking, the wondering, the realising. My god, what if this is the only point to being alive at all?

I have never felt the overwhelming drive or desire to be anything until recently, finding my vocation quite late in life, with the help of a spiritual source of sorts. Is this because I felt so overwhelmed, under water and drowning, from simply existing? I think I know the answer to this, and it is yes. Partly due to the emotional neglect of my parents, partly because of my own sense of clarity and sorrow and pointlessness about the world at large. My dreams were covered in the heavy wet blankets of depression from a young age, having also a very real sense of social paradigms, how they all functioned, in a pyramid built on the backs of lies and control, racism, sexism, and power plays. I don’t know how I saw it from such a young age, but it may have had a lot to do with PBS and my mother screaming back at the television a lot, sometimes in agreement, sometimes in argument. At least I had access to this learning, this education, the insular environment that to be quite fairly, moulded me into a thinking, seeing, intellectually aware young person. So I could see things, how they effected others, and also how they effected me. But just because I could see, didn’t mean I knew what to do. I was angry and rebellious, and rightly so, but didn’t know how to channel it. Then, while I was figuring it out, still suffering under it, grappling with it, I was overlooked, ignored, lusted for because I had finally come into my own. What a fucking trap, femininity. Now I know that there is almost no way to win. It’s all stacked against us. Dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t. We live in a slightly different world now, after Me Too and others pushed the bar forward in some ways for safety. But we have lost the guaranteed right to abortion. This I will not unpack today, because the rage is locked up in me like a tiger in a cage, and I don’t have time or the emotional energy to let him out today. Female rage, and so very much of it, where is its place in this world, in me? How do I expel it without hurting my husband and my children?

This will not be answered today, for now I must go on with my life as though it is normal, ordinary times. When in fact, it is not normal now, not at all, and it may never be normal again. I feel like a cicada pushing out of its shell. I need to make the long, low, aching and sad, melancholy moans of this ancient insect, as it is the end of the long hot summer of my life, and now I must enter this new season by shedding the skin of my past, emerging whatever new creature I will become, to continue on in a world that exists without my mother in it.