In the Far Away…

Yeah. Um. Day’s over. I survived all the bits and pieces of it. Survived yesterday too. There was lots of salt water wasted over the two-day period, but hey…that’s what I do now. You should invite me to your big event. You wouldn’t even have to pay me to cry there…I just do it anyway. I could have my own reality TV show…I could do Laura Dern…I could follow happy people around malls and try to bring them down.

Anyway, senior awards ceremony last night. Boychild is an honor graduate (no shock), but also got a commendation from the National Merit Whosy-whaty…he didn’t get beyond the top 5% in the nation because we didn’t have him take the SAT in the right month. Why? Because we’re stupid obviously. No, because their rules are confusing and we messed up. Whatever. He looks thrilled. Actually, as his dad says, he looks like the reincarnation of Meatloaf in Bat out of Hell. Except less angry.

He’s thrilled to be there. There was a dress code. Otherwise he would be in his standard uniform of jeans and black Tshirt with random holes in it.

We handled dinner afterwards and the girlchild only gave me a ton of shit, instead of two tons. I’m sure I deserve it. I did give birth to her without drugs, by the way. Back labor. Oblique lie. She owes me. She’ll figure it out. It’s OK. But yeah, she made me cry at the awards ceremony and my ex had to separate us. I was willing to just leave, but apparently that wasn’t an option. I had to come back and sit with the family.

Seriously…being a divorced mom of teens isn’t for the weak at heart…although I suspect if we were still married, I would still be the target. I just wish I could hack it better than I do at the moment. I recognize that she needs to separate from me so she can leave and go to college. I just wish she didn’t have to be so nasty about it.

So after dinner, I came home and cut stuff out, and I made the mistake of watching Parenthood, which consistently makes me cry. Stupid, eh? When I was much younger, it was China Beach and 30-Something…and something else I can’t remember the name of…this is why I try to stick to murder mysteries and sci fi these days. They are much less emotionally draining.

See progress? I do. Tiny progress. Tiny bubbles. Boychild asked me today, “What’s a Don Ho?” I explained. I used YouTube as a support. I’d like to say I’m tech savvy, but me and my computer are currently doing some sort of battle that I think will only end in some sort of Fatal Error, not in my court, but in the home of Shit You Don’t Have Money to Spend on a New Computer Right Now (at least not for yourself…probably for that kid who is going off to college). How am I going to survive next year without the calm words of my boy…”What’s she freaking out about now?” Hell, I don’t know. There’s the kid that cooks and the kid that follows instructions, even when he doesn’t want to. There’s the uber-needy child and the otherly needy child. One talks, the other clings and then screams. My counselor talked me through some of this today, because I’m at the end of my rope. I’m dangling off the edge of an emotional cliff. You know it’s bad when your ex has to talk you back into the chair, off the floor. Seriously bad.

I’m going to be OK. Someday. Not any time soon. Maybe in two years. Or five. Maybe. I’m aiming for age 50. It’s a nice round number. It’s far enough out that I have a good chance of being sort of OK by then. Two years, nine months. Then I can be a crone and life will be oh so easy. Whatever.

Here’s one of my frogs during dissection. If you object, sorry…this is a huge learning experience for my ignorant little kids…

Just seeing the variation and how everything fits together is a good thing for them. It’s going to suck in two years when I don’t have body systems any more…sigh. Science teaching is changing too.

Anyway. I did about 5 hours of grading tonight, and it was just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve been doing this all year, sacrificing work to some version of my sanity by doing art instead, and I just can’t keep doing that this week. I have to hunker down and just grade. For hours. With loud music blasting. And yeah, I will probably cry for part of it. Damn tear ducts. Do you think frogs cry?

Patti Smith? Yeah. Well. It’s not that I don’t like Prince, it’s that I like Smith better. Dark deep woman.

My plan…to get the grading out of the way so I can draw and make art and try to be a human that doesn’t depress me. Don’t know if it’s possible, but it’s a goal. Goals don’t have to be attainable in the moment…it can be in the far away.

Nothing is so fucked up that it can’t be fixed by a Peter Gabriel song…

I think I believe that…oh yeah. And pie.

Crappy video, great song.

This Is Where Things Are Right Now.

It’s been a rough few days, physically and emotionally. I’ve been running microscope labs for three days and then went right into frog dissections. These take lots of time, energy, class management, cleanup, and dealing with squealing teens, which I just don’t have the patience for right now. I suspect MOST teachers are running low on patience at the moment. There’s nothing abnormal about that. But Tuesday night at the gym, after spending over an hour with the boychild and his dad, trying to navigate through college and immunization crap, I hadn’t apparently eaten enough and my blood sugar crashed at the gym. Badly. I didn’t have my tester, but I did have glucose tabs with me. Here’s a sign of how your brain doesn’t work when your blood sugar crashes: I kept exercising. I know. Silly. It was OK in the end, though…although I felt like crap for the rest of the evening…that’s also unfortunately normal. So I didn’t have the energy to stand and iron…I cut pieces out instead. Silence abounded. Sadness followed.

It’s OK, the next day, right?

Fuck that.

My cutting view: TV, messy house, pajamas on, single glass of wine. I get my hour in, then I go to sleep. The sleep of the exhausted. That’s what low blood sugar does. Fucks with me.

And I keep getting emails from places that annoy me…like Good Housekeeping, why? I don’t think that a new everyday hairstyle or a pop of color in my bathroom is going to change my mood…although the bathroom is on my list for the summer. And House Beautiful? What the fuck? I’m not into that stuff, reading about it, it’s just depressing and reminds me of how lame I am at the moment. Comedy shows? Not my thing. Delete delete delete. Comedy shows are full of mean people being mean to people. Fuck them. Take me off your fucking list, unsubscribe over and over again. Just leave me the fuck alone. Comedy isn’t funny.

Deep breath. Normally I would take a weekend or a short vacation right after school got out and clear my head. That’s not happening this year. No money. Nowhere to go. No one to go with. One kid will apparently be in Palm Springs (or Palm Sprongs, which is what I’m calling it now), which is fine, or it WOULD have been fine if someone had actually talked to me about it instead of assuming that because I have no life that there doesn’t need to be communication. I feel like I need an artists’ retreat or a self-reflective place with lots of meditation time, but I think that would also be a mistake right now. I don’t have enough emotional support to do that. Maybe what I need is to be in my own space, cleaning and rearranging and painting my own life so I can move on past this mopey shit. Damn mopey shit has tentacles that don’t let go. Release me, you fuckwads. Let me be someone else, someone who is not this sad person. I’m tired of her. She’s not fun to be around and she just makes me feel worse.

Funny that the me is still me. Can’t get away from me. Me me me me…fuck me.

So yesterday, I knew it would be rough…first day of frog dissections, plus I had a 2-hour science meeting right after school and then I had to sit through a 2-hour teenaged driving course (required by the school so the girlchild can drive on campus next year without her brother around, who already sat through this). For those of you who remember Red Asphalt…I just saw Red Asphalt V. Sigh. And three other videos that I show my students every year about driving and drinking and texting and all that crap. So I packed food (I learned from the day before…this is my new existence. Eat or pass out.) and I drew during each meeting, because otherwise I would have fallen asleep…

Post-it note with ballpoint pen: not my favorite materials, but I left the sketchbook in the car.

Then I drew during Red Asphalt…

She’s remarkably calm-looking, considering what I was there to see and listen to. Surprisingly, girlchild got mad at me for reading on my phone during the presentation, said it was rude, but had no issues with my DRAWING during the sheriffs’ talking. Not rude to draw.

So Tuesday night, this is what it looked like after I cut pieces out…

And this is after Wednesday night…

Can you tell the difference? Sigh. It’s no wonder I’m depressed. It’s fucking neverending. I mean, I can look at those two photos and see that I got something done…but it’s taking for-freakin-ever. I’m at 11 hours and 38 minutes. There is no way I’m finishing in a couple of hours or so.

Same with this post. I need to go to school. Who knows when I’ll finish.

From meditation, the title. This is where things are right now. Live in the moment. In the moment, I am tired, frustrated, dejected, sad, depressed, overwhelmed, disheartened, anxious, stressed, barefoot, drinking tea, reminding myself I need to iron the boychild’s clothes for the awards ceremony. Mr. Meditation talks about opening a space where we can envision change, even if change is not happening right now (I imagined a mountain meadow with peaks and trees all around, because he said to open the space). Lifting oneself out of the depressed space. Can’t do that. Fuck you. But now I’m sitting in a meadow with all that other shit towering around me. I don’t know if that’s better. It’s easier to hide in the trees than out in the open.

Frogs are done. I even did the dishes already (science labs=dishes). Tomorrow we start sex ed. I don’t know that it will put me in a better mood. When you read all that futuristic and dystopian fiction, there’s always pills or medical conversion chambers or genetic engineering that makes sure that people don’t feel bad or sad…OR…they kill all of us mutants and don’t let us reproduce and make more deep reflective thinkers like us. Society doesn’t want to deal with the likes of us. Even though we make amazing art, visual, verbal, musical, dance…they don’t want to admit that the brain falls so deep for so long. This is where things are right now. Tomorrow maybe I will have a donut and they will be somewhere else.

Earth Stories: Sewing It Down…or Up…

First you sew it down. Then you sew it up. Once all the pieces are ironed down, I stitch them down with an invisible thread on the top and a small zigzag…here’s what it looks like from the back.

Jul 31 13 021 small

It took me about 9 1/2 hours to stitch the whole thing down, starting on July 31 and finishing August 5…I took a few days off in the middle for a soccer tournament.

It’s kind of mesmerizing (or monotonous, depending on how I’m feeling) to do all that stitching, but if I don’t, the pieces don’t stay put. When I’m not actually sewing, I pile it all up on top of the sewing machine, because otherwise cats want to sit on it.

Sometimes when I’m actually quilting the piece, I’ll find stuff I didn’t stitch down, so I’m not perfect…I try to follow some sort of plan so I don’t miss pieces, but it doesn’t really work that way.

I have a nice view at least (not that I look up…at all). I had a hard time working on this part last year, because normally I listen to music, but music has memories attached to it and emotional tugs, and that was just not a good thing last year at this time. Hell, it probably STILL isn’t, which is sad…but I bullied through. There are a lot of tears in this thing.

Once the whole thing is stitched down, I sandwich it with batting and backing. I had to piece the backing…the quilt finishes at 72″ square, so I even had to move the bench out of the entryway to get it to fit (yes, this is the largest empty floor space in the house…I will never be able to move unless the entryway is at least this big).

Here it is sandwiched…which means no one can come in the front door until it’s pinned. I do have to consider these things (where are the kids and when are they coming back?).

It took almost 3 hours to pin baste it…on my knees…

Then comes the quilting. I start with a dark thread to outline the things I want to see…I had all these spools of the same color of dark blue (it’s one I use a lot). I think I used almost all of them up.

This is outlining, which I do before I stitch any filler stitches.

I outline anything I want to pop out, so most of the imagery in the quilt.

This stage is not easy, because I’m manhandling a large, heavy beast through a normal-sized machine…I wear gloves and try to get up and flex my back and shoulder muscles regularly, but usually, once I start stitching, I find it hard to stop.

I cried a lot during this part too…music again.

Here’s what the back looks like…that’s the heart (upside down).

It took 19 1/2 hours to quilt this whole thing. I started August 7 and finished on the 14th.

There was a lot of little tiny stitching detail going on…

These figures are less than 5″ tall…

The stitching details were what made the difference on these figures…

That section is a whole lot of crazy.

Sometimes the thread has issues…

Here’s that crazy corn section stitched up…

And the International Planned Parenthood Federation logo. I did contact them about this quilt, but they never answered. I should probably do it again with a picture this time.

Cat and baby detail…

Vegetable garden (very fun to draw and make)…

When it was all quilted, I laid it back out on the entryway floor to try to cut it to size. It had to be 72″ square, so that was a pain in the butt…I hate making to an exact size.

Then I put the 18 miles of binding on…

Stitching the binding and sleeves took a little over 8 hours (cat involvement!).

Technically, I finished on August 24 with 168 hours and 39 minutes, started in March. But then I drew on it later…I have absolutely no idea WHEN that was…thought it was January, but I’m not finding any notation of it. Oh well. I know it was after it was photographed. Oh well. I’m OK with that.

Two more posts on this…the exhibit posts and the little quilt…which took a lot less time and energy to make.

No Fit…

I’ve never been good at fitting in. I have a lot of different interests and that seems like it should make it easier, but it doesn’t always. I suspect part of it is my fault…I see all the differences, as well as the similarities, and the differences feel like they push me away. I’m not even sure I want to fit in most of the time…maybe it’s that I want to feel accepted even when I don’t fit well. Maybe I will never fit well. That’s not true. There have been times when my core existence was a good fit, or at least I thought it was, and it made it easier to feel like I fit in elsewhere. Or that it mattered less. Right now, I can’t even find my core…I’m floating around in this weird mental space that doesn’t feel right, I don’t feel right, and maybe that’s the issue. It’s not that I don’t fit in with any particular group. I can handle that. I’m OK with that. It’s that I don’t feel like I fit in with myself.

It’s hard to explain. It’s like wearing a shoe that’s not quite comfortable. There’s a rock in there. You pull the shoe off, readjust the sock, find the rock, put the shoe back on, walk for a while. Nope. Still doesn’t feel right. It’s just uncomfortable. It’s wrong. You stomp your feet a bit to try to make them conform to the shoe or vice versa. No luck. No fit.

I have conversations with my counselor pretty regularly about how this feels and what to do about it. It’s part of what feeds the depression, feeling out of place, unsettled, like I don’t know who I am. I do the stuff she suggests, sometimes I’m already doing it, because I do know how to make a life. I’ve had to remake my life before. I remember. It wasn’t this bad last time though. This time, it’s like going from a scorched landscape…like the hike we did on Saturday, where the fire was a year ago…where baby plants are just now popping up, and here we are stepping on them, feeling bad about it. A fire goes through, it can take 10 years or more to get back to something approximating normal. So maybe I am the fire-scorched landscape, and it hasn’t even been a year, and I have baby plants, but they’re not strong enough, big enough, and they’re getting stepped on. I’m betting those hillsides don’t feel normal yet. They certainly don’t look it.

So why do I hike? Being outside in nature helps with the depression. Being outside doing something physical, sometimes even challenging, it helps. (Saturday was a challenge, between elevation and my knee acting up…not a good thing…it was a challenge. Not a significant challenge, like the previous week, which hopefully I’ll post later today, but still…) Forcing myself to be with people for at least part of the days when I would normally be alone, in dead silence, it’s probably a good thing. I do OK when the people are around most days…it isn’t until I’m on my own, driving home or wherever, that I have an issue. Out of the group, into the pit.

I’m working on all of this. I’m aware of it. I’m trying to find my trail through all of it. There are marked trails, but I’m not good at following those…I’m out bushwhacking my own trail. It may take me a while. It most definitely will take me a while.

So this weekend, I tried a few social events. I did OK. I haven’t found a balance between trying to be with people and getting my introverted and artistic needs met. I have to sacrifice one to the other, it seems, and that’s not ideal. It’s not what I want. But it is what it is right now. I went to a work thing. I went hiking. Then I went camping with people from work (well, one people from work, because the others bailed). In the moment, it was fine. I did OK. I like hiking. I like camping. The crap feelings I have on either side are what I need to work through. And I am.

So after I hiked about 10 miles off of Sunrise Highway, I drove out to William Heise County Park near Julian, where a friend from work and a bunch of her family and friends were camping. Here was my setup…

We had four campsites all clustered together under the oaks, with a nice wide area in the middle for the ten kids to race around and throw things at each other (you know, like kids do…).

We hung out and chatted and ate and sat by the campfire…

It was nice. I was tired, but it was OK. I even walked around and took pictures of flowers…

These are the oaks that were above my tent…

Here was my breakfast (very exciting…I did not challenge myself on the cooking. I bought a burrito for dinner and heated it up on the fire).

I read. I drew. I made tea (shocking, for those who know me). It was nice. This drawing has been in my head in pieces for months. It’s not done.

I’m not even sure I like it, but if it’s in my head, it needs to get out.

This one I did Sunday morning while drinking tea…

It’s also not done. I like it better than the other one, but I’m not sure it needs to become a quilt. Maybe.

Sometimes I just draw and I don’t worry about the purpose of the drawing or the final product. It is enough to draw. I haven’t been drawing much lately. You need time to draw, and my time has been limited. That is one of the issues of doing all the hiking and social stuff…it takes away from my art time, from the actual space I need in my head to draw. I hate that. It’s a nasty balance. I don’t seem to be able to work it out right. I was better at it before, but that was a different me. She’s gone. This other me is a lot more needy.

I only camped for about 22 hours (yes, I counted). I had stuff I had to do yesterday, including groceries and getting the boychild a tux for prom. Yes, he’s going…with a group of friends, which is the best way to go anyway. So we stood around in a tux rental place yesterday and tried to get him to make decisions (amusing!). And I was uber-tired yesterday night after very little sleep two nights running, so I fell asleep while trying to grade tests (I am so far behind…) and finally gave up and went to sleep. No amount of caffeine was going to help. I slept over 9 hours last night, almost straight through, so that tells you how exhausted I was. Good thing I had today off. Today? Gotta be efficient. This week? Gotta be on top of my game. Whether or not I fit is irrelevant this week. I just have to get through.

So here’s the science teacher brain at work. One of my coworker’s daughters pointed out these bugs while we were setting up my tent (it required two people…it was a bizarre shape…kinda buglike, actually). There were some on the ground near the tent, and then she found them on the tree. These are the adults, I think, with the wings…

Then these are the larva, no wings, look kinda like bees with the stripes.

There were husks of the larva on the tree, attached to it, so like a cocoon, but not. The legs are still there. Like they stick to the tree for a while.

Then as I was taking the tent down, I saw this one, probably newly emerged, because the wings aren’t entirely unfurled, and it still had a really pink, new-looking body.

And this one, also on the tent, looked full grown.

We were concerned that these were the gold-spotted oak borers that have attacked many of the trees up in the Cuyamacas, including in this park, but those are much smaller, and the larva are worms, not crawly beetle things. So I don’t know what they are. But it was interesting seeing all the stages around (most of them on my tent).

Anyway. Today? Not trying to fit. Just trying to cope. But see, I’m back with my kids in my house doing the stuff I need to do as a mom and teacher. So that’s not where I have the problems. I have issues when it’s just me on my own…and that’s going to get worse over the next two years as the kids go off to college, so that’s my goal…figure out my head before they both leave. Have a comfortable space where I feel like I fit, even if it’s just me by myself, and be OK with that. Be able to go out and do this more social stuff and come home and feel content, not empty and lost. It sucks to be in my late 40s and trying to figure all this stuff out yet again, but there’s nothing I can do about that except try to do a better job from here on out. Find my fit.

Power Struggles

Apparently there’s some sort of power struggle going on in my head between the depressed part of my brain and the part that is just tired of the depressed part. I have to admit that the tired part is not winning. Neither is the depressed part, so I guess that’s a good thing…imagine a big tug-of-war rope with two weaklings pulling on each side, falling down at times, rope burns on the hands, but no one lets go. Oh wait, sometimes the tired side lets go and the depressed part wins for a while, but because she’s depressed, she eventually lets go of the rope and wanders off, only to start tugging again when tired rises up and tries to take control again.

It’s exhausting to watch. Hard to muster any sort of energy on either side of the fight. No one wants depression to win, but sometimes it’s so hard to even consider who you’d have to turn into in order to have the other side win. I don’t know who I am at the moment, but I do know a lot about who I’m not. I guess that helps.

I came into counseling angry today, for decent reasons, and we parsed out why, and delved deep into where it came from, but didn’t find the healthy outlet for it. I spend a lot of time saying “but that’s not who I am” to explain why I don’t take the easy way out. I guess that’s good. I don’t know. I do know I understand better than most why I do things, what I feel, how I’m thinking. Yes, it probably means I spend too much time in my head, but at least I’m not just reacting to life. I don’t want to just make random decisions without thinking clearly about all the parts that go with it. There are so many decisions right now that my head is basically spinning. I think that’s why I’m hiking so much…I can’t possibly decide anything on a hike. All I can do is put one foot in front of another. Over and over again. Until I’m done. You can’t beat that. That’s the decision…walk or stop. Walking is the only thing that makes sense.

I have a plan for the three-day weekend. I probably won’t make it through all the things I’ve planned, but I’ve tried to set myself up for both control and success. I could fail miserably, but hopefully not. I really am hoping for three days of no power struggles (um, yes…I AM aware that I live with teenagers, but I have faith…in something).

I have a quilt that’s been in pieces for a while now, since early April. It’s only got about 365 pieces in it, so it wouldn’t take long to iron…so tonight, I sorted the pieces to that end…

I’m hoping to have some time on Sunday to get them ironed together. Or even Monday. I’m trying to ignore the 160 journals in my classroom that need grading, as well as the two periods’ worth of tests I still haven’t graded. Grrr. Ignore. Yes, this quilt only has FOUR boxes of pieces, instead of TWENTY-ONE. It’s not complicated…on purpose. Apparently I also need to make another smallish quilt with no nudity or violence (um. hmn. ok…)…apparently soonish. Whatever that means. We’ll see how that goes. Summer looms. I’m apparently not teaching summer school (they rejected most of us, so I don’t feel bad)…so maybe I’m going to get a seasonal job at Home Depot. We’ll see.

Then I spent a little time cutting pieces out…

Still forever away from finishing…

Honestly, I have an early hike tomorrow, plus I’m camping, so I had to pack a bunch of stuff for that, and I really should get my butt in bed. Like now. But because I SHOULD, my brain is balking and wanting to stay up late, like the immature little brat it can be. Anyway. I think I can persuade it that sleep is a better choice than trolling the internet…although trying to persuade it that it’s not OK to stay up all night making art is a little bit more difficult. It’s a recalcitrant beast.

Out of the Pit, into the Cave

Depression is an interesting beast. It’s so prevalent in our world, has been for years, just read some Romantic poetry or wallow in Russian literature for a while, and you’ll realize how not-alone you are in this feeling that never seems to go away. I’ve seen it described as a rain cloud that follows you around, the big black dog, a pit, a hole, a cave. We come up with these personifications, these illustrations, to try to make it something we can look at, distance ourselves from, maybe even fix. My meditation guy wants me to look at my whole brain that way. Like I’m a private detective, leaning up against that lamppost in the dark, lighting the cigarette and watching the brain (hey…shouldn’t smoke!). Watch what the brain does, make notes in a little book, process it, spit out a report at the end. This is what happened, this is where it went, dry and dissected, no emotions.

I wish my depression was the big black dog. I know how to deal with dogs. It started out as a pit, a hole. It’s been that before. Prior to my divorce, back in 2000 or so, it was a giant hole, and once I had dragged myself out of it, with no help from my husband at the time, he tossed me back in. But I got out…probably because I had spent a couple of years trying to deal with my brain and what it was doing, and I had enough tools to build a ladder out of there fairly quickly. I had some control over the situation.

Not so this time. This time I didn’t even see the pit before I got tossed in. I thought it was way behind me, filled in, totally safe ground to walk on, and I blithely continued on, carrying my little beachball of work stress and hormonal disruptions…which yes, caused a minor depression, but it was completely treatable. I just didn’t know I needed to deal with it. I think it would have eventually worked itself out with the right supports (which I wasn’t getting). But then a giant maw of a deep dark hole opened up and I just tumbled all the way down. And I can look back now and see how deep I went, how bad it was (sometimes still is).

They tell you that once you’ve experienced one depressive event that you are more prone to them later on. Great. Appreciate it. Didn’t ask for this. Mine are event-based. This isn’t just random shit being shot out of a cannon, like some people’s depression, which I can see would be much harder to deal with, because you can’t pinpoint the cause. It just is. It’s that brain chemistry out of whack. No, this is because of what other people have done, and in each case, it is out of my control. I am just the one dealing with the aftermath. It seems unfair, but I know that life is not set out to be fair…there is no arbitrator of fairness and karma setting out punishments and rewards. You may believe otherwise…feel free…but I don’t.

So once I’m in the pit, the deep hole, I have to find my way out. Sometimes it’s medications, which didn’t work this time, it’s always counseling, it’s always a time of deep reflection and artmaking for me, which makes me somewhat lucky, in that I can actually create while down in the pit. I know plenty who can’t, who are hogtied by the depression to a point of not being able to even pick up a pencil. I guess I’m glad that when my brain goes into that hole, she takes her sketchbook and her pens with her. I guess that is a learned defense against the depression.

And it really is me, the private dick, still leaning up against the lamppost, checking my watch, adjusting my hat against the misty rain, waiting for the brain to show herself again, logging her activity.

I guess the plus is that she’s moved out of the hole. Well, she moved into a cave recently, I guess…I don’t know why the visualization changed, but it did. It seems easier…she can just walk in and out of the cave, no need to build a ladder or scramble up the sides of a muddy pit. She hunches over, my brain, and she brings a bowl out into the light, gathers some leaves or berries (I’ve been eating a lot of berries lately), she blinks, squints up at the sky, sees me and drops her chin, acknowledging my presence, and then shuffles back into the cave. Brings tears to my eyes. There she is. She was out. She tried. She’s going back in for a while, because it was too much.

Some day I’ll talk about the current quilt and its title. Because it is the hardest part of this depression. I know what was in my head as I drew it, and…it’s one of the worst things I’ve ever had to deal with in my own head. Yes, only one. Sad but true.

I’d better find a way to do something restorative tonight, beyond exercise and meditation. Because…ouch. Bad place.

Earth Stories: Sticking It Together

My continuing saga of how the Earth Stories quilts came together…

Once the pieces are trimmed, I iron them all together. I do this by putting the original drawing right-side up on the ironing board and putting an applique press sheet on top. You can see the lines through the sheet, so I pull the paper backing off the pieces one at a time, line them up, overlap them where necessary, and iron them down.

On a quilt this big, I needed multiple sheets going at a time…the quilt is 72″ wide and the sheets aren’t.

I try to iron big sections together, but not necessarily all the pieces. I need room for adjustment later when I go to iron it down to the background.

When I have super-small pieces, like in the skeletons, I often don’t cut those pieces out until I’m ready to iron them. Otherwise, I lose them. I’m not sure WHERE I lose them…it’s like that extra sock you can never find. Sometimes I find them two quilts later, a randomly numbered piece that has no home. So sometimes during this stage I have to redraw and recut a missing piece.

If I can get away with it, I just make a note about the missing piece…they often show up later in a different bin.

This section below has about 250 tiny pieces in it. It was a little crazy.

Oh yeah. This was also crazy. There was a lot of crazy with this quilt. It might have been funny if it weren’t so crazy.

Earth Mother’s face coming together…and her heart. Her heart didn’t turn out exactly like I wanted. I remembered that when I did the next heart.

And here’s the main character in the dream bubble…

I actually divided the sky in half, but ironed both halves on the same fabric…

Did I mention crazy? This is corn. I’m not sure in the end product that it was worth the level of crazy that I drew, but there it is.

You can see the little corn tassels and leaves above ready to be ironed. If you ever see this quilt in person, please appreciate the corn.

Then I pieced the (huge) background and laid it out on my entryway floor…which it filled. My mom’s entryway is bigger, so I have done this at her house too. If I ever move, I will need one big empty floor…

I lay the pieces out on the background and make them fit together. This is sometimes a really long and painful process. The dream world bubble was all one piece at this point…much easier to deal with.

You can see I had the Earth Mother figure divided into three main pieces…top, bottom, and belly.

Here’s most of it in place. I iron it down, best I can on a lumpy tile floor…I just need it all to stick together long enough to get it to the ironing board. Did I mention this is 72″ square? Yeah.

And then I transfer it to my ironing board and spray each section with water (hoping fabrics don’t run) and put the heat on for 30 seconds at least, trying to get all the layers to fuse down.

It took almost 31 hours to iron this sucker together. I worked from July 11-31. I should add that I was going through a significantly traumatic event while this was happening, so I know I wasn’t working very well or efficiently. Technically you’d call my mental state shock. So I guess I should be impressed that I can create anything while in shock, although this task is really just about getting it done, not about being creative. An assistant could probably do this part. I tried to concentrate on what I was doing to distract me from the other crap, but I had a really hard time doing that well. I really didn’t care if it got done or not, except that I had committed to make the quilt for the exhibit, and I’m usually pretty good about commitments like that. I’m not a flaky artist. So I did it. It was, honestly, something to do. It’s what I’ve been doing for the last 10 months…just making the art, even though it doesn’t feel good…there are other things that feel worse, and this seems to occasionally make me feel at peace…so I keep doing it.

But just looking at that piece lying on the floor brings back how awful I was feeling. I would get out of bed, trudge down the hallway, sigh deeply, and just keep going. Every day. That’s not a life. But it’s the life that birthed this quilt.

Next post, stitching it all together.

What’s That About…

I mentioned that I had some drawings pop up in my head in the last few days. One has actually been popping in and out for about a month. It thinks it wants to be the equality quilt that has to be done by November, but I’ve already told it that it’s not what I want, it’s not appropriate. It’s interesting, because I had picked gender equality, because that’s a big issue for me, always has been, and the image that’s popping up is not a good one…and I really do believe gender equality is possible…eventually. But some shit needs to change. The boychild is an editor on the newspaper at his high school and one of the writers (female) wrote an article about why we need feminism, and there was nothing new or earth-shattering in this article, being as it was written by a teenaged girl who hadn’t really experienced much of anything, but she obviously knew the code words and the issues…but another student (apparently) at the school wrote a comment, a huge long diatribe against feminism and women, claiming she was a 17-year-old female, showing enough knowledge of the school that our guess is that it’s the PARENT of a student, but because of some of the stuff in the comment, they can’t post it online as is (because if they could, me, my SIL, and half my friends would be commenting on her ass, for sure). The assumption is that every women CAN have whatever she wants, that nothing gets in the way of that, but then some stuff about being a proper wife (oh dear, well, I’ve blown that…in fact, I can’t even be a proper girl, or woman, in her terms…and I’m so totally OK with that).

So I need my drawing to be on the good side, the positive side of what gender equality is going to look like, because I have to believe that can exist, despite some of the shit I’ve seen throughout my 47 years (as she wrote about her vast experience of 17 years). So that drawing…it will happen, but the bad version of it might need to happen first. The one where despite what people SAY, they still believe in the lame divisions of who does what, with no understanding of the work involved or the assumptions behind it. If you want me to cook for you dammit, then pick a meal and go buy the supplies, and THEN we can have a discussion…don’t drop all that shit into the lap of someone who cooks all the time and thinks of it as just more work when she is already overwhelmed…do you know how many nights I make TWO dinners, one for tonight and one for the next night? Cooking is not my friend.

On Saturday’s hike, someone (male) slapped my ass. I didn’t say much…not sure what his assumption was, but I refrained from saying something…well…rude, honestly…but it certainly reframed the conversations we’d had over the last two hikes. Women in general will talk about almost anything on hikes…I talked with women about hiking, knee surgery, hysterectomies, teaching, raising children, artmaking, sleep, hormones, allergies, the view, hiking again, shoes (hiking, not the other, plus sandals for post-hiking), diabetes, and food…and that was just today. The men? Always a different conversation. We never know what they do for a living, unless we ask (women tend to drop this info quickly and easily). We don’t know whether they have kids half the time (they rarely talk about their children…we talk about our kids constantly). They appear to have no lives. They probably would say they come on these hikes to get AWAY from their lives, but you know that shit follows you…you might as well let it out.

So if he slaps my ass again, I will probably have to say something, but I’ve learned enough from dealing with middle-school kids that I have two routes: embarrass the crap out of him (burn! as my students say), which is sometimes effective, or grab him on his own and explain that I don’t like it. Either way, I am now that feminist, eh? And I’m OK with that. So my dad and I had a conversation about that and he said there were some women who slapped his ass (which he does NOT mind, the old lech), which I think is just as bad, personally, unless you know the person well and this is part of your interaction with them. I don’t know this guy well. And that’s my ass. So get off of it.

Sigh. There I go being all confrontational again.

So instead of drawing gender equality last night, I drew one version of the bathtub that’s been in and out of my head since I saw Frida Kahlo’s version…

reminded of George Bush’s version (it scares me that I keep remembering art that George made)…

and it’s not done, and I don’t even think it’s right, but it is. She needs a head though.

There’s a lot more that needs to go into the picture. I need at least a half a page above this one. It’s funny…I remember being in 4th or 5th grade, Mrs. Westcott was my teacher, and she was an artist on the side as well…in fact, my parents have a portrait of me that she drew, pastels I think? Anyway, she would get so frustrated with my inability to stay ON the page. My drawings, paintings, etc. always fell off the page. My tree trunks would extend so far up the paper that there was just the bottom part of the leaves showing. I distinctly remember her pointing that out to me, and telling me I needed to look at the page and try to FIT on it. Didn’t happen. I need paper that extends automatically. Anyway. I drew. That’s the real point. It felt good. It’s such a good place to be in my head when I’m drawing. Everything else goes away.

That woman standing in the bathtub…she was a skeleton when I saw her for the first time in the drawing Saturday. Before that, when I saw this drawing, she wasn’t there at all. So I’m not sure what that’s about.

I had another low-blood-sugar event yesterday, the first since I went off the apparently offending medication. It was a strange one, too, and I’m starting to pin these occurrences on hormones instead of anything else…I was feeling nauseous but knew I needed to eat, so I had some fruit with frozen yogurt about 30 minutes before, and then it crashed…which makes no freakin’ sense. Basically I ate pure simple sugars there, and my body flipped out. Sigh. So I logged it and dealt with the ensuing exhaustion that follows, and the blood sugar came back, but it just annoys me that I do everything I’m supposed to and it still doesn’t behave. Story of my life.

So I didn’t get much cutting done, because I drew instead (plus I graded a ton of papers, which I really needed to do)…

But there are the bins…some slightly fuller, one slightly less full. It’s not a short process…it takes for-freakin’-ever, basically. I had hoped to be done cutting out last week, though, and you’d think with having a full day off for fires I could have pulled that off, but my brain and I don’t always agree, so I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to. I do have a goal for this weekend, though, so I should get that set up (means sorting pieces into bins again…that’s a truly boring part of artmaking). But before all that, apparently I have to be a ~~good citizen~~ ~~mommy~~ responsible adult and go to work.

Kinda Stuck

I spent a lot of time in my head yesterday, partially because I was on a LONG kick-your-butt hike where I was hiking by myself for a goodly amount of time (not fast enough to be with the front group and not slow enough to be with the back group), and also because it’s Saturday and I usually spend long swathes of time by myself on Saturdays these days. Some people tell me to fix that, because yes, I do find it depressing to be in my head that much, I should go out with friends to dinner or movies or just to hang out, and I do have those options, but you know what? I’m an introvert. Yes. I teach middle-school kids all day and I’m an introvert. It doesn’t mean I don’t like people…I do OK with them most of the time, although you have to be the right kind of person for me to get really close to you, but I can talk to just about anyone (as evidenced on these hikes). What it means is that too much interaction with people and I need to recharge. I need quiet mental space with a book or music or my art and I need it on a regular basis, like every day, and sometimes for many hours. I can handle my kids and close family, but more than that and I feel like I’m exerting energy I don’t even have any more. It’s exhausting. Because yes, the depression steals some of my ability to cope in social situations. It gets used up faster.

So I actually need those evenings/afternoons/mornings where I’m not expected to be a certain way or put out a certain amount of interaction…but because of how my life is at the moment, most of those moments are now alone moments and my brain reacts to those badly.

I’m a fairly self-reflective person (not with mirrors all over me…that would be funny…oh shit, that’s the THIRD drawing that’s popped into my head in the last 24 hours. That was a plus of all the hiking alone time yesterday. I did a whole drawing in my head…now to get it on paper), so I spend a lot of time (possibly too much) thinking about what I’m doing, how I’m feeling, and how to make it better. Yesterday’s notes to myself: When depressed, don’t watch movies where babies die unexpectedly. Also grocery stores on Saturday night are depressing. Always. Knock it off. Go another day. I don’t care how convenient it is because you have nothing else to do. I don’t care if you feel you HAVE to go Saturday because Sunday is a clusterfuck schedulewise. Find some other chore that needs doing so you’re not perusing the vegetables at 7 PM on Saturday when all you can think of is what you would have been doing then a year ago. A year ago doesn’t exist any more. Move on.

Yeah. Brain and I are not getting along at the moment. I think some of it is because there are still a couple of really high-stress things in my life that need to get handled this week, and they are overwhelming me, so I’m not handling the rest of life well.

Anyway. So I hiked yesterday, a really long hike, and my body is complaining today, but I managed yesterday to NOT have to take a nap (good). And yes, I went to the store (bad). But then I needed to do some cutting out of fabric, because I was too tired Friday night to do that after searching for about an hour for the title on my old car, which needs to be sold. So that now requires a DMV trip, which would be fine if they’d let me make an appointment, but they won’t at the local one, and I can’t get to the nonlocal one in time after school. Bastards.

I have the bins all set up on the couch…

I’m still working on using my new camera well…it’s fussy. There is a black cat in the back of that photo, but you can’t see her at all. The bin on my lap (which you can’t see) has all the trimmed-off trash pieces in it. The bigger bin to the right of me has all the pieces I need to cut out, and then the bin just past it has all the cut-out pieces. Usually there’s a cat somewhere in there too…eventually she moved to the couch behind my head (where she likes to be, because I reach back and pet her occasionally). I use an app (Task Measure) on my phone to record how long I spend each day on each part of making the quilt.

I cut stuff out for a couple of hours, putting me up to 7+ hours on this part of the quilt.

This is the stuff I still haven’t cut out…so the pile is getting smaller, but it’s still pretty big.

I get frustrated with some of the pieces because they’re so tiny (see all the skeleton bones, long skinny pieces?)…some I don’t cut out until later, so I don’t lose them, but these are big enough. These are all the pieces I’ve cut out so far.

So I’m getting there…both with the quilt pieces and with my life, although the latter does seem stalled in place at the moment. There’s some step I need to take but can’t. I know what I want but can’t deal with what I’ll have to do to get there. Don’t have the mental energy, the desire even to go there. So I will be stuck with the quiet Saturday nights for a long while, I think…I can’t really financially afford to be going out and doing stuff anyway, so that doesn’t help. I think sometimes you just have to accept where you’re at and that at some point in the future you might be able to make a change. I don’t like that waiting stuff, though, but until my brain figures out how to come out of the cave/pit/hole/whatever the hell it is that it lives in right now and stay OUT, I’m kinda stuck.

Earth Stories: Coloring It In

Once I have all the pieces sorted into bins (in this case, I had 21 of them…I actually had to go buy more), I start ironing Wonder Under onto fabric.

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Each bin has 100 pieces in it, and if I was really organized when I numbered the pieces, it gets ironed together in some logical order, often bottom (base) to top. I try to do all the body pieces together, but it gets problematic, so sometimes I just do all the flesh pieces and then all the inside stuff, like lips and nipples and lungs and uteri.

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This quilt had some weird stuff going on with it though, so the first thing I did was go fabric shopping. I bought the background fabric first (I always do, so I can hold each fabric that touches it up to the background to see if it’s going to work). I also bought a bunch of grays, almost whites, and then a big piece of bright sky blue for…well…the bright sky.

I hang the drawing up in my office, and as you can see, this drawing took over the room. I don’t leave the ironing board there while I’m ironing…but basically, the ironing board is perpendicular to the drawing, so I can just look to the right to see what’s where.

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Here’s ironing the sky…I did that first, because I knew it would be big and I just wanted it out of the way.

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Then how do I pick the colors? Usually I have some idea of the coloring of the quilt in general, mostly the main figure against the background. Because this one was about how the Earth was being damaged, I wanted the Mother Earth figure and all the people in the main part of the quilt to be grayed out. I started with her, making her mostly shades of white to gray, and then the smaller figures in the section were a range of blue-grays, which sit on the blue background. So I really thought this one out. That said, I never sat down with colored pencils or a computer and colored in a drawing. It’s all in my head.

As I iron the pieces to fabric, they all go in a bin.

Sometimes I have to pull sections out so I can hold them up to something that will be next to them or under them.

While I’m ironing, every fabric I’ve pulled for the quilt ends up piled on the ironing board…which got kinda overcrowded on this quilt.

That way, I can reuse fabrics throughout the quilt, which gives it a bit more continuity.

These are water fabrics in the base of the quilt, early days in the ironing.

I started on April 24, 2013, and worked on it a little bit each week until I went on vacation to Oregon with the kids after school got out…and then finished it up before July 4.

Just like with the most recent one, school nights only yielded an hour or two, if I was being really good. Here are all the rocks in the river bed below the ground.

And skelly pieces…I always have skelly pieces…

These are freakin’ tiny, I might add.

In the end, I used 137 fabrics, most of them grays…

A serious number of grays…

It took almost 27 hours to iron all 2000+ pieces down to fabric.

Then I had to cut them all out…to be truthful, I overlapped these two tasks, even taking a bag of pieces to Oregon with me to cut out while playing board games in the evening. Some of the super-tiny pieces stayed on their bigger piece of fabric until they were ready to be ironed down, just to make sure I didn’t lose them…

It took almost 29 hours to cut them all out…I think part of that was because I WAS doing other stuff while cutting them out, like playing games. But there also a lot of teensy weensy pieces that were just fussy to cut out. I cut pieces out from June 11-July 8. July 8 would have been my 24th wedding anniversary if that marriage had lasted. Yes, I think that every year. I keep thinking I’ll stop, but that’s not how my brain works. It marks events. It runs itself by days when stuff happened…some good, some bad. Then some dates I can’t remember at all.

Once they’re all cut out, I sort them back into the bins by 100s so I can start ironing.

That task in itself took 2 hours and happened on July 10, when I was the person previously known as Kathy Nida. I’m a different Kathy Nida now. This poor quilt survived my going through all that trauma. This might be one of the reasons I don’t really ever want it back in my house…but maybe I’ll feel differently in a year or two, after it’s traveled.

Next step? Ironing that sucker together…ironing during a Southern California summer…not the best choice of times. But we don’t always have choices.

It’s hard to write about this quilt. I have to go back through blog posts and photos that I don’t want to see, to think about how deep in the hole I was while I was making it. I had hoped that with 10 months gone, it would be easier, and maybe it is a bit, because I am managing to sit here and hold back tears while writing this, but only just. Emotional pain is such a strange beast. It’s so deep inside you, somewhere around where the art resides, quite honestly. They are closely linked and thinking of one evokes the other. I guess that’s a good thing. Hard to say. If I weren’t an artist, would I have bounced back, recovered quicker? Or would it still be me, and I would still be dealing with the pain, just without the added layer, perhaps therapy of the art?

All that probably doesn’t matter. I really was trying to make this a simple report of what happened to create this quilt, but it has so much ironed and stitched into it that it will come out, no matter what my plan once was. A couple more posts and you’ll get to see the final version…