A Small Baby Bird

My mind literally skittered away from meditation tonight; I couldn’t force the light to fill my body. I am supposed to start from a pinpoint of light in my chest and visualize it filling my body with warmth and light. I can’t. I just can’t. There is black tarry sludge in the edges, and it’s pushing back at the light, forcing it to shrink back into the center and sometimes just disappear. It sizzles when it touches the light, lets off a rancid smell, chemical, burns the nostrils.

Wow. That’s not like a good visual of my mood at all, is it? In fact, a drawing pretty much popped into my head fully drawn when I was meditating, which really turned into trying to fight the sludge away and continue to breathe like I’m supposed to. Sometimes it just seems so pointless to even try, but I know I feel worse when I don’t. So I just do. Again and again.

I need to try to go to sleep at a semi-reasonable hour tonight. I can feel the mood worsening this week and I know some of it is hormones, some is stress, but some is sleep. If I’m lucky, I might get an extra 30 minutes tonight. Maybe. And if I’m really lucky, I’ll have all the financial aid stuff done and packed up for mailing some time this weekend, so I won’t have to think about it any more. I’m hoping that will help. Then again, maybe it’s distracting me from the other shit.

I’m thinking about this quilt again…

One Paycheck…because my life is back to that again…looking at the available money and taking deep breaths, trying to figure out survival again. I am so tired of it…so tired of worrying about money and expenses and how to pay for stuff. I had it rephotographed because it’s going to be in a book on quilts and human rights that will be published later this year. I know that once the kids get through school and hopefully get jobs that I will be OK, because I will only have to take care of myself, and I think I can do that. I think I can keep one head above water. Three heads? When two are in college? I’m having a lot harder time visualizing that. Maybe that’s the black tarry sludge…it’s worry and depression and panic and anxiety and grief, all rolled into a burrito of shit. A creeping burrito of coming-to-get-you-in-the-middle-of-the-night. Stephen King hasn’t written the single-mom-paying-for-college book yet…now there’s a scary-ass horror story for you.

Deep breaths. I meditate at school all the time now. I kick one class out into the hallway, close the door, pick up all the science journals, adjust the planner on the screen, stare at the wall and breathe…one two three four…you can make it to the door…five six seven eight…you can do this. You can’t rhyme all of it, but you can do it. You can open the door and let them in and breathe out the crazy and the sad and the dreary depth of grief that overwhelms you sometimes as you walk around the room, trying to persuade kids to work. Feeling this one’s forehead and wondering why he got sent to school with this fever and headache, talking quietly to that one about how to change what’s happening with her stuff right now, praising this other one for doing work you’ve never seen him do, chastising that other one for a giant brain fart day. You understand those days. You have them too, and somehow you get through. You grade. You teach. You email. You do all the right things. You walk through the black tarry sludge, which sucks at your feet and threatens to stop oxygen flow to your cells, but you push through, slog through, put your shoulder to it and move on through it.

But it never ends. Never fucking ends.

I needed to draw tonight, but it got too late. I had to make a test review powerpoint. I thought I had one for this test, but apparently not. And I graded because the girlchild commandeered my computer, so I watched part of Downton Abbey while doing that, and it made me cry. Dammit. I didn’t even get through the first fucking episode of this season without losing it. I’m such an emotional disaster area. Just stay away from me. It’s like nuclear waste. I feel like it just radiates off of me.

It must. You must be able to just look at me and know.

I heard this the other morning and went…NO. Why? What the hell?

Chvrches: Bela Lugosi’s Dead

And then I thought I might actually like it. And now I’ve heard it like 7 times, and I still don’t know. It’s definitely not Bauhaus. But I think I might like it.

You know, there really isn’t a conclusion to today’s post. I keep thinking someday I will get on here and yell, hooray! The depression is gone! The witch is dead! Hallelujah! Thank you all for joining me on this journey out of the hole! Whoop! Now let’s get on with what equates to normal with Kathy. Seriously, when I read old posts, I wonder who that person is? Even when she’s stressed, I don’t fucking recognize her. I don’t even know who she is. And that makes me so incredibly sad. Really sad.

Yeah. Well. I guess that’s what hope looks like, a small baby bird in my hand who is barely raising its head for water. At least it’s still alive.

Buried in Fiber

It’s OK. I did art stuff tonight. I probably should have gone to bed earlier instead, but…I wonder which will prolong my life more? More sleep or more art? I’m voting for the latter. Trying to balance the two, but really? The art is more calming. Sleep isn’t restful. It’s full of bad dreams and nasty sad. I’d rather be playing with fabric. I started cutting out flower parts…

which is complicated by the fact that there are wool parts of flowers and cotton parts of flowers, so I’m cutting all the wool first, and then I’ll find cotton that works with it, since I have a fairly limited stash of wools and a vast stash of cottons. I made it through almost all the flowers…at least the wool parts…and there’s a squirrel and a bunny in there too.

I need to figure out the banners and all the cotton bits. There’s not a lot left…maybe tomorrow night? Except financial aid is still a mess and school stuff needs to get done too.

I stitched at soccer…

I forgot to take pictures of the girlchild playing. He played her tonight, for real. That’s good. She did well. They won. Another game Thursday. It’s kind of a routine now…two games a week, one Academic League match a week. I keep having to remind myself what day it is…do I bring my stitching to school? Do I bring my Uggs and sweatshirt to school? Will I have time to go home first? Too much thinking. My brain isn’t good at thinking any more. It’s obsessive about the bad stuff, runs over and over it, trying to make sense of it, having conversations with myself. But give it a real task? Yikes. It’s done.

I went to the gym. I meditated. I finished two books…The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon…

who is only 22 years old. This is her debut novel, the first of seven in the series. It’s called a supernatural dystopia, and definitely has sci fi overtones, whatever that means. I liked the idea and most of the book, but kept getting lost in vocabulary and this foreign race, the Rephaim, and some other race, the Emim, which sometimes didn’t make sense. Plus the setup of clairvoyant levels is supremely complicated. But it has promise…I would read another one.

The second book I finished was Zita the Spacegirl, by Ben Hatke…

Yes. This is a kids’ graphic novel. A group I’m in has a graphic novel/comics book club, and I have never been to the meetings, but thought I could try to read the books at least, and maybe someday swing one of the meetings. I had a hard time with this book…not because it’s written to a younger audience, but because I got confused by events in the story. Plus I honestly didn’t like Zita much…she’s kind of an annoying squirrel, to use a term I use on some of my students. I don’t know if this book would appeal more to a younger audience, like a late elementary age? Maybe. I do have the second book as well. I did like the giant mouse and the round monster thing, and the spider robots were cool (even though they are evil). It was kind of an eh.

Kind of like my life. Eh. Which means it’s probably time to go to sleep. The later it gets, the sadder I get. I did find another hike for the weekend, I think. I actually found two, signed up for one reluctantly, then found the other one and switched. Seems like with the three-day weekend it would be lame not to go on a long hike…so that’s what I aimed for in my planning.

Ugh. I’m hoping with more regular influxes of art activity the days won’t feel so shitty. We’ll see. I’m tired of the shitty feeling. I keep doing things to improve my mood, trying to think positively about my future. Yeah. Well. The fun thing about depression is that it makes it very hard to think positively about anything, and when past experience is slapping you upside the face, pulling your feet out of the mud long enough to even Stand the Fuck Up and Go Make Art is difficult. I can’t be that depressoid who does nothing but sleep. I can mope and iron fabric at the same time if I have to. There’s some chance of surviving this if I keep my hands buried in fiber.

No One Else Can…

The new meditation visualization is easier than the last. It starts as a pinprick of light in the center of the body that spreads to take up the whole body shape. That’s much easier than a football-shaped oval of light running up and down the center of my body. It kept getting snagged on my liver or my solar plexus, whatever that is…seriously, he keeps using that term, and I finally had to Google it. I knew it was in the middle, but that’s all I knew. Deficient education.

I spent a lot of time cooking tonight. I’m not sure why. I made barbecue sauce from scratch. It was pretty good stuff. I froze the extras for later. I made BBQ burgers with the sauce. They were really good. I made some potato things that were mostly eh. And I made a blueberry cheesecake galette that might kill people with joy. Seriously. It was fucking good. You’re jealous now because there isn’t any for you. Well, honestly, if you came over tomorrow and asked nicely, I’d give you some…I might have to wrest a serving out of the kids’ sweaty palms (I had to delineate ownership of each piece for tomorrow, so boychild wouldn’t eat all of it), but I’d give you some.

I’m not sure why I had a sudden urge to cook good stuff, but I did it. Maybe it was to make up for the largely useless day at school, where very few people listened or changed their behavior based on my directions. I love days like that. Those are the days when teachers wonder what it must be like to work with adults. Having spent the first 13 years of my work life working with adults, I can tell them it’s not a whole lot different…except that you have more control over your own stuff and politicians don’t expect you to work miracles with rocks. Or teenagers. Because sometimes they’re hard to tell apart.

There was definitely some frustration involved. So the cooking helped. And the girlchild cleaned up the kitchen. It almost looks normal. We had a discussion the other day about available hours in the day and why I don’t care as much about cleaning as I do about fabric. I explained to her my theory that in a household, whether you are married, dating, or roommating, that if there is something that really truly bugs you about how things look or are being done, then you should do them yourself…it’s not OK to force your ideas of cleanliness or household importance on other people. It’s about the only good thing I got out of marriage counseling a million years ago…and since I’m the only adult here, that’s how we roll. She’s welcome to mop or sweep any time she likes…and when her friend came over on Sunday, because we were the only household in East County that wasn’t watching the Super Bowl, well then she cleaned what she thought she needed to clean. It was different than what I would have done in some ways, but I was grateful for any help…because honestly, I don’t usually get any help.

Things I’ve learned from the girlchild: how to use fresh garlic and ginger, how to embrace weird-ass ingredient combinations, how to use every dish you own for only one meal. She’s an amazing cook. I don’t know where she gets it from. I am a much better cook now because of her. It’s her fault that blueberry thing got made…and all the calories that were in it? Probably also her fault.

There are only so many hours in the day. I choose to do the things that make me more at peace. If I watch a Hoarders episode, my priorities might change…but only briefly.

I’m not sure where the rest of the evening went. I did have detention and tutorial after school, so I was home late…and I did meditate and exercise and talk to my health coach for the last time and work on more of these crazy financial aid forms and help dry dishes and help pick out boys soccer photos for the school newspaper and butt heads with the boychild about the next college interview (sigh. if you want to go there, and this is your first choice, then stop bitching and set up the interview. or don’t. just don’t give ME shit about it. I did not design this world. I am no happier living in it than you are.). It’s his third college interview…good sign. I hope. But I didn’t do art stuff, and that is starting to wear on me…nothing in two days. Need a fix. Tomorrow is staff meeting, soccer game, and gym. It will be a miracle if anything else happens. No photos even today. Barely even got to read my book. Feel disconnected from my own head at the moment. I can stitch during the game at least. Have to remember to take it all with me. Car full of supplies so I can survive a game. Boots, sweatshirt(s), gloves, stitching, blanket, chair. Tea.

The awesome hike I was going to do on Sunday got canceled…the trail is closed. I picked another hike. I’m not as excited about it, but it will be semi-challenging…although I’ve done it before. I was looking forward to the other one. Sigh. I rarely look forward to anything any more. Sad but true.

OK. I need to do that sleep thing…even though it doesn’t work right. Too much of that stupid sad brain talking back to me. Actually, it doesn’t even do that. It mutters in a corner and when I say, “What? What did you say? Repeat that?”, it replies in a surly fashion, “nothing. I said nothing. Shut up. Go away,” like I’m just going to stop paying attention to it. I mad dog it a little, giving it the eye, getting up close and personal with it, and it gets nervous, fidgets, uncomfortable, tosses some now-painful memory out at me, a picture, a scene from the past and I seize up with it, with the view of what the artist-formerly-known-as-happy looked like (this one was from Oregon), and it takes the opportunity to duck out under my arm, slipping past me, and I feel it slide gently past into another space, out of reach. Damn brain. You talk too damn much. Heal thyself. No one else can.

This Sad Dark Room

Strange question today. Counselor asked if she had met me a year ago, would she be counseling the same person? No. You wouldn’t. She asked about stress, if the school and kid stresses would have been the same? Well, the college and financial aid stress is new and heinous, but otherwise, yes, they would be the same…at least similar. Would I have the same attitudes? Was I crying all the time? No. Hardly ever. PMS occasionally. Not like this. This is horrible. Endless. Awful.

I think I confuse her. She says that I don’t let things control me, that I change the things that are bothering me or I at least act against them or on them or something. I don’t just sit there and let it control me. So why? Why am I letting this grief control me?

This is where I go back to that magical step…I don’t think ‘let’ is the appropriate word. I don’t seem to be able to get the upper hand on this. I argue with myself all the time about it…tell myself that reality was different than what I thought and I need to get over it, to move on, and I just can’t seem to drag that stupid-ass part of my brain up and out. It’s just mired, lost, sinking…depressed.

Counseling was a giant weepfest. I guess there is some catharsis in that. But no resolution. She doesn’t have the magical step, apparently. I think if she did, she would give it to me. She asked me to name one thing I was grateful for at that moment in time, and right then, at the end of a long week, with things hanging over my head like guillotine blades, I struggled to find something that wasn’t an absence of something bad (I don’t have cancer…I’m grateful for that)…something that was actually a glass-half-full instead of just feeling empty.

In this conversation I had the other day with a self-professed Myers Briggs expert, she made me think about how I think…metacognition in teacher speak. I’ve said this before, that I wish I could get far enough out of my head so that I could get past this, but maybe this is part of why my artist brain is so good at what it intuitively does…I spend So Much time in my head with the art–drawing and interpreting and observing–that it’s almost impossible to get out when the brain is tying itself up in knots. When I am working on a big project that is taking up huge parts of my brain power, processing through images and compositions and colors, no one, including me, questions my interior focus. It’s what I’m meant to do. It’s how I function. The reason I was thinking of all this was because the Earth Stories quilts are shipping this weekend, and I had to iron, dehair, and label them…so while I was ironing, I thought again about using ink on the quilt…

And I did. And no, it’s not in the catalog. I’m OK with that. It’s not a lot. It’s just enough. If I had been in a different mindset back in August/September, I would have handled the last stages of this quilt completely differently…there are things I would have done that would have extended the finish time by a month probably, inking and embroidery and maybe even beads, but I just couldn’t. I associate this quilt with the worst of my depression, with the three weeks of shock and the craziness after that. I did NOT want to spend more time with it then. So I found mistakes and problems when I was cleaning it up today…I fixed a few of them…but then I made more mistakes when I was trying to get it cleaned up…I actually ended up ripping out stitches in the background by accident in two different places. LAME. So I had to fix those.

My bad. Not focusing enough. Not wanting to think too hard about this quilt and all it represents to me right now. It took me about three hours tonight to deal with the two quilts because of screw ups like that, but also because I had it all wrapped up and then remembered I needed to pack the small quilt with it…and then realized I was supposed to put labels on both of them. So I unwrapped and rewrapped about three times. Just inefficient and stupid.

It’s so frustrating to be working with my brain when it’s this disconnected. But I remember the high level of focus I had when I was drawing this thing…it took over 22 hours of my Spring Break last year to draw it, and I had to literally rip it out of my head. I was never without that image in my head, building and rebuilding parts of it, revising the composition until it made sense. Same with picking the fabrics. So deep into the crevices that I am carrying the image in the front of my mind at all times, whether I’m in the classroom, at the gym, or out to dinner. It’s always there, niggling, engaging the deeper, intuitive parts of my brain into making it work.

And I don’t think any of that is bad. That is how I work. That is what makes me good at what I do. It’s also what makes it so freakin’ hard to get my brain OUT of shit like this, shit I can’t explain, shit that makes no sense, shit that makes me question my entire existence and future and past and every fucking thing. Shit that makes my sleep interrupted (even more than before). Shit that makes me cry at the drop of a hat, the drop of a word, the hint of any tiny bit of sad, stress, overwhelming emotion.

I can’t really expect my brain to treat this problem any differently than it does an artistic problem.

So. I guess we are working on that. I feel like the part of my brain that has the answer, the next step, the magical pill for the cure…it’s hiding around a corner…I come chasing through the hallway, racing after it, and it slips into a doorway that locks behind it, and I end up banging on the door, screaming until my throat is sore and my voice ragged, and I can hear its breathing, quiet and hidden, but it won’t answer, it won’t come out. It’s huddled in the corner, head on its arms, covering its eyes, hands covering its ears so it doesn’t have to listen to me. It’s processing.

I don’t know what the solution is.

Girlchild was playing like a beast last night for the time she was on the field…

It seems strange to think that she will have back surgery in about 6 weeks, but there we are. She was back to normal today, helping in the kitchen, telling me it’s OK when I explained why I didn’t think the NYC trip could happen, that I just don’t have enough of a financial cushion for that, that we could reevaluate in summer, but that the money stuff just isn’t good at the moment. She said, “It’s OK, mommy. I understand.” And I told her I understood that it didn’t seem fair because her brother had three trips, but that I didn’t pay for all of it and my finances were better then, and now they’re just messed up, and I was really really sorry. Proof I guess that she is growing up, that she’s becoming the amazingly understanding adult I know she will end up being…probably too understanding.

Anyway. I spent all evening in my head telling my brain how stupid it was being. Not a good thing. Tomorrow I will try to erase some of that bad hinky stuff with a hike, and then hopefully I will get the next big chunk of financial aid hell done with and move on to something that feeds my soul or art brain or whatever that might bring me out and let me wander freely on the planet, instead of being kept in this sad dark room.

Mood-O-Meter

I had a full design for a Mood-O-Meter in my head this evening on the way to the gym. You prick your finger for a drop of blood (diabetes raises its ugly head…we have talked about blood sugar possibly affecting some of my depression) and place that on the device, and the arrow swings wildly from one side to the other, determining your mood from the proteins and hormones rushing through your body. There are marks on the device with potential cures for each level of emotional upset…from the most mellow, which needs no more than a cup of tea, to more premenstrual types, which require sugar or chocolate. A glass of wine is certainly one stop on the meter, as is an entire bottle for those days when bad mood is worsened by PMS. Shopping for fabric (or an equivalent…I hear some prefer clothing or shoes) is on there as well. Exercise of all types has a place, including hiking and dancing. Meditation is probably also a good one. But far on the right, on the Way Far Right, almost falling off the meter, for when everything is bad sad and anti-glad, there is art…drawing…the strongest and most effective cure for moody crap on there.

I should have found the time and energy to draw tonight…but after soccer and gym and dinner and meditation, I didn’t have anything left. I’ve spent a lot of hours in the last few days wading through my own financials, trying to make it all condense down into the forms provided by government and schools. This morning, after 45 minutes of tracking down totals for my retirement and my current accounts and expenses (some very depressing stuff, forsooth), I set off for school in tears, feeling like all the have-to crap of college applications and financial aid was truly weighing on my shoulders, that I felt the pounds forcing me down into the ground, that it was almost difficult to take a breath. I did not want to be doing all this parenting alone. My ex…he does what he has to do, but no more. And we don’t really work as a team. Really…I do everything and he occasionally steps up. Tonight, he called to suggest we share some numbers (cheating!), so we would have the same answers on the test (financial aid feels like a test), and told me he would stop paying child support on my son in June. Really, he could have stopped this month, per the parenting agreement, because he turned 18, but the reality of losing any money right now while having to consider paying for college almost made me throw up. I guess I have 5 months to prepare for that.

I know that I will still be paying all these bills, more in fact, but with less money.

I hear rain falling. That is a peaceful, nice sound (at least, right now, it is). Trying to breathe meditatively with the rainfall. Because the money stuff, it has to work out somehow. I don’t know how. The kids wanted to go to NYC to look at colleges (well, the girlchild really), but even with my tax refund, I’m looking at the money and thinking I can’t do that. I can’t take the risk…there’s not enough cushion. And I feel bad, because boychild got to go to LA, San Francisco, and Boston to look at schools, and I really can’t afford to take her anywhere…except down the road to SDSU or UCSD. It’s not just the flight costs…you have to feed the beasts. Sigh. I remember all those trips I took as a kid to all over the US…I know my daughter was insanely jealous that her cousin 5 years younger got to go to Paris last year…I wish I could have given her more of those experiences.

These depressive mood swings, I wish I could pin them down to my cycle, to hormones raging and waning, but they are not that logical. Sometimes I can tie an emotional response to my hormones…today, the girlchild was angry (there’s been a lot of that lately) and I had just spent about 2 hours sitting in the cold on a metal bench watching her soccer game, while her father did something else, and I had made a comment she took badly (I always say it wrong…if there’s nothing that’s been hammered into my brain for the last two years, it’s that I always say it wrong), and I told her I loved her as a way to soften whatever she was feeling, and she yelled, “No one loves YOU!” And the thing is, we often parry back and forth like that, like Your Mom, no Your Mom kinda thing, but today…today it was like getting slapped, and the emotional reaction was quick and painful and overwhelming and uncontrollable. And she knew she had hurt me. And I know that I should be able to take it. And I know she should try to be more careful, but when she’s angry, she is not good at that.

And all that feeds back into feeling like I’m doing all this alone. I did not imagine raising kids with no help. I dream of having a team of two adults helping each other with family and household duties, of one supporting the other, when one is not feeling well or is moody, the other picks up the slack. Of not always having to be ON when you don’t feel up to it…of having someone to lean on.

And I appear to not be able to have that.

That fucking Mood-O-Meter is swinging way over to the right. I tried the tea, exercise, meditation, the glass of wine, and sugar. Like I said, I should have drawn, but it was just too late and I was too tired to even pick up the pen. I wish I could say that I will do better tomorrow, but realistically, I still have a huge chunk of financial aid forms to get through tomorrow night…for now, I suspect attempting sleep is my best bet (although that’s been a loser the last few nights). And if I manage to get some drawing time somewhere in the next few days, I think that will be the best cure for what ails me…at least on the surface. There is maybe no cure for the deep nasty sad shit but lots and lots of time.

By the way, I’m totally pronouncing it Mood-OH-Meeter in my head, not Mood-AH-muhter…like it’s all trailer trash Honey Boo Boo meter-type, instead of scientific, highfalutin meter-type. I wanted to make sure you were hearing me say it like that in your head, which is kinda hard if you’ve never heard my voice.

“It lasted a lifetime. I couldn’t remember when it started, and I didn’t see when it would end.” The Bone Season, Samantha Shannon

Seesaw World…

Still freezing tonight. Must be fighting something off. I actually managed a social evening, although I was meant to socialize with 11 other people (and did for about an hour), but then ended up talking the rest of the time to the one other person I talked to LAST time I was at book club. The plus is…I like the books…and these are my people. Sort of. Counselor dings me for always remembering that I don’t fit in. Yeah well. I’m old. I don’t know where all the old people hang out, but it’s not where I am…actually, I am middle-aged. The old people are retired and they all show up, and the young people all show up, and all the people my age are on vacation? Who knows. The discussion wandered through books, cleaning, Myers Briggs, food, childhood, and god knows where else. For two and a half hours, I was mostly at peace. Good thing.

I was a giant stress monkey before that, though, because the financial aid stuff is due sooner than I thought, despite W-2s JUST showing up on Saturday. So I finished my taxes tonight. In January. Earliest ever. Tomorrow I will try to track down the vast quantities of data the other schools need in order to give the boychild an education. Meanwhile, he has another interview…someone should do his laundry so he has something to wear to that.

It was eyeball dissection day today…

It was pretty easy. Sometimes I think I could do some of this stuff in my sleep. I think I’ve walked almost 2000 kids through eyeball dissection at this point. I need to do the dishes tomorrow. Exciting stuff.

Boychild had Academic League and knew some amazing stuff…

He’s on the left. They beat the rival team by 10 points, but it was a tense match (funny to say that for Academic League, but it WAS!). Two of his answers were Walt Whitman and women, but I don’t remember the questions. One had something to do with the State of the Union speech, which I didn’t watch and he apparently memorized. Make me feel stupid, boy.

Girlchild had soccer last night…but he wouldn’t play her. I spent a lot of time watching the sky…

The sunset was gorgeous…

but I watched her get angrier and angrier.

Don’t blame her. There are girls who mess up continually who are playing. It’s frustrating for her and for us.

I think her dad is just going to stop coming.

I will still be there. There are nice sunsets at the away games (which always face into the sun)…

I stitch…I did this…

Finished the bottom one, and started Month 3…just barely got started on the background stitching.

And then today at Academic League, I did this…

Finished the background stitching on the blue ones and one of the purple ones (Month 4). I end up getting about 5 hours a week of stitching in at kid events. I can’t grade in the crappy light of soccer games. I guess I could have graded at Academic League, but I didn’t feel like it. Sigh. That will come back to haunt me at some point.

I really need to get some focus. I started tracing Wonder Under for the mammogram quilt, or whatever it is, lumpy breast…

I did NOT get very far. Like I said, I didn’t feel right last night. I feel off again tonight, but not like last night. Obviously I’m doing financial aid tomorrow night or Friday night, whenever I can find the time. Lots of numbers to locate and input. Stress.

Trying to think about things I can do that will be good for me, like book club, but won’t take so much time. I thought about joining another book club, but I don’t have time to go to another meeting right now. Same with life drawing. Number of hours in the day is a finite number. I don’t have any. What was interesting about last night is that I went to bed about an hour and a half earlier than I have been for weeks, but I couldn’t fall asleep, and then I woke up for a significant stretch of time in the middle of the night and right before alarm time, so I got about the same amount of sleep as I have been every night (nowhere near enough). Have I trained my body to only allow itself 5 hours a night? Or is there something else going on?

Stop thinking so hard. Go to bed. Sleep…sigh…maybe it’s just not something you get to have enough of for a while. Maybe it’s like ice cream…it does affect my mood, though. Not enough sleep and I get more sad, more depressed. No balance. Seesaw world.

Feeling Off

I’ve taken myself to bed early (for me, of course…normals have gone to bed hours before me). I’m feeling off, kind of an ironic term, because I’ve felt off for quite a few days, weeks, months now. But something’s wrong. I’m freezing, have the chills. No fever or other symptoms but general falling-asleepness. Best to try to get some more rest.

Ah, but the heater just went on. That means the house has dipped below the 66-degree mark. Maybe chills are quite reasonable. Whatever. I’m here now, still freezing. The bed is not welcoming tonight…it is cold and the sheets need washing.

Eyeball dissection tomorrow. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I always hated that phrase, like it gives people permission to treat you badly…you’re strong…you’ll be fine. My personal strength does not give you permission to treat me badly. I will remember that tomorrow during eyeball dissection.

I’m having a crisis of art thought at the moment. With no obviously looming deadlines, I can’t seem to focus. The forgetfulness continues…left the water bottle in the car at the gym. Who knows what else I’ve forgotten? No one is helping me keep track. How will I know if I’ve forgotten it? Will it send me a petulant email, or will it just show up on my doorstep, lip lifting reproachfully, disapproving?

Maybe I’ll write more coherently in the morning. Maybe I’ll do my taxes instead. Hard to say…at the moment I am still shivering too hard to decide.

The Getting Up and Pretending

I’m not sure where my head is still…I forgot even more stuff today, left one ingredient out of dinner (the kids noticed, but survived), couldn’t find photos that I had already removed from the relevant email and resized, left my brain in a dusty corner somewhere. I feel so freakin’ inefficient and lame because I can’t seem to focus properly…only half my brain is engaged in life. The other half is somewhere else. Hopefully it’s in Tahiti or the Caribbean, having a grand old time, instead of what I imagine from all the TV shows, where we hope it’s on vacation but it’s really locked up in a damp cell with duct tape (students, that’s d-u-c-t, not quack like a duck) over its mouth, bloody nose from getting hit too hard, double vision.

Yes, the imagination runs in overdrive on a regular basis. I tried to remember stuff. I shipped my journal and bought boxes for the quilt, which needs to get there next week some time. I should have packed it up tonight, but I didn’t have the mental energy…which is too bad, because I think the other four nights this week will be much worse than tonight. Oh well. I need to iron it and dehair it as well. Maybe I’ll do that tomorrow night (cough cough, after tutorial, soccer game, and gym). Whatever. The show doesn’t open until May. It will get where it needs to go on time. Ish. I focus so hard on deadlines sometimes that I think it makes me a little insane. Juggling like crazy right now.

I graded papers tonight because I am now way behind. I rarely grade at home these days…it’s just not a priority. I try to do it at school, but sitting in the classroom during prep is depressing. So I avoid it. I have enough depressoid going on…I don’t need to make more. On the other hand, I do need to catch up. So I’m trying to balance those things out.

I exercised and meditated like a good girl…exercise is just an excuse to be able to read really, and that is never bad. And meditation…it centers me, makes me be more conscious of my inner state, which is often not good, but I’m much better at controlling it this year. My students I think are benefiting from my conscious understanding of when I am losing it, and taking control of that. Breathe. Think. Don’t react. Wish I’d known about it sooner…I think it would have made my life different and better years ago.

Then I came in to try to figure out the fabrics for the Ivy Memorial quilt, which has nothing to do with any art show or entry or deadline at all. I didn’t think there were that many pieces in it, but that is because I am a space cadet and forgot all the detailed tiny bits I put into it because I am freakin’ insane. It has 312 pieces in it, which is a lot when you consider its size…which is about 19″ high x 38″ wide…wow, that’s a lot bigger than I thought it was…and that’s without a border.

I laid out the first 100 pieces, which are all freezer paper, cut with a border if they’re meant to be wool, so I can cut out the wool on the line, or cut on the line if they’re meant to be cotton, because I will turn the edges under to applique them. Only a tiny bit confusing…

Most of it is supposed to be wool, with a few cotton accents around, and I planned it to be mostly bright colors. Last year or the year before, I was searching for a run of flesh tones for the main figure, but I never really worked out the rest of it. I have a decent stash of greens and a few browns etc., but none of the brights I was envisaging for the flowers. I have red. That’s about it.

I did manage to iron the hills and river behind the main figure…I had enough greens for that…this is what I’ve used so far for the hillside…

And the river is done. But before I decide about the rest of them, I need to find the stash of leftover pieces from the two Sue Spargo quilts…there were brightly colored pieces in there that were big enough for flowers, which is mostly what I need them for. I think they’re hiding out in the living room in one of the boxes from my last cleanup. I never throw those offcuts away, those funny-shaped pieces left over from cutting out birds or flowers. Yes, I think that makes me a hoarder in some ways, but I think if I just keep watching a Hoarders episode every month or so, I will be motivated enough to keep the packrat tendencies down to a minimum. Besides, in this situation, I think it’s exactly what I need…little pieces of bright colors. I may track those down tomorrow night.

After I pack the box. Yeah, I know. I don’t think I’ll be doing either of those things tomorrow night, but who knows.

I could just do another drawing of a sad woman with a weapon…because that’s not disturbing at all. I try to explain that I get all my supremely sad and angry and disturbing thoughts out in my drawings, so I don’t need to follow through with them. Expressions of anger, sadness, grief, depression, even suicide. I don’t need to DO any of that, don’t want to…but do need to acknowledge the thoughts that ramble through the brain. It would be stupid not to address those thoughts, the ones that inhabit your brain in the early hours of morning and want to color your dreams. Naw. Bugger off. I saw you, I said I saw you, now go away.

It’s funny…I have this tiny little wool stash, only about 20 different colors and some small pieces of some others…so it makes it really hard for me to pick what I want. I like having a huge palette from which to choose. This is the biggest section of stash…crazy quilt fabrics on the left side, browns, yellows, whites, purples, blues, and grays on the right side (actually it’s taking over the left side too…I recently consolidated the CQ stash over as far as it would go). And below the shelves you can see is a drawer of green and one of black.

Then to the left of that are the blues (3 drawers) and greens (3 drawers), with a drawer of grays and one of browns…

There’s other stuff stacked on top, pieces large enough for backings and backgrounds, plus a hefty Kaffe Fassett collection and all the William Morris-type fabrics ever printed…there’s a bizarre combination for you.

Behind me is one drawer of brown, one of orange, and one of red (spilling out all over)…I have another black drawer back there somewhere too.

Then under the sewing machine desk are two drawers of brown, two of pink/flesh, and then a ton of flesh colors that won’t fit in there. The top pink drawer is broken…the plastic is so old and one of the fatter cats kept sleeping on it until she broke it. I keep meaning to try to replace it. I’ve been really good over the last two years about not buying backing fabric, about using up what I have.

Since I will never be able to afford to move out of this house, I’m thinking when the kids move that I will just knock down all the walls and make a huge studio. I’m sure that won’t hurt the resale value.

So yeah. I did some art stuff, not a lot. I worked. I don’t feel happy. I don’t feel completely buried by sadness…just heavy with it. Always so heavy. I work so hard at pushing that away, at getting up and out of it. I wish it would just go. But I think I would need to walk out the door and get on a plane to some foreign country and start completely over for that to really work…plus they’d need to wipe my brain (tempting, oh so tempting). But then who would make my art? So I stick with my dorky kids who argue with me like teenagers do, and the goofy dog who lay on my lap while I was grading, and the three cats who vie for my attention. Every day I feel like I’m just going through the motions of a living person, trying to act like a real live human so no one notices that I am actually an alien from another planet, infiltrating their world, trying to fit in. At least there is art and there are animals and snotty teenagers and books and sometimes even decent movies or television (although tonight was not a good night for that). Without those things, I don’t know that it would be worth it…the getting up and pretending. I do miss, horribly, going to the movies regularly. Sigh. Oh well. Life sucks and then you die (I said that in high school with no understanding of what it meant…now that I better understand what it means, I deeply hope it’s not true).

“‘That’s the thing about pain,’ Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. ‘It demands to be felt.'” John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

Emotional Sine Wave

I have another post I have mostly written, but I don’t feel like finishing it tonight. Maybe tomorrow morning.

Today was a numb day. I went to the gym. I managed grocery shopping (sort of a miracle these days…I forgot my reusable bags…again…the world will die because of all the plastic they gave me today). I went to one of my art group meetings (I forgot the quilt I was supposed to deliver for a new show, so I went back for that…didn’t get too far, luckily, and then I forgot the checkbook to pay my dues). Numb apparently equals forgetful.

It really does. I am so forgetful now…hence all the post-its and the calendar reminders…otherwise I’d forget my brain. Some days I don’t even know what day it is. I don’t know what month it is…I wrote a check earlier and dated it October 2013. What the hell? It’s like I’ve had some sort of stroke. My brain doesn’t like to remember stuff at the moment, so it chooses to tune out of everything. Hello, brain…feel free to join us here any time. I don’t think it’s going to get better without your involvement. Really. I know it sucks and all, but this is what we’ve got.

I finished a book, M.L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans…

It was a gift from my UK family. It’s her first book, about a lighthouse operator in the early 1900s in Australia. It was good; I enjoyed it, even though it was tinged with sadness.

I worked on the third bird of Month 2…

Thought I had finished it, but turns out I was supposed to sew in the moon as well…so I started that but didn’t finish. I sewed in the car on the way up and during the meeting; it was dark on the way back down. I’ll finish it at Tuesday’s soccer game and then start on Month 3’s embellishments. Very exciting stuff. The stitching itself is relaxing. I manage to stop grinding my teeth when I’m stitching mostly. The rest of the time, grind away. I have to consciously make myself stop holding my jaw like the world is ending around me.

Still too many things on the to-do list. Started my taxes because the W-2 finally showed up and I need that for the financial aid, finished the journal for Earth Stories and got it ready to ship, along with a bunch of other stuff I have to mail. Made a new to-do list. Boychild had one college interview today, so I ironed his clothes for him. He commented that men’s button-down shirts are not made for men with long hair. Never thought of that. He has another interview next weekend. I guess it’s good that he made it past the first pass…or maybe they interview everyone. Who knows. It’s all new for him, having to talk to strangers about himself, trying to sell himself, trying not to get annoyed by stupid questions…or at least not to SHOW irritation. I feel for him, but am excited by his having to deal, to manage, to grow up. He’s a good kid…man.

Came home and girlchild had made dinner, which is always nice. She hurricaned the kitchen (yes, that is a verb now) as well, but I needed to catch up on dishwashing anyway, so it was motivation to do so. All these tasks take away from artmaking time, of course. It was pretty late before I started my lesson planning for this week…well, I did most of it last year. I’m not deviating much…can’t handle that on top of everything else. I signed up for two more hikes. I need more outside time…more physical in nature time. More open space with fresh air and sweat and exertion and letting the toxic shit in my head float away into the sky while I stomp along a dirt path.

Two of my quilts are in a California Fibers exhibit at Soka University in Aliso Viejo through May 8…the opening is this Thursday from 5:30-7:45. The weird time is because there is a performance at the university right after that, so this takes advantage of that. I won’t be able to make it up there, unfortunately, but it apparently is a really nice show (that is only open Monday-Friday). I’m hoping to go up during Spring Break, I think. We’ll see. Earth Mother is there…

As is Untied…

Both normally hang in my house.

Then next week, I have one quilt in another California Fibers show in Ojai, California, at the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts…Here is hanging there…

ha ha ha. Here is hanging There. That’s funny. OK, not really. It will be there through March 30. There’s word that there may be an artist’s panel with some of us on March 30. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it to that, but other artists will be there.

There are three California Fibers’ shows opening in January and February…this was a great group to join to get into shows. All three have been juried, so you still have to have good work that people want, but instead of pulling from 700 people for a show with 40 pieces, they’re pulling from a group of 30. California Fibers is a juried group and the membership call is coming up in April. If you live in Southern California, are willing to commit to 4 meetings a year in Oceanside, and work in anything that qualifies as fibers, you might consider it. Check out the website and contact the membership person.

The other art group I’m a member of is doing a 2-month exhibit in September/October about the border fence. I’m in a subcommittee (I didn’t commit to leading anything…see notes about forgetfulness above) that will be doing some sort of cross-border quilt/fabric construction. This group works completely differently than the other group…but they both are trying to be actively in exhibits and marketing themselves. It’s good, because I feel like my local SAQA group has become less active, even though we had a decent show last month that will be traveling to Georgia in March. We used to meet more down here in San Diego, and now there seem to be very few meetings down here.

If this is my life, if art is my focus, if art is the thing I have right now, then I might as well make it a regular thing. I’ve been looking at life-drawing classes as well, although then I need to balance exercise and hiking and art, because they all seem to want to happen at the same time. But if I can do it once a month, that doesn’t seem like a bad thing. I miss life drawing. Yes, I miss sitting on an uncomfortable wooden bench for hours staring at a naked person and trying to make my drawing look like what’s in front of me. Sounds crazy. It’s a different head space though…not a bad one.

Anyway, I didn’t get to start on even thinking about real artmaking until about 10:30 tonight…and then it was a decision of What Next? I could draw, I could clean off the light table and set it up for tracing the next quilt, I could stitch down the smaller quilt that’s hanging in my office. I decided to finish cutting out all the pieces for the Ivy Memorial Quilt…

They’re freezer paper, not Wonder Under…yes, new and different. The quilt is mostly wool fabrics (or will be, since it currently doesn’t exist) with cotton fabric accents, and then there will be embroidery like you see on the bird blocks I’ve been doing. It’s not something I really expect to exhibit…I just want to hang it in the house, like above a doorway, so it’s wide but not high. Ivy died in May 2012 of liver cancer at the age of 6. For some reason, it was significantly more difficult to deal with her death, probably because of her young age and it happened really quickly. I guess I don’t deal well with unexpected bad stuff. Anyway, now that all the pieces are trimmed, I could start picking wool fabrics and ironing freezer paper to them…maybe tomorrow night.

I wonder if these numb forgetful days are an aftershock to the highly emotional days. I think I’m on some sort of emotional sine wave, up and down on some regular rhythm, somehow controlled by hormones or amount of sleep or exercise or something else I don’t understand (or a combination of all of those). It’s super super low and then I hit numbness…I don’t ever really get to the high point, though. It’s just less painful than some other days. Maybe the numb days are when I get enough of some combination of sleep and exercise and interaction with humans who give a shit. It’s hard to say. I have people say to me all the time, Hey, I read your blog, and then I’m like, well then you know I’m not having any fun with all this. I don’t know what to say to that. Well, then you know I’m a giant pile of depression and awful. Well, then, I guess you know that I was crying yesterday, I’ll be crying today, and tomorrow? On the menu is crying. I guess that’s OK. You won’t have particularly high expectations of me then, will you. You’ll know I can make good art but I can’t remember anything and I’m likely to dissolve into a pile of saltwater if you bring up anything that I find troubling…like really anything. Sigh.

Who the hell is googling my age, by the way? I’m 46, people. I’ll be 47 in a couple of months. I don’t know why it’s relevant. Feel free to just ask.

OK, taking the sine wave to bed…maybe I’m still on the way up…

Hitting Me Over the Head…

So when you wake up in the morning and the first thing you think is holy god how can I just go back to sleep and stay there until everything feels better, not because you’re tired or sick but because you just don’t feel like you can negotiate all the interactions of the day or even the noise level, because it’s quiet now in the classroom and dark, but the gates open in maybe 3 minutes and then you have to deal…when that’s how it feels when you wake up, then there is not a lot of hope for the next 7 hours.

And yet. I dealt. Because I have to. Because when it’s hard, you deal. Or you don’t and people around you have to suffer because you don’t deal.

I’m really NOT in a good place tonight. I tried to be. I crossed off like 6 things off my list (my lime-green post-it note from hell). I resized things and signed things and scanned things and dropboxed things (most of those aren’t really verbs, but I don’t fucking care…language is there for me to manipulate it). I signed the girlchild up for her SAT and the boychild and I assigned her 4 colleges…she is looking at veterinarian/zoology and writing, and now he is looking at law, even federal stuff. Wacky. I don’t even know what to think about their futures, except…hell…they are THEIR futures and I am simply here to sign papers and fill in financial aid forms and Paypal them when they need it.

I just want them to be happy. The one thing their mom failed at so far, I want them to have that. I don’t care what they do. I don’t care what their fucking grades are. I just want them to get to happy.

I’d like to get there too, but I hold out less hope for that. I was able to describe to the counselor what happy looked like; yes, I still remember it. She says I don’t think I can be happy again. It’s definitely hard to imagine, especially after tonight’s meditation, which was a giant pile of cry. I don’t know why. I never know why. He says if you can’t find your overriding emotion, then to look for clues. Seriously? My overriding emotion for the last 6+ months? Sad. Grief. Crying. It’s there every fucking day. Sometimes it’s low level and I’m like barely touched by it, barely touched by anything, numb honestly. Then there are days when I am on the verge of tears all fucking day long (today) and finally I just lose it during meditation and cry for 40 minutes straight. Just crying. That just sucks. It just sucks all your energy out and stuffs your damn nose up and makes your head feel like it’s going to float away on a sea of saltwater shit.

Seriously. I could do without that. He asks, Mr. Meditation, is it heavy or light (the visualization)? It’s fucking sad, you asshole. Is it spacious or restricting? It’s just fucking sad. There’s nothing light or spacious about sad. It’s suffocating. It’s heavy. It drags you down into deep sucky mud and makes it so you can’t breathe or stop crying or see straight. Do I feel stillness or restlessness? I don’t even know. Be clear about how you’re feeling without judging it. I’m clear. This is fucking sad. I don’t judge it. It just fucking is. It may never go away. That’s what it feels like tonight, like suckers attached to your chest and they will never fucking let go.

I’m sure that will be better tomorrow. Or Sunday. Or Monday. In 2021. Whatever. Fuck you.

I was listening to NPR before counseling and they were talking to an author, Jennifer Senior, who wrote a book about parenting and children called All Joy and No Fun. The author talked about how women (in general) have a running ticker tape of concerns going through their heads. Men compartmentalize and can put concerns away at work. I don’t know if that’s true. I haven’t been with the parent of my children for long enough that it seems irrelevant to analyze how we deal with the kids…because we aren’t really a team. When the boychild and I were trying to decide if I was a single mom, like the legal definition, well, no I’m not. I have an ex who has joint custody and pays money, but I do almost everything that is kid-related with virtually no support. I can’t imagine having support, having a team supporting the kids. I wanted that, but fuck all, when do I get what I want? I don’t know. I’ll let you know. I do all the SATs and ACTs and college apps and FAFSA and interviews and all this shit. I get very little help. I would have liked to have help. I would have liked to have had a team to deal with all this. I would have liked support, empathy, help.

I must have done something very very wrong to be in this space right now.

Or I just feel that way.

Yes, it’s a bad place. It’s OK. I’m sure it will be better tomorrow. Or the next day. You really just get to this point where you push yourself into bed and sleep and hope when you wake up that it doesn’t feel the way it did yesterday.

And if it does, you do it again. And pick up a pen or a needle or some fabric, and hope to god that it doesn’t ever feel like that again.

I dehaired and packed yet another quilt for a show that’s opening in two weeks in Ojai…

I’m delivering it Sunday. Busy weekend.

The new Sue Spargo BOM? We’re not allowed to post finished or in-process blocks on blogs, because people were copying them instead of buying her patterns, so I guess for the next year-plus all you will see is supreme details and materials…here’s the materials for Month 1.

I am so not ready to even start Month 1. First I have to get the embellishment done on last-year’s quilt Months 2-12. Minor issue. Packed up a bunch of stuff for tomorrow’s drive. Maybe I will get through Month 2…or even start Month 3. Who the fuck cares. It just occupies the part of my brain that likes to move thread around with needles. It’s not the savior to my sanity.

The sleepover got canceled, by the way…thank god, because I was in no sane frame of mind. I decided to keep cutting out the freezer paper pieces for the Ivy Memorial quilt, started last year and abandoned.

This is an interesting quilt in that it is mostly wool with cotton bits and pieces, with plans for lots of thread embellishment, so sort of a clash (clash?) between the Sue Spargo wool world and Kathy’s art world. I have no idea what will actually come of it…but I just wanted something to acknowledge Ivy’s existence on the planet. It’s never easy when things/organisms/people die too early. It just feels wrong and makes you obsess and drags you down.

So maybe this quilt will help me move on to a new dog. Who knows. I can’t afford a new dog.

I listened to this in the morning…

it helped. Maybe. Briefly. Hitting me over the head with a sledgehammer also might help.