Grief and creativity

This week’s ear worm song:

When I tell my therapist that I can’t talk about my daughter’s impending departure for college without crying, she says, “Of course. You’re grieving.”

Really?

“Grief” feels like too strong a word. I mean, c’mon. She’s not dying.

But last week, as the time left for her to live with us changed from the unit of month to week, I have found that I often can’t even think about it now without crying. Yesterday as we made breakfast, I had the thought that Cane should make his beignets, her favorite, before she goes, and I was so flooded with memories my body literally couldn’t contain them.

Time has taken on an almost tangible, viscous quality. I have no work-based entries to make into this creative notebook because, I am learning, creativity requires a kind of mental fluidity that’s beyond me right now. I feel suspended in some kind of thick, gelatinous reality that is not reality. Although time is moving, I am not, and it feels I won’t be able to until what’s going to come next is finally here.

It’s true:  No one’s dying. But something is–the life I’ve been living for more than 18 years. It might seem as if that statement’s not true; in that 18 years I’ve changed jobs and homes and life partners. Through all of that, though, my kids were the constant, the one thing I knew I’d never leave, the only thing I’ve ever remained wholly true to.

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I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people say that when you have kids, your life stops being all about you. It becomes about them. You’re no longer the most important person in it.

Um, no.

It’s still all about you:  When you have kids, they have to go where you take them and do what you tell them to do.  They are woven into the fabric of your every day. They become your people, and you are theirs, and you are a family, a unit in the world.

Truth is, I didn’t feel my life really started until they came into it. Now, that life–with both of my children–that’s ending, and it’s happening less than a year after the end of the family life Cane and I tried to create.

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So, yeah:  I guess I’m grieving. And it’s kicking the stuffing out of my creative productivity.

Back in the spring, I finally “finished” the house project I’d been documenting here:

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This isn’t the final product, but it’s close enough. I did finish it by covering it with a glaze.

I’m not pleased with the final result. It’s too cute; I was trying to express something more serious than this image conveys. The book pages I used to make the house came from a chapter of a history text on the Industrial Revolution. It talked about the terrible housing conditions for the working poor in many cities, and how difficult it was for mothers, especially, to care for their children. The text for the tree came from a children’s book about animal habitats. When I started it, I had recently read a YA novel, The Hired Girl, in which the protagonist runs away from her abusive father and works as a maid for a wealthy family in the city. I wanted to create a piece that would provoke thought about need vs. want, resources, social class, and how we nurture our young (and don’t). The leaves around the edge make this too cutesy/cheery, and I don’t like them.

There are also some issues with my (lack of) skill. Part of the reason it looks too cute is that I don’t have the skill to execute the vision I had in my head.

As a learning piece, though, it’s fine. I learned some things doing this one that will serve me in the next. I’m ready to let it go and move on. Working on this piece, while simultaneously thinking lots of personal thoughts about housing, home, resources, needs, and privilege, has me interested in small (not tiny) houses, particularly those in what were once working-class neighborhoods. Portland (OR) is in the midst of a housing crisis. A deep history of racist housing policies and current gentrification are driving many out of Portland. (If you’re interested, this article recently published in The Atlantic is an important read.)

Although I’ve tried a few times to go into my studio and begin some new work, I haven’t gotten anywhere in there. The most I’ve been able to do is go on walks and take some pictures.  I’m posting them here so I have easy access to them:

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Great photography wasn’t my goal. I just snapped these with my phone. I’m not even sure where I’m going with this. These are just interesting to me, and even though I don’t seem to be in a place to do anything much with them right now, I know that will change.

I’ve been doing creative work long enough now to know this is just the way of it. Sometimes, other things in our life use up our creative energy. Sometimes, those very things are the source material for future work. This might seem like a disjointed post–about grief and kids leaving home and…working class houses and gentrification and displacement?–but I know it’s all connected. Just as I know there will be future work.

It always comes back. There are so few enduring constants in any life, but this is one of them in mine.

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About those darling succulents…

Remember these?

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Back in February, inspired by lo the many, many images of cunning little succulent pots I’ve seen online…

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I decided that turning these sweet little 70’s coffee cups into such planters would give me justification for buying them.

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Here’s what they don’t tell you in all those blog posts:  If you do even a half-way decent job of nurturing your succulents, they will grow out of those adorable little pots:

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And it will happen far more quickly and spectacularly than you ever thought it could.

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As you see new shoots budding, you realize that the charming vision you had about those pots is going to have to be abandoned. You are going to have to let it (and them) go. If you want those succulents to keep living, you’re going to have to find a new place for them to grow. Because–of course!–they have to keep growing. The only way to not grow is to die.

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And you don’t want that:

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So you look for new pots, ones with more space. You prepare to transplant. You let their old life, in the little cups on the kitchen window sill, go. It’s hard. They were so sweet, and you loved them even more than you thought you would. You know how empty the sill is going to look without them.

In not unrelated news, this song–released the year my daughter was born (yes, that was really 18 years ago!)–has been playing on repeat in my head the past few days:

 

Walking my talk, the better late than never version

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I’ve been finding it kinda ironic that I proclaimed “voice” my word of the year, and where I find myself living now is a place that requires me to (mostly) shut up and listen.

But “voice” is what carried me to the Portland production of Listen to Your Mother, which has been one of the best experiences of my year. We performed the show in early May, and last week videos from all of the shows were released online.

I’d sort of forgotten that was going to happen, and when it did I found myself feeling…a whole bunch of things, but, mostly, vulnerable.

A few days after they were out, a  friend from the cast asked me why I hadn’t posted about it on Facebook, and aside from questions about vanity and the general weirdness of seeing oneself on video, I realized that I was wrestling again with  questions about when and when not to publish, and who has a right to tell which stories. It was feeling like one thing to tell a story that involves our children in a blog post, or in a small live performance, but another one to tell it on video and then direct people to that video. I’m still not sure if it is different or not, but it feels like it might be.

I am a deep believer in the power of story and preach (often) the necessity of telling them. I know how important it is for us to tell our personal stories, particularly about topics that carry stigma. I wrote the blog post that became the story I told on stage because I wanted to create something to help others understand what it is like to parent a child with a mental illness. I hoped that doing so might alleviate for someone else the fear, guilt, and isolation I felt early on. It always helps to know that we’re not alone in grappling with a hard challenge.

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But, but, but…

I am a mother before I am anything else, and the world can be a cruel place. There can be real consequences to sharing your membership in a stigmatized group. While I want to serve others, I serve our children first. Always. It is hard, often, to know how to best do that. I want to do my small part to make the larger world a better place (for everyone’s children), but I don’t want to hurt my children’s personal world to do that.

After a fair amount of internal hand-wringing and conversations with good friends, I’ve decided that the potential rewards outweigh the potential risks. So many people right now are being called upon to be brave, in so much larger ways. The hard stories that help us see each other more truly and fully are the ones we most need to tell. So, here’s my offering, my small act of courage, some walk to go with my importance-of-sharing-our-stories talk:

You can click here to get to  the national Listen to Your Mother post that will connect you with all 500+ videos from this year’s productions across the country. You can find videos by location or you can browse featured playlists. (I am feeling really honored that mine was selected as a featured video.) If you couldn’t attend the Portland show and want to experience the next-best thing-to-being-there, you can go to the Portland playlist and watch it in order. Our producers did a fantastic job of putting together an anthology of stories best listened to in the order they were presented. (Nope, not biased at all!)

Before you click over, I warn you:  You may find yourself spending more time there than you planned. The stories (and their tellers) are so compelling. Raw humanity always is, isn’t it?

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Color photos by Elizabeth Sattleberger of Lizilu Photography
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lack-and-white photo by Amy McMullen (of our wonderful cast).

Careful what you wish for

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My parents live on Washington’s Olympic peninsula, and the journey from my house to theirs is framed by bridges. It is only after I leave Oregon by crossing the Columbia River on the I-205 bridge that I feel I’m really on the road, and it is only when I hit the peninsula’s Hood Canal Bridge (shown above) that I feel I’ve arrived.

When I’m crossing it, I can feel the thrumming inside me quiet. My body lightens and my breathing deepens. I am back in the landscape my life started from–home, in every sense of that word.

Every time, I wish that I could stop on that bridge and capture the water that surrounds it with my camera. But there’s no place to stop on the bridge. Once on it, you have to keep going.

Unless, of course, the bridge is up to let passing ships through. A few times, I’ve been stopped on the highway that approaches it. I’ve always found this to be a frustrating inconvenience, especially if it happens when we’re heading east to catch a ferry. Last Saturday, though, for the first time ever, I got stopped on the bridge.

At first, I muttered to myself and cursed the delay. I was on the way to a ferry. And, it felt unsettling to be stopped on the bridge:

What if one of the ships hits it?
What if an earthquake strikes?
I am trapped here, far from safe land.

Miraculously, though, for once I’d left with plenty of time to spare. It took only a moment for me to realize that this wasn’t an inconvenience or a deathtrap, but a gift. I was finally getting what I’d always wanted:  A chance to take photos from the bridge.

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This trip to my parents’, it was a bittersweet one. My parents moved to the peninsula after my children were born, and it was my first trip there without them. Ever.

For much of the week, I felt the ghost of visits past all around me. I saw and heard all the different versions of my children that I took to this place, the setting for some of our best memories.

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Saturday, I took off on my own to see an old friend–and that’s when I got stopped on the bridge.

Sitting in my car, waiting for the ships to clear, alone for the first time in days, I realized that for the past few months, I have been racing across a bridge from the life I used to live with Cane and the kids to a new one that is (from this distance) shrouded in fog. I’ve been spinning my wheels through the prospects of new jobs and new houses and new towns to live in, changing lanes over and over to position myself to be in the right one (whatever that is) when I exit the bridge. I have  wanted that next place to look and feel and be as different from the old one as possible, so that I won’t feel haunted by the ghosts of the people and times that have passed.

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That old friend I visited came into my life more than 30 years ago, when I was a student in a poetry workshop and he was an editor just starting a literary journal. He was the first publisher of my poetry, the one who told me that I had written a book before I knew it myself.

“If you could do anything with your life right now, what would it be?” he asked.

I looked around the park we were sitting in, thinking of all that’s happened in the past few years. Thinking of all I once wanted to do. Thinking of what’s now possible and what no longer is.

“I don’t know, ” I said. The truest words to come out of me in months.  Years, probably.

The truth is, I have never known. Watching my children taking their first steps into a life largely independent of mine, I can look back at myself at their age and see that I took off running and never stopped. College, job, marriage, house, kids–all the destinations I thought we all needed to arrive at. Sure, I took some major detours (hello, divorce), but even those were navigated at high speed, my way to outrun fear, discomfort, grief, boredom, pain; all taken without ever fully stopping to look at them and see them for what they really were.

Life doesn’t give us much opportunity for truly full stops, and I’m not wishing for one of those (as they tend to accompany disaster). But I’m OK with looking at the coming weeks–where so much is suspended, waiting for what will come next–as my own little stop on the bridge.

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My time last Saturday helped me see that, sometimes, the best thing we can do on a bridge is to stop moving and take in our surroundings. Take a breath. Take notice. Pay attention to where we are.

I’m putting a temporary end to moving forward, changing lanes, plotting destinations. I’m giving myself permission (and time) to stop, get out of the car, stretch my legs, see the ponderous beauty of the clouds above, notice how truly far the road stretches ahead, know that where I am, right now, is home, in every sense of the word.

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Image of Hood Canal Bridge at top of post comes from prune picker:
http://prunepicker.blogspot.com/2012/07/hood-canal-bridge.html