Notes on My Life

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.
Coffee and Cigarettes

Feb 27th, 2023

I have found it difficult to write lately. It seems that I have lost the habit. I feel like I have nothing to say, nothing that I want to say. I have been trying to face everything sober, and am having to learn that that is not easy. Alcohol for me is not the problem now, it is cannabis. I can’t use it anymore, at least not at this time. My addictive tendencies are too strong, combined with the will to escape, these two forces together are too much. There is no ‘taking the edge off’, there is just complete annihilation. There is no stopping me once I have started, and the emotional toll it takes on me after is just not worth it. The most important thing I can do now is stay sober, in the sadness and grief that surrounds me like an unwanted fog. Even cigarettes, they are a means of escape. I am rewatching Stranger Things, and watching Hopper reminds me of this. He always smokes, taking from a smashed soft pack of Camels. He smokes to escape, to push down the pain of loosing his young daughter, a pain that forever changed him. There’s the few moments of escape that the cigarette offers him, to forget, or perhaps to remember in some part of his subconscious, an act of punishing himself, disguised as an act of momentary relief. I know this game, this deep psychological game of emotional resistance, of passing the time with the pain. It was why I started smoking again in California, to pass the time, to take a break from the emotional horror story that I was living. Yet I knew I was punishing myself, hurting my breathing, my breath. The refined act of living is breathing, and I was consciously making it harder for myself by filling my lungs with toxic smoke. Punishing myself for years of unresolved questions, memories, and problems, disguised as a break from the present, a present that was bringing all of these things to light. Will this awareness now give me the strength to stop? I hope so.

This morning I woke up late, the kids watching the TV at 9:30, and still watching, on a Sunday morning. The cat, the one that’s left, sleeping in the sunny spot on the bed, waiting for me to get up. Made coffee, with chocolate, snuggled on the couch with my daughter. It was lovely, just being present, enjoying the kids doing what they want to do. But then I went out for a smoke, and one turned into two. Now I don’t want to sit with them, so they don’t smell me, and I’m writing in the study. Even cigarettes, not only alcohol or cannabis, separate me from them. What if I were able to just be fully present? How much would that change my relationships with them for the better? I owe it to myself, to them, to find out.

I must find my strength, trust myself, to take one step at a time forward into the future, the new world without my mother in it. I can create my life now, gone is the source of panic, of the world ending, as it has already ended. Left over is me, my wiring, my own deep issues and fears, and I can deal with that now. The catch is that the grief is here now, requiring a new rhythm, one of much rest, and patience for myself. I must sleep early, sleep when the children sleep, so that during the day I can work, and grieve, and do good things for myself too. For the hours I have are short, and the demands form before are still there, and the desires to create good things in the world through my work. But I have to be honest with myself and admit that the grief is overwhelming. It must be allowed to overwhelm me, but in ways that don’t hurt me, or others. I must learn to live with it, to carry it with me, to set it aside gently when I must tend to other things, other people, and to not forget that it is there, so that it doesn’t surprise me at opportune moments, like an angry, wounded dog. But for now I will have another cigarette, let the kids watch another show, knowing that both will delay the inevitable, but for now that is ok. My silly, adolescent grief is still here, but I will put it to rest, let it go, with the end of this winter break that we have all spent together, watching too much TV and sleeping in late.
Here, Now

Feb 12th, 2023

At Royal Kids, the indoor play park, I sit in my noise cancelling headphones, kid size of course, leftover from the music festival where, as it turned out, you could rent them for a fiver. I sit here, depressed and a bit stoned, to be honest. These last two days have really taken it out of me. Aristide runs up, and asks me for money, two euros. They always have a bit of add on at these places, to really test your limits as parents, and to commodify everything. Oh how fun, but I easily say no. I had to practice with him earlier, saying no at least a hundred times when he asked if he could have his candy now instead of having to wait in the car. I should have just said that it was a motivator for him to hurry up and get ready, as he seems to take the longest. But then he did a little Broadway show for me to make me smile. It was quite surprising, but I loved it. I loved him. I just hope he doesn’t feel responsible for my feelings like I did for my mother. I mean, I likely do this seeing as that is what I learned.

I will have to examine this closer. One of the main things I like about using cannabis is that it really helps me to have a look at myself. I think that for a long time I have been disconnected from myself. Very, very disconnected. Drinking definitely added to that, and cannabis seems to help me to reverse that. One of the main attractions to this plant must’ve historically been that it aids with the feeling of enlightenment of the spirit. That’s the high, if you tune into it. Sure, it makes things funny too, but also clear, like if you have had a problem you are trying to sort out and need to tap into your feelings, it can really help. It should be used in moderate doses, though. You don’t want to just be escaping everything all the time by getting so stoned instead of just high.

The trauma that surrounds us weighs so heavy on how we deeply feel about ourselves, and colours our actions, interactions, and reactions to other people. Now this situation seems to challenge me so deeply that I feel that I must release generations of trauma of all kinds. I am truly broken down now. I ask God for no more, please. I don’t mean to be selfish, I know that there is much senseless suffering in the world, and at much more importance and at greater scale, but I am hurting, and I want to do better, and I want to heal. Please, no more, for now. I know that my strength is dependent on you but at ask you to please test me no further.

I release my prayer and trust that things will turn out as they are meant to be. I have already learned why Réglisse had to go, to teach many lessons: to show us how to grieve as a family, to bring death to our doorstep and make real what had happened so far away, and to show us how lucky we are to have every moment alive. Also, maybe to brak me wide open. The third eye injury wasn’t enough, well, it definitely was enough at the time, and plenty. But lest not forget, the seizure. It was Chinese New Year, I remembered today, when I was wearing bright red leather ballet flats while walking outside on the dark gravel. Why not a little poppy coloured brightness? Why not? Seemed audacious even, on a sad day like today. But as the one bird passed over, signing sorrow on his way, along came joy with sorrow and together they would stay.

Oh and by the way, I caved and bought the jetons for the bumper cars, one ride for each. I bought twelve for ten euros and the bartender threw in a lucky thirteen for free.
For Réglisse

Feb 12th, 2023

The cat is dead. My fury love, my source of comfort, the yang to the yin of his brother or cousin Tigre, a royal black lion of a cat in winter, fluffy, with a mane framing his face and his Egyptian nose, died suddenly yesterday morning. He was cuddled up at my feet on the bed, and when I stuck one foot out of the covers at 6:30 or so he put his little paw on me to say hi, yes, I’m here. At 7am he went out when Tigre came in, and at 7:15, when Cyrille turned out of the gate to catch his early flight, he saw his lifeless body on the side of the perimeter wall of the property. He stopped to see that he was already gone. He tried to call me, but I silenced the call, not wanting to wake the kids, then saw a text come through to look at my WhatsApp, and when I did, I saw the terrible, unbelievable news. Réglisse is dead. He is outside, already gone. Don’t wake the kids.

So I ran out to find him, and picked up his floppy, warm body and cried and cried. Not this poor innocent creature, who loved us so much, brought us so much joy and comfort. This loving beast that was still so young, who I thought would be around for years and years as part of our family. Not another loss. Not now. He was part of my plan of recovery, of convalescence. Work a bit, write a bit, cuddle and nap with the cats. Now one is gone. Now what am I supposed to do.

Never have I felt like such an adult. Cyrille is not here, for a couple more days. I have a dead cat in the doghouse, the dog house that I bought for when we go away for a few days and need to feed and shelter the cats, something that has probably never been really used until now. Now there is a dead cat in there and I have to dig a hole in the cold ground and bury him.

Now I am devastated. I am more shocked by this senseless and sudden act than by the death of my mother. At least her death was warned, was impending, immanent. Réglisse was alive one moment and dead the next. The bed was still warm from where he’d been sleeping. Not an old fat cat with health problems, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I can only assume that he was hit by a car from one of the four houses on our dead end street, at 7:10 in the morning, on a Saturday. This seems ridiculous, but it’s that or he landed on his neck and broke it from a height of five feet. This seems even more preposterous that the unlikelihood of the first explanation.

And why God, why? Why would you do this to us now? Losing my mother was a spiritual experience like no other. I was lifted up into my faith, into my belief, and now this: completely senseless and hurtful, it is breaking me. There is no peace from this, no release, only further heartbreak in a place where I’d prayed for peace and comfort. Why this now God? Do I not deserve some respite for all that I have given? I feel that I am being tested. Does everything happen for a reason, or are somethings just random and can be horrible. I don’t know where this is going to take me, I am still too far down in it. I’m still looking out of the corner of my eye when I hear a noise, as I think it’s him. I broke down sobbing on the way home yesterday, as I was aware of the familiar feeling, usually so subtle, that I was happy to go home and see the cats. But yesterday, it was just one cat, for the first time, and I cried and cried and cried. Why would God take such an innocent, perfect, loving spirit away from us, from me, in a time when he was so deeply needed.

Why God, why?
Nothing to Say

Feb 10th, 2023

Here I am, sat down to write. The urge is gone, the sense of urgency that I had before has withered and died. Now I am back at home. Suitcases half-unpacked, I’m avoiding completing the task. My husband starts travelling again tomorrow, which is Saturday. It seems unfair that he is off to sunny Greece to sell wine, to shmooze with people at a fancy dinner while I am home in cold and grey Champagne with the kids. They deserve better than this, than me, right now. The winter vacances start tonight. I’d hoped we’d go skiing for the first time as a family this year. The kids are finally old enough to really enjoy it and we would do well to have the time together. Instead they will go to the centre de loisirs, sort of a day camp for people who must work and have no grandparents to look after the kids while they do so. That stings more than ever. Mine are both dead now, and his are unable or unwilling to do so. My husband’s father is on his third wife, third time’s the charm, as they say. No insult there, they are very happy. They are meant for each other, when you see them together it is clear. It’s also easy to be happy when you have no worries, no kids, in financial retirement. It’s hard though, that they are the only married couple in the family other that us, and we’ve been married the longest. We have no one to look to as an example of what it looks like to grow and change as a couple through thick and thin, though kids, moves, new jobs, life crises, loss, troubles, and most of all, our own growth and changes. We have only us, and other divorces, many divorces. When the going gets tough, you divorce. There is no working though, no making amends, no handholding though troubled times. There is just divorce, blaming the other for irreconcilable differences, no reconciling. There are kids torn away from their fathers, for at least part of the time. Broken families, and damaged children, left in the wake of their parents’ dissolution of whatever it was that they once had that made them want to make a family in the first place.
Unpacking

Feb 8th, 2023

I’m sitting on the bed in my office at home, surrounded by my half-unpacked suitcase and all its contents. The smell of the last three weeks is hanging on my clothes, a combination of the hospital, the care home, and sadness. A light but stinging, pungent smell that I don’t completely dislike as it seems to be the only thing left of what’s happened, evidence that it did in fact happen, all of it. I’m still quite shocked by it all, though shocked seems to strong of a word. I’ve imagined the emails I will write, to try to at least finish this with some sort of financial reparation. Charging us for January rent at the care home seems fucking absurd, and fucking insensitive, seeing as she left there on the verge of death on the 31st and only returned for a few nights, to an incompetent staff and not the correct meds, meds that she needed to sustain her comfort and keep nausea at bay. We were all basically left to fend for ourselves, told by the med techs that we needed to administer the liquid xanax, morphine, and haldol, the meds they give old people to zone them out, instead of helping them to manage the pain while remaining conscious. This is so difficult to write, as now I’m in the processing part of this, away from the non-stop panic of the actual situation, stuck in between fatigue and overwhelm, not quite able to keep up with the rapidly changing needs, responsibility, and troubleshooting. Now I can look back and ask myself what the fuck happened. It’s scary, did I do something wrong? Did I do my best, along with my sister and Bettie. Were we left with the rope to hang ourselves, forced out of the hospital too soon, unable, unprepared to care for Mom?

None of this matters, I realise, at least not in the emotional realm. I take a break to have one from my last packs of cigarettes, and I check in with myself. I feel terrible. I am in between times, in a void that cannot be measured. My grief is mixed up with everything else, and all parts of my consciousness are jumbled together. Mostly, I want to stay still, do nothing, be sad. But my children are home today, as it is Wednesday and there is no school in France, so I am home with them. Today I have set, and will keep, the bar low. I have made pancakes for breakfast and cleaned up after all of us. The floor needs to be vacuumed and mopped but I will leave that for another time. I shake out the rugs, doing just a step above the minimum so that at least they are clean. I have started laundry so that the kids will have their uniforms clean for Friday, and the boys’ favourite sweatshirts will be ready as well, if they chose to wear them again tomorrow. I will shower and wash my hair and get dressed, nicely, or at least not in sweatpants and a hoodie. There is homework to be done, but that will wait until later. I will take them to their hip-hop class after lunch, and I will have an hour to myself. During this hour I will buy a new plastic tablecloth for the dining room table so that they can have a place to draw that is clean and fresh. I will have to measure it first, as I always forget the length, so I will have to find a measuring tape. This I wanted to do before I left to the US, but didn’t have time, so I will try to at least pick this up where I left off. A tablecloth and a pretty basket for the boys’ room, so that they can pick up their clean clothes at the end of the day, the ones they’ve strewn about to find the right shirt or whatever as they got dressed in a hurry in the morning, or on the days they are home, the remnants of the many outfit changes they inevitably make throughout the day as they play.

For now, it is the mundane tasks I must conquer, the absolute minimum, so that I can keep our lives going with some sense of normalcy, while I adjust to my new normal, a world that exists without my mother in it.
Other People

Feb 7th, 2023

I am home now. After everything, all the things, everything worked out and I got home. It was a long, sad drive to the airport with my sister. She had a friend with her as a buffer. She probably arranged it just like that so that I wouldn’t talk to her; wouldn’t trap her in the car on the long drive and force her to talk to me. Since then she has contacted me to pay for her hotel. Rudely, with no kindness, and with the tone of a teenager. She is now 34. Turned 34 on the day our mother passed. This could be seen as Mom’s final act of narcissism, we joked about this before it happened. It is not so funny now. In our dealings over the last week I was there, I found her full of rage and sadness, but mostly rage. We had one good night together, re-potting plants at Mom’s place on her little porch, with me sitting and smoking. Maybe she wanted my help? I have no idea, because she has the same problem I do, she has w very hard time expressing what she wants and then when someone doesn’t live up to her unexpressed expectations, she gets mad at them and totally resentful that they haven’t read her mind. Same as me.

I’m certain how she feels about me now, after this trip. She hates me, despises me. It’s a venomous hatred, sly and cunning, like a rattlesnake stalking its prey. I can do nothing right by her. She has her reasons, and they are valid, let me be clear about that. From years past, when I fucked her over, deliberately. I thought we’d moved past it, that I apologised enough, but apparently I haven’t. She hasn’t forgiven me, and has no plans to do so. I can do nothing right by her, even now, especially now. I have to consider grief in this equation, and give her room to be however she needs to be. This was one of the mistakes I made years ago, when our father died. I expected her to act a certain way, to show me basic care, respect, and consideration and when she didn’t, I punished her for it, just to prove that I could. To prove that I should be listened to, to prove that I was in control. I broke her in a way that she had never been broken before. I knew I would break her, and I did. I did what I did with calculation and precision, with full awareness of how much it would hurt her. I knew it would destroy her, and I did it anyway. How was this so easy for me? What was I doing, and why? Perhaps if i can fully admit to what happened and why I can fix it, or maybe I can’t ever do that, and maybe I have to live with that for the rest of my life.

I came home to zero fanfare or welcome from my husband. After 3 weeks away and the loss of my mother, I’d hoped for a nice warm lunch to welcome me home. Nope, not today. There was practically no food in the house, no fuss made at all, so I ate a bowl of cereal and I went to sleep. Woke up briefly to the smell of some sort of dinner cooking, and fell straight back to sleep. I woke up in the night with a dead phone but had my watch on, and it read 5:30, so I started to get up, and stumbled downstairs to make coffee. Come to find out there is no coffee. After weeks away, filled with tragedy, loss, fear, abuse, sadness, and difficulty, I am not even welcomed back by coffee. There was not thought given to me, to what I might like. Is this too much to ask of your partner of 14 years? Too much to expect? I really don’t think so.

But based on these two people, maybe I deserve this. Maybe I’ve been such a fucking asshole in my life that it doesn’t matter what I do now to make up for it, these ‘loved ones’ are going to hate me. This is what I’ve sown. So what do I do? Divorce, move on, take the kids, in the hopes that I can save them at least from the years of dysfunction that would inevitably follow? Put up with the grief abuse of my sister? This fucking sucks, all of this on top of the one thing I need and want to do, which is to grieve the loss of my mother.

*

Hell is other people. – John-Paul Sartre
The Last Day

Feb 4th, 2023

It’s 9:04 and I should already be in the shower, but I don’t want to. I would love to spend a few more minutes avoiding the inevitable by smoking a cigarette but even I can’t justify that time wasted. Now I am on a countdown, and have an appointment to see mom at 10. I will take a shower and let it wash all of the noise and static away, the filth of the last few days, the worry, and try to meet her with a pure heart to say good bye. I must drag myself to make myself move, tired from the night before with a low, steady panic coarsing through me.

Off I go to say goodbye
Night Watch

Feb 4th, 2023

I’m taking a minute to check in with myself before heading to a 10pm meeting. I realised today that I’m six months alcohol-free. Not sober – I’m stoned right now. I don’t mind it, it’s softening everything, which I need right now. I don’t fly off the handle, but instead can talk through arguments. My triggers seem dulled, or I just don’t care to be triggered anymore. I’d love to chalk this up to my spiritual evolution but the cannabis sure doesn’t hurt. The pain of loss and death is too real, too much, too soon. I need coffee.

I feel my body and mind preparing to be in an uncomfortable place. You have to face yourself in these things, I’ve found so far. It’s easy to run and hide during the day, when your mind bops around from one thing to the next. But at night, in a group of alcoholics, not so much. You’re right there, facing yourself along with everybody else. I just don’t want to burst into tears in a group of strangers, not right now. So let’s see. Biggest part of life is just showing up, so here I go…

*

The meeting was great. I really had to settle into myself. Trying to go brought out my deepest fear of being seen. How many times have I wanted to disappear, to become part of the wall? Years and years of being unseen, where first? Tonight I felt comfortable after just a few minutes. At the heart of each meeting, it seems, is someone sharing their story in detail.

Now I lay on the bed, taking inventory. I am exhausted beyond belief. It is a new level of exhaustion. Very deep, into my bones, my soul aches. Pain is fear leaving the body. I feel the fear of not having my mother, it is a childish fear, a childish feeling, true and primal. My body aches in many places, but not from the usual groan of household labor, but from this gutteral sadness. I have smoked too much. If I could, I would non-stop chain smoke cigarettes, a disgusting habit that I’ve returned to like a sling made from self-loathing. Anything to punish myself, to cling to a former self that felt nothing. How shall I take care of myself now? She is gone now, I tell myself, as I hear two urgent train horns sound, as though they are exchanging an emphatic greeting, and they go trugging along in the night with their freight.

It is my last night here and it is late. I am alone in the hotel room, with public TV on in the background, allowing some news from the real world to seep in, It’s not good. The trains still pass, with their engines long gone. Tomorrow I will be gone, too.