one artist mama of three
if you ask
(words about this new work)
breathe no. … no Quietly No- quietly not for you quietly not about you but, about you. it is me – about me . in your presence. seen and feeling seen. you see, you see me. you see me if you see me, but .you. won’t ask me
if you have read up until now, things are about to abruptly change and forgive the spelling errors.
up until now, I have been at least I thought, appropriate.
well, I guess it doesn’t maybe serve me well
I have these smart ass responses in my head lately that I need to get out
like: happy people don’t need post it notes all over their houses telling them how happy they are
epiphany #1
and #2 if you are asking the Universe for a sign, maybe it’s over the door reading E X I T.
seriously
My head is pounding from crying for the past two hours over slights, real, or imagined, or both. Aren’t they both real in your own head anyway?
wondering, why didn’t I have the balls to say something in the moments? why didn’t I?
what is wrong with me?
WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?
why do people think it’s okay to talk to me a certain way? (because I let them)
why don’t I stand up for myself? (because I am afraid they won’t like me)
when we reveal ourselves, why is it that what we think we have revealed and what was ultimately understood are so disparate that we stand alone even after all that effort toward closeness?
and wondering? how could you know me so little? how could i have revealed so very much and be so little understood? how is it possible that you think I am that person that I do not know?
I struggle to become.
So, now I feel like asking. Tear me down. Tear me down until I am NO Thing. NOTHING. Non existent.
without feature. then.
then. I can choose which features I need
which serve me and which do not.
I can let go of all this insecurity and fear and oppression
i can start
and not be so beholden to anyone
why don’t I stand for anything?
I feel like the worst failure. Like someday, my kids will say, “why did you have me?” and I will have to answer.
and their response will be, no doubt, “I wish I’d never been born” because they will hate me.
or if I can change “fate” they won’t
{I wish there were words for what’s going on right now. I’m trying to look at the bright side and find the silver lining and all that b.s. but it’s just not happening unfortunately. I keep thinking, someday, we’ll look back on this time and think it was not so bad. It was just character building, humbling, made us closer as a family. or. I will wish I never brought these little people who rely on me into this world because I have failed them.
I am starting to see that as parents we have no choice but to just do the best we can, in the moments we are in with the tools we have. Maybe my perfectionist nature is what always makes me think things could be so much better than this all the time. I don’t know if there is a ‘good enough’ for me. I keep trying to see it from their perspective and to provide them the experience they have had for so many years now of me being here for them.
I feel so much pain inside, but the realization that I will have to be the primary breadwinner is not something I want to come to terms with on so many levels. I have been here too many times in the past seven years. Promises that start of with right action and end in trailed off incompletion. I get hopeful and it turns on me to where I wish I had not let myself get so vulnerable again. I have to be so much stronger to turn off something inside me that will let me be that provider. Everytime I think about it I cry. I worry that someday they will say that I wasn’t there or didn’t care. They won’t see that it is because I cared that I did what I did.
I have time with the kids now and I just feel like I am looking in a window of what raising them everyday should be.
I never thought it would be so painful to be away from the kids. Hell, I didn’t even want children.
I just keep thinking of the childhood I want them to have and if I’m working full time, it takes so much of that away from them. If I don’t work full time I take away the stability that I could otherwise be providing.
and now. there is a new dream, a new vision, a new promise.
Do I believe again? Do I wait and keep pushing and pulling and balancing. All the while saying this time will be different.
I want to believe. I know it all comes from LOVE why can’t that be enough?
So, maybe they won’t hate me- but who do they see me as? someone who does what they hate because it is the right thing to do even if it is detrimental to myself because my job is not to my self but to others – I might pay for them with my ‘self’ until my ‘self’ ceases to exist.
or conversely, to be so selfish that I satisfy my own needs but cease to see theirs as any sort of priority. much less, corollary to my own throbbing with creative juices.
why did I choose this path? why did they choose me? why don’t I quit, out the exit, and walk on all of it?
LOVE
I try. I cry. and I go through motions praying feeling comes back to extremities of heart, mind etc in time. days. months. years….
I’ve been away from here and that is not because I haven’t been documenting life with words, just not for public consumption.
But, I am trying to make space to breathe and like the title of this, get out of my own way. To make clear the path.
I have learned that grad school, which I finished 10 years ago, didn’t make me hate art. It made me hate talking about it, writing about it and understanding it in a verbal language that I don’t think in. I think in a visual language and one of actions. Now art and Art need to come back from their exile. Art, photography specifically, used to be my religion, my air that I breathed, my lover, my way of experiencing life and understanding it. I will probably never be a photographer again. But… I will take pictures. Also, I realize that as an artist, nothing is wasted, no experience is without value. Everything I have done, creatively and otherwise will inform every creative expression I have yet to be given. That reassures me. I am not starting over only continuing down my present path.
So, in that spirit, I am seriously giving up on words. I am jealous of those who can turn out words that others find themselves in, I can’t. I choke and have to close the computer upon reading them sometimes, feeling I am invading a found journal and must close it, not being worthy of those secrets.
Here is a start even though these were taken with my phone.
It sucks -especially b/c it’s of my kid’s installation of paper umbrellas which is great though the photos aren’t. but it’s a beginning and end to this past decade.
edited3/20/2010 – I’ve been working on it.
time in a cleaned out studio / where I can actually work
breakfast with someone who likes breakfast and maybe even drinks coffee
an art show that moves me
big luscious paintings
beer and guacamole at midnight in the quiet of my house after work
driving alone with the music loud
to feel loving and patient with my oldest child
to be a better mom these those days
to understand why all of this is going on
to move through it gracefully
I think I have finally perfected my state of denial. Things are certainly going to hell and I’m ready with drink in hand. Maybe this would be a good time to drag my camera and photoshop skills out of the closet because when shit falls apart is when the ‘artist’ in me loves life the most. Who knows maybe something good can come out of all this depression, anger and apathy.
I am going thru the motions with my brain in the gutter and desires for everything beautiful and dirty. I have moments where I remember what it was to be the artist and I sometimes wish I could be again. I used to be good, but like with anything, without practice…it’s going to take awhile to get back where I was. I feel like some old athlete or musician. It’s going to be a steep learning curve, but maybe something worth seeing will be at the end of this tunnel. Is it too late to make a come-back or is it just depressing and sad to see at this point? Like someone past their prime having a mid-life crisis with a silly car and new tastes in clothes or music? What kind of art comes out of all this b.s. anyway but narcissistic, self absorbed skills thrown out for an ego stroke? Really, but what is art anyway then, right?
seems to have heated me up too. I’m feeling like an animal in heat these days. My brain has been taken over by S.E.X. It’s a good thing we got that whole reproductive thing taken care of after kid #3.
and it’s not like all of a sudden a bunch of crazy kinky things are happening over here or anything. The Mr. has been out of state working, so we’re barely hitting twice a month over here, but it’s all that I can think about. How did I go from ‘what’s sex?’ in May to ‘can we lock all 3 kids out of our room for like an hour?’ now?
Is it the monsoon season? The heat? The truth to “absence makes the heart grow fonder”? That I am drinking more? The fact that a guy 17 years younger than me flirts with me at work? I dunno….but the combination is apparently working and the switch has been flipped.
Now what to do with all this energy? Since I can’t do it 4x a day like we used to…and. It is way powerful. I forgot how much sexual energy swirls in me since it left even though it was for just a few months that it was gone. It feels overwhelming now. I feel like every single person I talk to can see right through me and know that I am just ooozing sex, dripping sex, looking at any man strictly on a ‘does looking at him do anything for me? basis’ - if I can only properly harness it all I could rearrange this life. Serious manifesting energy swirling. It is all creation energy. I can feel it tangibly, like electricity, bringing my thoughts into reality before I know how things happened, in ways totally unimaginable. (not like all that ‘the secret’ financial crap, but what I really think about….and dang…. instant karma for the kids, flowers from the husband and major psychic hits)
I need to get control, and let go of all control. Trying to take it into the next level, in meditation because I know this energy could be turned around and go up, up, up. But it’s soooo hard when my focus is so physical. My skin on the fabric of my clothes, the feel of every sensation, my breath, my breathing, following my breath. Breathe. Breathe. My mind: “um….breath on my neck”….and back to my breath, but then I feel my tongue in my mouth and my teeth with my tongue and there I go thinking of biting skin and tongues and you get the point… But I feel the potential if I can follow the right road here (which I probably can’t until fall, but then the energy will be different and so will that level of power in me) so for now, for tonight…I need to go wake up my husband. mmmmmm, I hope he doesn’t mind. and if he does ….. I can always try meditation again, but damn it’s fun to have a body this go round.
When my life is on shaky ground, my libido evaporates. Maybe everyone’s does, but for me, this is new.
In the past, nothing, and I mean nothing could affect my needs for physical pleasure. It didn’t matter if I was feeling emotionally distant from whoever I was involved with…that was a separate issue to the needs at hand. I used to also say that I didn’t need a man for anything but that one particular thing. I had a good job, hobbies, friends…the one thing I wanted from the guy in my life was a good orgasm and if he couldn’t deliver, well, he was just a friend then.
So, now fast forward 10 or so years, I married the guy that happened to do that one particular thing way better than anyone else ever could have. And now, I can’t get out of my head and back into bed, or wherever it might be likely to happen…the parking lot of the science center, a second grade classroom, church, off the side of the highway…you get the idea.
So, I have some serious ::::NEEDS:::: but everytime I think we might be going somewhere that they might be met…damn, he has to go say something that reminds me of all this shit we are going through financially right now and then I’m stuck in my head and can’t get out. Then the to-do list is running and my list of complaints I have about shit he didn’t do while I was working….that I would have got done if he’d been the one working and I was home all day…
Now, how the hell (without batteries or indiscretions) do I get back to that happy place? Someone tell me, please. I haven’t gone this long since I was single!
hmmmm, It’s 1:19am, I just got home from work, I’ve been up since 6:45am. I’m up drinking beer and eating chips and salsa. I have been making an awful lot of mexican food lately, it’s my comfort food. I grew up in Texas and chips and salsa can be very therapeutic.
I have a hard time living in the present right now…I find myself remembering another me.
and missing art and texas and simplicity of being the artist I was back then.
thinking like an artist and holding little pieces of paper delicately, pondering the way things look and feel. being alive and in love. I want to make myself something. Something small and delicate and beautiful. I need something to hold onto right now. I need to remember what art can be for me, that it can be the way through this. It can be the light at the end of the tunnel right now, a way to take my past through this present.
I’m get nostalgic about texas…mostly because of this:
it reminds me of texas and boots and sex and tequila
Obviously with 3 kids, it would not work, but a girl can dream of a date night only truck, right?
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