It Will Have to Do…

I had a plan for the artmaking this month. Spring Break is coming up. Usually, by now, I’d be counting the days and ranting and raving about how I need to be on vacation. This year, Spring Break is late even. But I don’t know how many days it is. I’m not even keeping track. It’s not that this year is easier than any other year; it’s really not. We took on some things this year that made it more difficult, trying to keep on top of kids and their work, really pushing for passing grades, TRIED to take on computers in the classroom, but that disappeared last week (long stupid story). Plus my brain makes it difficult for me to focus a lot on school this year. I’ve figured out how to push it over there in the corner and ignore its existence a lot better. I think. Maybe. Either meditation or depression has helped me to balance my work life better. I’m hoping it’s the former more than the latter. I don’t want to have to be depressed to put work in its rightful place…just enough attention to do it well, but not at workaholic level.

So I wanted to have all the Wonder Under traced on that new big drawing by now (insert hysterical laughter here, because that’s probably 20 hours of tracing), and to be cutting out Wonder Under, so I could do all the fabric ironing over break, but in reality, that’s not going to happen. I haven’t even started tracing. I’ve had other stuff to deal with. And it’s not that important that I finish it “on time,” because there is no “on time” for this one. There’s no deadline for anything I’m working on, which is alternately a relief and really depressing. Last year had three major pieces that had to be made by a deadline for a specific show, and I guess that was a good thing in some ways, providing me with a focus that I couldn’t wander away from. Right now? I don’t have that. So on the one hand, I can make what I want without some wacky theme hanging over me, but on the other hand, who knows if it will get in anywhere? I have about 4 pieces from the last two years that are getting in NOWHERE. Sigh.

It’s OK. I know intellectually that is a temporary thing, that there is no explaining the whims of jurors, any more than you can explain what colleges the boychild got into and didn’t get into (still waiting to hear on two more, but I think he did OK). It just is what it is; you take a deep breath, and you move on. You pick up the next thing and start working on it.

So I did…

Still doing this, but I didn’t fall asleep while doing it tonight. I guess that’s good. I’m 4 hours in and still have most of the fleshy pieces to cut out. But it’s getting there. Worst case scenario, I’ll get this one ironed down and start on the stitching over break. I’m going to schedule some hikes in there too, plus I have an art exhibit to go see up in the OC, and I’m going to do some life-drawing classes during the school days. I can pretend to be retired…practice for a million years from now when I might be able to afford to retire (ha!).

I managed to make it to the gym, eat dinner, meditate, read my book, AND do the art stuff. Of course, that’s because the house is empty and I have no one to talk to except furry beasts, and I’m blowing off work. So. There’s that. I don’t know that it’s the healthiest existence. It’s certainly lonely.

I also had to do a journal entry thing for the Celebrating Silver exhibit. I had found the scrapbook paper at my ex’s house Tuesday night. I wrote up the pages yesterday and got it all put together tonight.

It’s not super-exciting, but it will do. And since it has to arrive by April 1, it will have to do.

Over Spring Break, I also need to draw my gender equality thing (the only real deadline I have this year), and then there’s an exhibit my women’s art group is working on about the border between the US and Mexico; we’re meeting about that this weekend. I think I will have very little weekend free outside of the hike and the art meetings. There’s more next weekend. I guess I know how to keep myself busy. Now if I could only figure out the happiness part. I guess that comes with time.

And art. And nature. It’s kinda like sleep when you’re female and my age…if you really want it, it’s elusive. It comes when you least expect it, when you’re holding scissors in your hand.

That Stupid Voice

I have a houseful of giant stress monkeys. This one…

this one is trying to make up all her schoolwork from the week she missed due to surgery, but she comes home and is (logically) exhausted and falls asleep and then freaks out because she can’t get everything done and there isn’t a good liberal arts college (she says) in Boston. I let boychild deal with that one, walking her through a bunch of websites where she can look shit up like lists of good colleges.

Boychild is freaking out (in his own quiet repressed way, because if he gets loud and emotional, the world is ending, guys) because almost all of the colleges he applied to are notifying today and tomorrow. I tried to tell him that he should be less stressed because he got into one of his backup schools, but since he really really wants to go to the OTHER schools, my comments fell on deaf (or slightly irritated and know-it-all) ears.

Both were yelling this morning because I was in the laundry room, home of pet food and litter-tray hell, which is what I was dealing with, demanding little furry beasts, because girlchild can’t tie her shoes (she can’t bend down yet to reach them), so boychild was doing it FOR her, which was highly amusing. He doesn’t tie them “normally” because when he was little, he pretty much refused to do anything the way it was taught…he had to find his OWN way to do it, like writing certain letters and numbers. He would say, “But I don’t LIKE it that way,” and that would be the end of all arguments, because it was his world and in his world, everything was done his way.

I pity any woman who ever decides she really likes him and wants to like hang out with him for any extended period of time. Either that, or maybe he’ll mellow a bit with old age.

I had book club last night (oh thank god, people of a like mind who READ) and we discussed Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones…

Yeah, it’s a kid’s book, but we liked it…except the last few chapters are moving a bit fast…the pacing seems off. There are two more books in the series and some of us may read them; some may not. Honestly, I’ve got so many books on my to-read list at the moment, that I probably won’t get around to them. I’m not sure I cared that much…I mean, the story was entertaining and nice and well-written (mostly), but it wasn’t something that I was dying to finish, like some books. I should be dying to finish the book I have out from the library right now, because it was due three days ago and I can’t renew it and the fees are adding up. I am a very bad person for that, I’m sure. Sometimes I think it would be cheaper to just buy the book…but then I’d have to find a place to PUT it, and that is a bigger issue here.

A sign of how stressed the boychild is was that he texted me at book club about some financial aid thing he thought I hadn’t done for one of the colleges, and when I got home and looked, it was obvious that he had been trolling not only all the college websites for dates and notification times, but he’d been on their Twitter feeds checking out admissions stuff (one of them actually sends out PAPER LETTERS for notification, the horror! And so when you’re on the Left Coast, it takes a lot longer to get notification than on that other coast). Poor kid. I hope it’s a good day for him. I don’t really care where he goes, as long as he goes. Oh wait, that sounded wrong. You know what I mean. He needs to go to college. And he will.

I made dinner for them last night, put the casserole in the oven. Neither of them ate it though. Girlchild was groggy from sleep (she actually ate some later, after I got home) and boychild was on a food strike (he says he doesn’t like this dish…oh well, he can make a quesadilla then). So I guess I have leftovers for the next three days. Score!

I’ve spent all morning racing from one pet-related mess to another. The dog, though sweet most of the time, is some sort of crazy trash/underwear-eater in the morning, and I have to constantly check on her to see what she’s trying to eat next and stop her. One of the cats had broken into a bag of cat food, so there was food all over the place. Because I’m starving them? No. The old Psychobitch (aka Babygirl) has been very good lately, but was on a yowly rampage this morning. Someone puked somewhere. I heard it, but I haven’t located it yet. That’s OK, because my morning stomach doesn’t handle puke well…I do much better in the afternoon.

Anyway, I fell asleep cutting these out last night.

Seriously, I jerked my head awake at one point and I was holding a piece of fabric, half-cut-out, in one hand and scissors, open, in the other. Who knows how long I sat like that, but I decided it was time to go to sleep, even though I wasn’t done with that piece or exercise or meditation or blogpost. Sometimes the body just needs to sleep, apparently (only 4 hours the night before might have been the issue).

I realized (again) yesterday that I spend most of my work day saying really entertaining things (although I am often irritated when I say them)…such as:

No, you don’t poop babies out.

That’s not what a penis looks like. You have one. You should look at it some day.

Yes, that is a penis. Congratulations for noticing that the picture of a dog you are looking at does have a penis.

That is not a penis; it’s a foot.

Put the ruler down.

If you are not drawing a straight line with that ruler, I will take it away from you.

If you pee on the seat, you will clean it up (here is where I clarify that I teach 7th grade, not kindergartners).

No, I do not know how squid reproduce.

I don’t know why humans don’t lay eggs.

No, humans and dogs cannot have babies together.

(We are obviously reaching the end of the year, when I will eventually be teaching human reproduction and I can clear up some of this confusion for them, PLUS have them draw a penis correctly, thus traumatizing AND educating them all in one go.)

We have been dealing with epidemics of stomach flu and pink eye (not usually together) at school, so there’s been lots of handwashing and deskwashing and sending kids to the nurse and/or pointing out the nearest trashcan. Luckily, most of the vomiting seems to be going on in other classrooms, so all I see is the empty desk where the kid should be.

I guess the plus of my own kids stressing out all over the place is that I can’t really concentrate on my own mopey self, although there was a bit of that last night since book club was in my old stomping grounds, a part of town I can’t really afford to hang out in any more (which does suck, because no movies). I managed to get my head out of THAT gutter though and move on. At least last night, I did. This morning, it’s a bit more difficult to turn off that stupid voice. It’s stalking me.

Expect more artmaking tonight. It’s about the only thing that shuts it up.

Blue Sky

No, I’m all still tied up in knots inside my head, still lost in some depressoid space that doesn’t seem to want to release me from its clutches. I just get tired of announcing, Oh Hey! I’m still depressed! I still cry! Everything still sucks! It gets old. I want to shed that skin…it’s Spring, I want to run free among the wildflowers like a child. Or something. I don’t know how to shed years of sad though. They just cling to you like a small snot-nosed child.

I went over to the ex’s to find my scrapbook pages (don’t even ask…just know that it involved the girlchild)…and I sat there listening to all the stuff I needed to deal with while the three of them ate dinner, directed by girlchild, cooked by my ex. Then I came home and cooked my pitiful dinner by myself.

Oh shit. So this is my life? That wasn’t good. I went to the gym, though, and I’m reading a really good book (although it’s one that brings me to the brink of tears almost every time I open it)…so I try to think of the good, to think of the positive, and I still drive away from his house with the damn scrapbook pages that I needed for some quilt thing, and I’m crying. Not a little, but a lot. This is a life? It’s an incredibly painful one.

Boychild got his financial award statement from University of California. I don’t know whether to be pleased or offended. They gave him a good chunk of money (assuming he goes there, which he probably won’t), but they gave it to him because I am “significantly low income.” Their words. I’m a teacher. A public-school teacher. With a Master’s degree…who’s been teaching for over 12 years. And I’m “significantly low income.” Should I be offended? Or relieved? I wonder how many years post-divorce before I stop living paycheck to paycheck. Not this year, for sure. I guess I am relieved. Saddened, but relieved. Now let the private schools feel the same way.

I’ve been reading what people in my past have been saying. What does it mean when people who were significant in your life make no sense to you? Is that a good thing? And yet people LIKE it on Facebook. I can’t parse the words.

I still don’t know who I am.

Art rejections. Sigh. Discouraged by them. Numerous. Doesn’t help the mood. Seriously, there’s no point in entering shows right now. I can just expect a rejection. It’s been a few months of that. And I keep making stuff, hoping that it’s not a permanent thing, that the stuff I’m making will get in somewhere. REJECT. We don’t want your art. It sucks.

The girlchild and I joke that every time I leave school, this song is on the radio…

And every time, it makes me cry. I wish I were young again and everything felt possible. OR…I am moving to Iceland soon (it could happen).

Bear trap on ankle. I remember writing this. I feel like depression is a bear trap on my ankle. It grabs it as I’m running away, trying to get away, strips the flesh down to the bone, breaks the bone, hurts like a bitch, doesn’t let go, no way to get it off.

In meditation, there is the concept of blue sky. Blue sky is always there, if you put your head up above the clouds, the blue sky is always there, even when you can’t see it. Mr. Meditation says that contentness is like that…it is always there, like the blue sky. What stops us from experiencing it? He tells me to notice the resistance and let go of it. Then there’s nothing but blue sky. Mr. Meditation has been smoking the wacky weed again. Seriously. He also wants me to put this happy pinpoint of light and warmth that spreads from the center of the chest outwards. It doesn’t work on me at all. The black vultures chomp at the pinpoint and snuff it out. I can put it on OTHER people though. I’m supposed to pick a person I respect…I have plenty of those. A person I care about. Right now? There are two. I gave birth to both of them. I can’t think beyond them. Then this week, I am supposed to pick someone outside those two realms, someone I know but don’t really care about. That’s harder. What’s interesting is that I can inflict the happiness, the warmth, the exploding pinpoint of light on ALL of them…all of them except myself.

So yeah. Meditation = crying at the moment. Hate that place.

Realized that the disruption in my life that was the surgery was messing with mood. Girlchild went back to school today and is doing much better. She was very tired when she got home, napped for like 2 hours, but she was AT school. This is a plus.

But I have been neglecting my art mind, and that is what might be causing all this emotional dippage. Or something. Fuck knows.

So I am up late again tonight. I’ve been good about going to sleep earlier, but the casualty is making art. And then I think, what’s the fucking point of making the art if you aren’t going to get into the shows with the new stuff? Fuck. I can’t think that way. I just HAVE to make the art. There’s no choice about that.

I’m reading this right now…

along with other things. It’s appropriate. I feel unlovable.

Underneath it is a birthday card from my ex, quoting Pablo Picasso (was never called an asshole)…

And the happy book from my mom. Not getting to the happy.

So tonight. I cut out fabric pieces. Because I needed to.

And it won’t make me happy. But. I don’t know what will.

Did I show you the scissors that were found in my driveway?

We don’t know where they came from. Is it a donation? Or some sort of religious icon left there? No one knows. People are now driving past my driveway and throwing scissors at it. Seriously. These aren’t mine.

Plus there’s Midnight. She sits behind me as I cut out fabric.

Someone should sit there.

Those Damn Monkeys

I finished numbering the giant-ass drawing. I had guessed about 1200 pieces, based on the Celebrating Silver piece, which is about the same size, but apparently, I was more of a crazy-ass on this drawing…first of all, I forgot to number this happy little face when I numbered the rest of her body, so she’s in the 400s and the 1200s…

That won’t be confusing at all. One of you needs to remind me that I did that when I start ironing pieces to fabric, because otherwise I will just be massively confused.

OK, I will be confused anyway. I think that’s why Julie sent me some spare brains…

They are very nice and brightly colored. I am sure they will be much more effective than the probably gray-and-blah brain I am using now. Plus now I have two extras.

I’m really working on significant exhaustion at the moment, which is unfortunate, because I spent many hours this afternoon working on school stuff, because when life is chaotic and you have way too much going on, it makes sense to create an entirely new lesson plan for the week that requires additional work, significant amounts of it. I am some kind of workaholic freak. But I wanted to do art stuff.

So back to the numbering. I managed to find a bunch of pieces I had missed the first time around, but I think I officially hit 1662 pieces (with at least three more numbered something-a, something-b, and something-c). That would be significantly more than the 1200 I had originally guessed. Oh well. Life goes on. At least I know I’ll have plenty to be working on over Spring Break. Can’t have down time, you know. Might accidentally get happy or something.

See that? I number everything and then I write down the total and I date everything, document the shit out of these projects. That’s the left brain trying to control the right brain. Except those concepts are faulty…at least that’s what science is saying today. Who knows what it will say next week.

Next up? 10 yards of Wonder Under probably.

Speaking of happy (was I?), girlchild finally had an almost-pain-free day, after 4 days of nonstop pain. She was so much calmer…and she ate food…and she got up and walked around and did some math homework. Hallelujah. I was starting to sorta freak out over when she might go back to school. And we timed the meds better for tonight; we’re going to try to push everything to 4:30 (yes, that’s AM) and see if she’s OK with that. Last night, they skipped one medication at 2:30 and she was awake at 3 or 4 in a lot of pain…so we’ll see how that goes. Ideally, she’ll be at school on Tuesday, moving like molasses and probably late to every class, potentially falling asleep during 3rd period because of her meds, but at least they will be able to count her snoring body as attending class. OK, that’s not ideal, but if she can stay awake for the math lectures, I think she’ll be OK. Luckily, there’s no way any teacher will look at her and question her absences…she’s obviously disabled. Plus the big black brace she has to wear all the time might signal an injury. Deep breaths.

This is the face of menopause.

Seriously. There’s so many things wrong at the moment. Stupid blood sugar. Hormones. Sleep. Aargh.

Anyway, I can start tracing Wonder Under now, or I can cut out the fabric for the two quilts sitting on the hearth waiting for me. Or I can draw. Or something. But tonight my brain is demanding sleep. I guess that’s good. It’s a change. Change can be good. Sleep can be too. It’s too bad that I usually get this tired, then go to bed, and then can’t fall asleep. How is that survival of the fittest?

Note to self: do NOT, repeat, do NOT read lists of things you can do to be happy, especially the stupid one that says that “everything will be all right because everything always is.” Wow. OK. You crazy. When will I learn to stay away from shit like that? No one knows, but probably, when I figure it out? I’ll be happy again. And then I’ll just laugh it off (no I won’t) and move on. No, I’ll probably remember how awful it felt to read those stupid lists when you were doing almost everything on them and it wasn’t working and it made you feel like even more of a failure than you already did. Because in our culture, depression is a failure. Suffering from a biological imbalance in your brain that was caused either chemically or by some shitty thing or things that happened to you that then turned into some chemical cascade, that’s a failure. You did it wrong. You suck. And that attitude doesn’t really help with depression, now does it. Ah, the vicious cycle. Even when you’re fully cognizant of what your brain is doing, you can’t make it stop doing it.

Jellybeans: why do black and white even exist? Even purple and pink are questionable. And why all the fake jellybean versions? Jelly bellies are fine; the rest are crap. Classic jellybean flavor though? Very addictive.

Yes, I’m stress-eating; why do you ask? Best thing to do when you feel stressed is to remove all food from the house that might cause you to stress eat, leaving you with carrots, brussels sprouts, and the like. I can totally stress eat sprouts and they will not hurt me. Seriously. I just bought more today. Oh my god! I’m getting dietary fiber! I’m fighting cancer! Although, after last week, this week will have to be a piece of cake. Someone should tell my twitchy eyeball that. So it can stop twitching. That would be nice.

I was lucky this weekend to have two friends who wanted me to eat. One took me out to dinner and sent me home with a ton of tasty leftovers. The other one appeared at the house with large containers of food. Score! I don’t have to cook for a few more nights this week. That’s a good thing. Plus it leaves food in the house for the girlchild, who has not been eating well and then gets dizzy and wonders why. Hmn. I know why. Food as fuel. Diabetic mantra.

Anyway, it was kindness that was appreciated.

Read it. It’s a screenshot from my work computer…

I never did see those damn monkeys. Sleep. I hear it helps with twitchy eyelids.

Trying to Find Normal

Being home from hospital and going back to work doesn’t equal normal. Work was a little crazy…apparently my guest teacher was ALSO a little crazy. I got desperate hugs from my students. I guess they missed me.

The good news is that, although girlchild doesn’t think she’s getting better (it still hurts a lot), I could see improvement just in the 20-odd hours she was with her dad. She can walk a lot further and she’s a lot more alert. So those are good things. She chose to come to my house (and walk up the stairs!) last night, and she ate a real amount of food for the first time since Monday night. Her med schedule is still fun for ALL of us. I got up at 12:30, 2:30, and 4:30 to medicate her, and then I was up at 5:30 because I’m some sort of crazy and I’m going on a hike today. I NEED to go on a hike today. So I am. So no post last night…too tired. Managed to cook dinner, exercise, meditate. Stared at artmaking supplies. Accomplished nothing. I don’t need to accomplish anything right now. It’s OK. Soon, but not right now.

Boychild is relieved that he got into one of his backup schools. There’s so much negative crap about smart white boys not getting into good schools that I think he was worried (I know I was). So we have started the acceptance/rejection round as of last night (one of each)…in another 10 days, we might know where he’ll spend the next 4 years, but as he said last night, now that he has ONE acceptance under his belt, “I can go to college!” Yay. I think he thought he would be stuck here forever. No worries kid.

More later, assuming I survive.

Recovering at Home

So I finally got the girlchild home tonight around 7 PM. It took some persuasion, but I was fairly sure she would recover faster at home away from the easy stuff at the hospital, so although she was scared to walk away from 24-hour care and access to better pain meds, we went home. Home, of course, in a divorce is a difficult concept. I did leave her at her dad’s, because he actually has a hospital bed in her room with the adjustable top and bottom (remnants of the marriage…I have one here in my garage as well, gifts from my grandmother to fill out our guest room, back when we had such a thing and she was getting rid of furniture she no longer needed). Plus I need to go back to work tomorrow and he is taking the day off to take care of her, so it makes more sense to not move her more than we have to at the moment.

Here’s where we spent the last 50-some hours…

in the Acute Care Pavilion of Children’s Hospital, the big glass building in the background. I wish I could say I wandered around and took lots of pictures of all the art that was there, but mostly I stayed in the room with her, barely able to concentrate on anything longer than a blogpost. There was some possibility after this morning that I would have to spend a third night, so midday, I went home and showered and packed another bag for tonight, thus guaranteeing that I wouldn’t have to spend the night, right? Oh well…it was better to plan for it than not, like the night before. I think I’ve been home a total of 4.5 hours in the last 50.

She finally allowed one token photo of her in the room, about an hour before she was discharged…

The painting behind her? I cannot say. I can tell you that we were on the air or sky floor, so all the paintings and art were related to the sky.

Mar 20 14 003 small

Like this one of pigs flying…

There were lots of whimsical things going on here. It was interesting, though, to walk into the family waiting room next to her room (she was sleeping and I was on the phone with work people about the chaos I missed but still need to know about), and to look at the giant photographs in the room and realize you know the artist, that she’s in one of your art groups. Wacky.

There were a lot of mosaics, which I’ve always loved, especially the irregularly shaped ones like this spiraling ocean of life that wandered through one of the outdoor gardens…

The ex and I actually sat outside near this mosaic for most of her surgery. It was better than being inside. I’ve spent the last 3 days inside, I think. And this tile (and others like it) were in the main bathrooms scattered throughout…

The animals were happy and calm…meant to make us feel the same way (except for the terrified puppies in hot-air balloons, of course).

Anyway, I left the meds and instructions with dad, and he can be in charge for the next 24 hours…we’ll see where we’re at after that. She can walk for short distances, but it hurts. She has to wear a brace while “ambulating” (doctor’s words) for the next three months. No soccer for three months. She has a ton of schoolwork to get done, and we need to get her back to school ASAP so she doesn’t miss too much.

I’m feeling a little distant from everything. I got very little done for all that time. Couldn’t stitch or read anything long at all. I finally managed to input grades today when I knew she was coming home. There’s something about that waiting state that doesn’t allow anything decisive to happen. I’ve accepted that as lost time. Moving on now.

I came home and did some dishes and ate and exercised and meditated (the first time I’ve done the last two since Monday night), so that was a relief. Now I’m going to sleep in my own bed with enough pillows and no one coming in every 2-4 hours to check vitals or give meds. What a relief. I’m hoping to get my art/creative brain back tomorrow, or at least be able to number the newest drawing or cut out pieces…pretty brainless stuff, but still on the artmaking spectrum.

She’s home. It’s good.

It’s Not Pretty

My head’s in a weird place tonight. Girlchild’s surgery is tomorrow. I’m off work for at least three days. Work is absolute chaos with Chromebooks arriving and testing starting, but the plan is still up in the air and nothing is working right…and I’m not even there to mess around and try to figure it out. I don’t know if I’m testing or when if I am or how or what. I play my entire life by ear. I know I will be staying in the hospital overnight tomorrow. I have grading, stitching, a few books…I will preload some photos for the blogpost on the hike I did Sunday. I need to deal with food too. It was an incredibly stressful day. The kids were not focusing. They channel the nervous chaos that the teachers are projecting, because we are up in the air, no plan. So that didn’t help. I drove off, thought I had left all my plans and everything set up right. Went to the post office to pick something up and realized I had left my computer and hadn’t hooked up the guest teacher computer (mine won’t work for her). Dammit. Drove back to school. Had the wrong dongle (huhuhuh…dongle…). Another teacher had one I could borrow. Set THAT up. Went and copied the two sections I fucked up on Saturday night…they worked this time…

The whole thing is about 34″ wide x 73′ high. Not a small beast. What to do next? I have two quilts to cut out (hey, I could take one to the hospital…). So I started numbering the big drawing…there’s three weeks until Spring Break. That’s enough time to trace this sucker…maybe. Have a plan, Kathryn. When you have a plan, you function better. Not normal. There’s nothing normal about my staying up until 2 AM some mornings on a work night tracing Wonder Under or ironing fabrics. It’s not a BAD thing…it’s just not normal.

Meditation right now is all about putting happiness on other people, on trying to see what other people look like when they’re happy. You’re supposed to pick someone you respect and then someone you deeply care about. I had a hard time with these at first. I would try people out in each position and see if they fit. I’ve jumped around on the people I respect. I picked women who are strong but who need support, who have talked to me about needing support. I don’t know if I really provide it, but I imagined them filling with happy warmth, like Mr. Meditation told me to. It’s finally getting easier (like 18 days into it). The other? I picked the girlchild. She needs it most at the moment. She needs to feel the happy. The boychild seems more stable, more OK with his existence. Although he’s hiding what he really thinks and feels, because that’s what he does. Hopefully he won’t do that when it’s important. I hope I’ve gotten him to think that through…to avoid what happened to his mom. God knows I’ve talked to him about it. Who knows what sinks in.

My right eyelid is twitching like a bitch. Oh yeah. There’s some stress. Damn surgery + school. I take deep meditative breaths all freakin’ day long. The only time it stopped today was when I was putting the damn drawing together and numbering it…so I started numbering.

Mar 17 14 003 small

It’s not rocket science. There’s some thought of the order of pieces…because I lay them out in the 100s…trying to think about how I will iron pieces is kind of important…not REALLY important though.

I made it through the 500s somewhere about a 1/3 of the way up the drawing. You can see the thicker black lines where I had to transfer something I had drawn on an overlapping piece between two pages.

I’m not sure what I will do about the octopus tentacles. Those sucker pieces are freakishly tiny. They may need to be embroidery instead.

I added some stuff on the sand after I taped everything together…

Mar 17 14 002 small

It was looking too empty down there. I’m guessing there will be about 1600 pieces. It’s not a small beast.

It’s not going to fix anything, making this quilt. It doesn’t stop me from hurting. It doesn’t bring world peace to warring nations. It won’t provide anyone with clean water. It seems kind of pointless when I look at it that way…like what is everyone else doing with their Monday evening? Did they finish all the dishes in the sink (I didn’t)? Did they straighten up the living room (I didn’t…you can see some of the messy floor in one of the pictures above)? Did they write part of the Great American Novel (is this my novel? This blog?)? Do you know that on these hikes I rarely meet people who talk about books they’ve read (I will start asking this, I think) or people who show any interest in art or people who seem to do anything but hike. And go to work. Don’t get me wrong…I love to stomp around in nature on hikes, but it’s not the biggest part of who I am. It’s not all there is. It’s a tiny piece.

I don’t know where my people are. Well, some of them are on the Interwebs. I hear from them occasionally. Pretty often.

Girlchild has spondylolysis, by the way. Hardest word in the world to spell. Genetic abnormality in the vertebrae. She has two fractures that kinda look like this…

Tomorrow, they will put two small pins in across the fractures, then put bone grafts in from her ileum, plus some growth factor to promote healing. She wears a brace for 3 months and then should be able to go back to everything she was doing before…no fusion. It’s kinda scary. But she’s been in pain for almost 3 years now and they won’t heal, so it’s time to fix them. Here’s hoping she has a pain-free senior year. Here’s hoping I don’t have a panic attack in the waiting room.

Boychild is watching for college admissions. Some of the UC schools have notified, but not the two he applied to, so we wait. These are his backup schools, so he needs to get in to at least one of them.

There is a lot of wine in my house right now. I’m sure you can see why. I wonder if the hospital has a workout room? That made me laugh. Of course they don’t have one.

Sigh. Big deep fucking sigh. I’m surviving. It’s not pretty.

In Which I…

I’ve read a bunch of books lately with chapter titles that all start with “In Which I…”, as if someone asked what you had been doing and why, and you tried to come up with an explanation for your behavior of the last two days, 15 minutes, 43 years of your life. It made me start to classify the parts of my day, my life, into things I could explain with a phrase starting with “In Which I…”. It’s an interesting exercise…maybe silly also. It’s OK to be silly occasionally, as I remembered during the 2+ hours I was in the car with the girlchild yesterday, and the 2 hours I was with myself in the car today, because everyone else fit in the carpool car but me. Sigh. Because I didn’t yell loud enough fast enough. It’s OK. That’s who I am. The loner. The chick who drives by herself. I can be that person. “In Which I Carpool with Myself…” (cue Billy Idol…)

Oh yes. That was worth it. “In Which I Learn to Sneer like Billy…”.

Anyway, the hike will be posted later, when I can rip off the group photos that someone else took, because I never take those. Strangely, although I made sure to charge my battery the night before, it looked uncharged when I started taking pictures on the hike and died about halfway through. I had the phone with me, though, and took OK photos with that. Me and my birthday money are looking for a new camera, although the one that was recommended to me is way out of my price range. I’ll figure it out, though. Gotta go read some websites. “In Which Kathy Buys Yet Another Camera…”. Seriously. I’m deadly to cameras. They just don’t last.

I managed to keep the blood sugar under control today, unlike yesterday. Ironic in that I could do that while burning a million calories on a long and strenuous hike, but couldn’t manage it while sitting on a soccer field watching the girlchild play. Stupid that. Oh well. I emailed the doctor finally. I had talked myself in and out of sending the email about 10 times, and finally did it so that if more tests were needed, they could be done at the same time as the others that I have to do, and I won’t have to go in for the bloody poke more than once. Hopefully.

Most of the rest of the day was the Have-To’s…”In Which Kathy Does the Shopping…”. Not exciting. Annoying really. I graded a bunch of stuff. I got ready for having three days off of school, the longest I’ve ever been gone in a row. I tried to get the girlchild to calm down enough to go to sleep. She won’t admit to being worried about surgery. I’m worried, not because I think something will go wrong, but because I just worry. I wish I didn’t. “In Which Kathy Worries about Worrying…”.

Then after all that stuff was done and I had meditated, I decided to try to finish cutting and taping the newest drawing, just because I know I have to copy one piece again, so I wanted to see if anything else didn’t match up…

It didn’t. Sigh. Oh well. I’ll do it tomorrow afternoon. I want to get the Wonder Under traced and cut out before Spring Break, so I can iron all the fabrics down in a concentrated chunk of time.

Then I came into the studio to try to deal with that damn bird, get it ironed down. Apparently I hadn’t ironed the lips or the eyeball either. It didn’t take long for me to be done…here’s everything ready to be cut out for the Mammogram quilt…

I should start doing that this week. So that means I finished ironing all the fabrics for that quilt. Someone said something to me about artists being free spirits. Well, yes, but then there’s that other part of my brain that likes to record and document and catalog everything. The part that keeps track of how much time I spend and how many fabrics I use…that’s a bit more of the OCD or at least the controlling logical part. “In Which Kathy Uses Both Sides of Her Brain…”. I won’t say I’m using ALL my brain, because obviously that’s not true.

Only 44 fabrics were used…

Mar 16 14 020 small

And it took 6 hours and 18 minutes to pick them all…that’s kind of long for me. I usually can do about 100 an hour. I think it’s because I did it in small chunks. It takes longer to get my brain into the right place to pick stuff on weekdays too. “In Which Kathy Tries to Make Art and Be a Responsible Teacher…”. Yeah. And add “Mom” into that as well. Consider “Homeowner” (no yardwork done at all this weekend, despite oath taken to self LAST weekend. Yes, I am that lame.).

OK, I need to do that sleep thing again. Make art? Don’t sleep. Don’t sleep? Get depressed. Don’t make art? Sleep. Get depressed because not making art. Damn vicious cycles. “In Which Kathy Does Her Best to Make Herself Insane…”.

The Rabbit Hole of Grief

I posted yet another picture today of my feet on a soccer field…where they often reside. I was grading papers. It’s girlchild’s last tournament before her back surgery, so some thoughts were going through my head. I noticed an old friend had commented on my Instagram account that I should hashtag my feet photos as #kathynidasfeet, since I keep taking these photos…and I was curious if I really HAD taken all that many Instagram photos of my feet…so I went searching through my account…which was a path into the rabbit hole of grief.

It seems that I will never escape this mess, as photos are everywhere that remind me of things that make me inexorably sad, so sad I fall deeper into a hole. I feel like I’ve got a grip on the edge of it at the moment, scrabbling at the muddy and slippery edge, ripping off fingernails as I try to hold on, gripping the sides of the wall with my knees, trying not to fall back down, to roll back into the gunk that fills the bottom edges of my brain. I hear the grief, like black dogs, vicious ones, Dobermans, not kind black labs…scratching at the sides of the hole, leaping up so close to clamp their jaws on the air by my calves that I can feel the rush of hot dog breath on my legs, smell their rotten dog food air. I’m trying to get out. I am.

So seeing photos of a former life, dead dogs, people who might as well be dead, a whole dead life that no longer exists and never will, a life I never asked to be removed from, never expected to lose…it’s difficult. It pushes me down, holds a pillow over my face, tries to suffocate me.

I can’t say that I’m all that successful at fighting it. My counselor says that I have a life. That I have a hold on things. That I have it under control. That I can control my stress reactions. And sometimes I can. Sometimes I take a deep meditative breath and I move on, I push the bad away, I breathe through the scary and come out the other side calm, ready, poised. Well, as poised as I ever am. Yeah. That’s not so much poised as Girl Scout readiness for disaster.

But it still doesn’t feel OK. Very little does. Last night, for an hour, a conversation with the boychild about poetry and literature, authors and types of poems (I have been categorized by my preferences, and I’m OK with that). At the end, he borrows a huge pile of my poetry books, including one volume of lesbian poetry that gets me a funny look. Then again, he’s used to my feminist rants, and this doesn’t fall far from that. I’ve told him that being a woman is different from being a man. We even talk about his childhood, what he remembers. I’m tired, lying on the couch in the dark post-exercise, deciding about sleep. I’ve been tired all week. I have stuff I need to do. Stuff I want to do. But this is more important. He will remember this feeling, if not this particular conversation. It will be part of what he remembers about his mom…much better than remembering her crying for the last 8 months. That can’t be a good memory. Will he describe me as the artist? The crazy sarcastic creature who draws all night? Or as a depressoid? I’m hoping that is just one short chapter (it doesn’t feel short at the moment) of a longer, fuller life. I don’t know. It probably doesn’t matter…but as we get to the end of his being the kid at home, with college notifications happening in just two short weeks…I spend a lot of time wondering what my life will be like without these two around all the time. It was so hard when I divorced to lose them at all…it was the worst part of the divorce. I had been their primary caregiver every day for a very long time, and all of a sudden, they would go off with their dad and have a life without me and I would be alone. There’s a lot of that now. There will be more in my future.

A lot of this angst is trying to look into my own future and feel hope or excitement or a chance at happy. I can’t get there. I can deal with one day, sometimes a week. That’s it. Hiking really is only a delaying tactic, a way to psych my brain out from looking at the future. I can’t think about all that crap on a hike…I can just think about the step ahead of me. It’s an immense escape. I guess it’s a healthy one, but who knows.

I keep getting lost in the rabbit hole. I keep getting stuck in some room. I draw those rabbit holes, you know. They’re in my quilts. I just realized it. Are they hiding places? Or are they traps of some sort? Are they somewhere to go when you can’t handle anything? Somewhere to hide what you want no one to find? Or do I fall into them and find myself unable to back my ass out?

No telling.

I was in Temecula all day at the girlchild’s tournament. I have photos, but don’t feel like dealing with them now. Then I came home and got ready for tomorrow’s hike, and went to FedEx to copy that 3-page drawing…I seem to spend many a Saturday night with the other losers in FedEx copying stuff. Tonight it was an older couple copying receipts…he was wearing suspenders and glaring at me (and my naked drawings) from under thick gray caterpillars of eyebrows.

I came home and exercised and meditated (cried through the whole damn thing)…and then started to tape the thing together…

There are two pages that just aren’t fitting together right…I think it’s because I didn’t push the sketchbook down hard on the copier. That seems to help everything line up better. So I’m probably going to have to go back and copy those two pages, or at least one of them.

I got about 2/3 of it put together before I realized I was tired and I have to get up early for a hike tomorrow.

I’ll finish the rest later. It’s not crucial. Nothing is. It’s going to be about 35″ wide x 80″ high. I enlarged it only 200% because otherwise it would be really massive. It’s already big. And complicated.

I have almost dropped out of tomorrow’s hike about 10 times. I’m worried about my blood sugar, so I decided to be much better about packing a variety of food, including sugar, just in case. I had another low blood sugar incident today. I’m trying to figure out what’s causing them so I can prevent them. I didn’t have an issue last weekend on the hike, so I will think positively about tomorrow. Plus it’s a hike I really want to experience…mostly for the location.

As for that damn rabbit hole…there weren’t a lot of foot pictures on Instagram, so I guess now I know she reads my blog probably…that’s where all the foot pictures are. It’s silly that my trying to assess the number of foot pictures caused me to fall backwards, to slip downwards. What a stupid trigger. In reality, I was already slipping, been slipping all week. I’ve been quiet on here, inwardly processing some level of worry and panic about balancing school and the girlchild’s surgery and subsequent needs. Being the mom means you have to hold it together and I seem to suck at that lately. Or do I? I don’t even know. I do often feel like it would just take one more thing, one more task that needed completion, one more responsibility loaded onto my shoulders, and it would all come tumbling down.

Except that’s just life. Life says, “Do this.” “Deal with that.” And you do. And then you move on. I’m trying to really adopt that attitude. Counselor says I have to. To survive. The blood sugar thing? It’s not the universe trying to take me down. It’s just a combination of medications being off and probably menopause creeping in and doing its thing. I can do my left-brain control thing and collect data and control it the best I can with that information, and prepare for its vagaries when it’s uncontrollable. Trying to plan for school over the next few weeks with the surgery and not knowing when I’ll be back at school and with testing starting? Fuck it. Does it really matter? I can wing it this week. I will deal with next week when I have to. The world will not end if we don’t finish DNA before Spring Break. Seriously. It doesn’t all have to make sense. I can give them a packet and it won’t even matter.

So yeah. I’m trying. I’m trying to let things go. I’m trying to let the crying happen when it needs to, because obviously it needs to. I’m trying to put the art front and center and not worry about the rejections, because they don’t really matter. I’m trying to stay out of that damn hole.

Drawing and Fire

Calling on all powers of patience, of calm. Remembered to meditate tonight. It does help. My weekend just blew up. Sigh. Oh well. Such is being a parent. I will deal. The next two weeks are kind of a mess anyway. Why not drag the weekend down into the morass? Meditation helps me deal with all the crazy uncertainties, all the things for which I cannot plan. I’ve never been good at the not-planning part. I like to know where I’m staying, when I’ll be eating (which is so much more of an issue now apparently), what the plan is. There is so much uncertainty in my life that I am always looking for the certain, for the dependable, for the things I can count on. I tracked my blood sugar all day. Interesting how drastically different it is from a year ago. I’m not happy about that. That’s something I don’t want to deal with right now and I have to deal with it. So I will. Growl.

So I could have ironed the bird tonight and been done with that quilt. But I was watching interesting television (The Amerikans or however they spell it…) and felt like drawing anyway. I just wanted the thing done. So I did it…here’s the top section, which I started drawing on December 10, continued on the 14th, and finished tonight…

The middle section was started on February 17, and then continued on the 20th and the 25th…that’s a pretty big gap between the top section (which is interesting in itself), but remember I finished some major quilts in that time period.

Then I started drawing the bottom on February 19, continued on the 28th, and finished (?…still not sure that part is finished) on March 11. I’m not copying it yet, so I can add to it if I want to. You wanted to know how the drawing goes, right? Assume an hour or two each night, so that’s 9 nights, somewhere probably around 15 hours. Wow. I used to be able to crank out a drawing in 2 hours, maybe 4. Of course, those were one-page drawings.

I seem incapable of one-page drawings at the moment. This sucker’s got a lot going on in there. What’s it about? Menopause. Loss. Pain. Grief. Anger. Genetics. Aging. Me.

Fun stuff.

I drew during the union meeting too (AND took copious notes. Because I am amazing like that)…

I am really trying to take deep breaths and go with the flow. Every day there is something else that someone needs from me, something else I need to manage. I’ve decided the classified staff at the high school are idiots. There are issues at my school with testing. A giant cart with 38 Chromebooks showed up in my classroom today. There was no room for it where it needed to be; suffice it to say that I had to make room for it. Higher-ups don’t consult staff. I think it will be OK though. I’m looking forward to being able to use technology whenever I want, and not just when a cart is available. I will have to migrate everything I do onto Google Drive though. That might be my summer project. Better yet, maybe I pay the boychild (with my nonexistent funds) to do that. Funny that. AP exams are coming up…between the two kids, they are taking 7 of them…at $89 apiece. I emailed about a fee waiver. Seriously, is there not a bulk discount? You can only be smart if you are rich enough to take the tests apparently. By the time we get the scores, boychild will already have acceptances and rejections and will have picked a school. What’s the point again?

An old friend of mine bought a quilt from me back in I think 1995 or 1996, somewhere around there. This was before I was doing art quilts really…I had taken a class in that watercolor technique, where you used squares and tried to move the shading from dark to light. I actually have two or three finished quilts lying around here like that, and this was one where I did that in the background, but then appliqued this bridge on top; if you drive north on I-15 from here, you see this bridge over the freeway north of Escondido…and then I did all these silk-ribbon-embroidery flowers in the border and at the bottom. I had a studio space downtown, and was working downtown at the time. It was very convenient, before kids. I would leave work and go screenprint at the studio afterwards. I loved that space. I probably couldn’t afford the rent now…it’s all near the new ballpark and probably horrendously expensive. But back then it was cheap and kind of unsafe at night, but it was all artists, and we would do Open Studios during ArtWalk, back when ArtWalk wasn’t just crappy stalls for blocks in Little Italy. And my friend, who was another editor at Harcourt, where I worked, loved this quilt and put it on a payment plan (you don’t even want to know how little I sold it for), and she bought it. And then I left Harcourt and had kids and we lost touch, but I’m pretty easy to find, apparently. She emailed me two years ago to tell me that she had been living somewhere back when the wildfires of 2007 were blasting through San Diego County and the quilt was in the fires…

Seriously. It survived, but only barely. I don’t even have digital photos of this quilt, it’s so old. I plan to document it sometime soon, when I can chase her down (and a decent camera…working on that…)…but it was actually in the San Diego Quilt Show in 1995…

This is before I had kids…I think I was pregnant with the boychild that year. I was. I was so sick, I was off work from early June until late August or September. Ahh…pregnancy. Ugh.

Anyway, she wants to know how to preserve it…and my understanding of burning is that it leaves the fabric so acidic that there is really nothing you can do long term…but even in terms of storing it? I personally would frame it under plexi or glass and let it continue to deteriorate until gone…but anything else? I’m not sure what to tell her.

Interesting to finally see it. I’ll have to poke around for photos of it pre-fire. They would be actual PHOTOGRAPHS. I know. Weird, huh? I didn’t have a digital camera back then.

So yeah. That took about 10 seconds. I have a shoebox in the bookshelf in my office that says “Stitching/Art photos.” Guess what I found? Really CRAPPY photos of the original…

And a closeup of the hand-applique of the hills (which look surprisingly like breasts to me now)…

And the embroidery…

And there is one of my very early “art” quilts. See? There is a process…I did evolve. This was April 1995 (that’s what the photos say), almost 20 years ago…the month I got pregnant with my now-18-year-old. Kinda looks a little different from what I do now, eh? I was such a different person then. It’s not all bad. I think I’m much more of a fiber artist now than I was then. Then I was a screenprinter for the art, and the quilting was more of a hobby…just trying stuff out and messing around with fabric and fiber techniques. I took lots of classes with famous teachers and dipped my feet into a lot of techniques (Hollis Chatelaine, Ellen Anne Eddy, Laura Wasilowski)…it took me a while to find my voice, my place, in fabric. I was lucky in that I had already found it in drawing and screenprinting. It took Joan Colvin and Wasilowski to help me figure out how to do it in fabric…that was probably around 1995 or so. Maybe soon after.

Anyway. It’s an interesting story of a Nida quilt. Next step? See it (and its owner, more importantly) in real life.