The Person You Wanted to Be…

I’ve been watching X-Files reruns while ironing the fabric for this quilt…I’ve seen them all, so they’re a little bit familiar. The stories are generally safe; there’s not a lot of emotional triggers in them for me, so that’s good. They don’t require a lot of brain power either, plus I’ve always liked the characters. At one point, someone is impersonating Mulder (they have striated muscle that can change the shape of the face to match anyone else), and they ask Scully about the person she wanted to be when she was in high school, if she became that person. Did she have regrets?

It’s an interesting question, especially as my son gets really close to graduating high school and going off to college, but also I sit here staring at my life and wondering what the hell and how the fuck do I fix it? It’s not that easy to try to think back to high school (a million years ago) to what I wanted. It’s changed over the years, but it’s pretty simple: someone who pays attention and can travel through life with me. The ability to continue to make art. Being outside in nature. Painting my walls something besides earth tones. Life gets hard sometimes. We don’t always do it right, and when we don’t, it would be nice to know someone could handle that. My kids have had to handle it; so have my parents. I guess I have too. I’ve floundered my way through a huge load of bullshit in the last two years, both at work and in my personal life, and it could have been so much easier, except other people were involved who didn’t know how to behave.

As I sat on the stationary bike this evening, pedaling away, while playing the addictive game 2048, which my evil daughter introduced me to (dammit! I’m so close to summer that I can so easily get hooked on a silly game like this), listening to and helping the boychild vote his very first ballot (my little boy is all grown up!), I hope I did the right job with the two of them. Girlchild has way more empathy than boychild. She also cooks better. His temper is more even-handed. His handwriting sucks. Hers is much better, but she’s a total stress-monkey when it comes to school. He’s so calm, it’s scary…except he did study for AP Physics. And he was worried about colleges. And he’s worried about getting a job this summer. His social skills are not as developed as hers. I wish I had a job he could do this summer. I should make him (ha! can’t make him do much of anything) write a letter to himself about what he wants to do in his future, about the person he wants to be, about what’s in his head…like a senior-year brain dump. Then seal it up and mail it to him in 10 years.

Hell, maybe I should do that for myself. I don’t think I had any idea what I would be doing, how I would be living, how stressful being a single mom would be, how much I really wanted a semi-normal family shape (not necessarily a normal family). I didn’t know how huge the art would become in my life, how much of me it would suck up. I didn’t know I’d be sitting here at 47, trying to remake my life yet again, for the second time, and again not by choice…and honestly not really wanting to deal with that any more than I wanted to deal with my car issues, which may have been solved today by my parents. Sigh. I do feel a bit inept at the moment. OK. More than a little bit inept. Fucking useless some days. At least I know I can pick out a piece of fabric. That’s my successful moment for the day.

So I don’t think I am the person I wanted to be when I was in high school. I think I wanted to be a more-famous artist or in a more-stable, happy life. Maybe I wanted a mohawk (I could still do that). I wish I’d written it down somewhere. My college app essays mention art and children and even teaching (how strange…I didn’t get the last bit until 12 years ago), so maybe I was a bit psychic. I’m fairly sure I didn’t want one tenth of the pain and heartache. That wasn’t on the bucket list. And I’ve had enough of it.

So I get all pensive and reflective when I near the end of each stage of making these big quilts…it’s actually kind of depressing these days. I used to feel a bit of relief, a sense of achievement when I finished a big step. Tonight I finished ironing the Wonder Under pieces down to all the fabrics…here’s that damn octopus…

It did end up being that purple after all. I had to find the blue ocean fabrics I’d used for the pieces behind it, so I could make sure they’d work. There are 131 fabrics in this quilt, seen here…

It took 22 hours and 32 minutes to iron them all down. I have put almost 62 hours into this quilt already, and a top doesn’t even exist yet.

Call me crazy.

I had already started cutting them out at a meeting last month, so I kept going on that tonight. I’m sure there will be another 10-15 days of cutting pieces out in front of the telly now.

Now I need to iron that other quilt together, plus start drawing the piece for the Equality exhibit. My goal is to finish the Mammogram quilt and this one this summer, and to have the other one significantly started, like maybe even into the quilting stage before school starts up again in August. I also apparently need to do something with no nudity or violence (damn) for another possible exhibit. That might be harder. Maybe one of those other drawings I copied will work for that.

But right now, I’m sitting here with post-ironing-fabric depression. I need to get deeply into achy-hand-cutting-the-pieces mode, so I can just be a little frustrated with how long it takes and how my hand feels. And I don’t have to wonder about the PURPOSE of what I’m doing and how it doesn’t really make me feel good any more. Dammit, when will I get that back? That’s just frustrating. What the hell am I doing wrong? I know how it should feel, I tell myself how it should feel, and somewhere deep in my brain there’s this little voice, an old and tired voice that says, “Not yet. You can’t feel that yet. You’re still broken. Come back later. We’re still at lunch. Our hours are posted.” Damn smartass brain.

There is an old-lady cat currently sitting on my shoulder. I think she’s revolting against my using the WHOLE desk chair. She’d like me to move up and let her sit in the back half (half? more like three-quarters) of the chair, like usual. Demanding old bitch, she is. So yeah, I moved. I accommodate my animals. I accommodate lots of organisms.

Besides, it’s time for me to go to bed. Maybe when I wake up, I’ll know who I want to be from here on out. Meanwhile, the cat can have the whole damn chair.