Snow Fun on a Sky Island

Papa bear, baby bear, and my dear brother bear. We live in the sonoran desert, but are lucky to live near a tall mountain range with several different biomes. The biomes change as the altitude changes. At the top, evergreens, aspens and snow....a sky island. My brother is visiting for the holidays, so we made the trek up the mountain and played in the snow. It was easy, snowball fun. We've had one week of break, and have another one this week. I feel like I am finally relaxing for the first time since the end of the July aka the beginning of the school year. Yay.

emergence

It's been awhile. It's been insane... We've been working, eating, sleeping, and trying to catch some creative moments on the fly. And we've have two months of company, which is all more than a little overwhelming.

I'm still finding my way back to my life, after my mother's death.... and a new school year at a new grade level, with lots more pressure to perform and reports to write so I can actually get paid.

Luckily I love the kids, first grade is so amazing. They are all reading, wow!!

What have I been doing lately...er....for the last four months... not making quilts (that's what) although I did quilt one up (the darla stars one). I still have to cut the threads off of it.

I also managed to read about 5 or 6 books (yahoo) and it wasn't even summer.

And I have sewn a bunch of felted wool squares to some homespun, and knitted a bunch of doll size scarves (just like sewing, I can knit in a straight line, just don't ask me to make a sweater or a bootie, I haven't a clue).

Everything is in process. My drive to finish has been eaten up by having too many things to do. Scattered to the wind in lots of directions put still, things do manage to get done.

Angst or is it garden variety anxiety?

School's almost back in session and I am a slight mess. Feeling like this knotty wood. How will I get my room ready...and what am I doing on the first day?

Tomorrow I am taking my first applique class and I don't have any straw needles, round toothpicks, or applique pins (are they really that much thinner than regular?)... and the class is taught by the owner of the shop. I am feeling like canceling it, but I won't get my money back, so I'll go and not have all the right stuff because I forgot to read the supply sheet until tonight. My back-up thought is, "Hey, people have been doing applique for generations without all the fancy equipment."
A deep hole in a rock. Because Papa Bear thinks I should go and talk to someone about my mother's death and the decade of rejection that preceded it. Will it help me stop stuffing my face? How did I get here anyway? Maybe it will help me except that she really would have rather died than give up control of an out of control situation, and that is how she opted out. Never mind the fact that she wouldn't come and see her only grandchild for seven years and balked at the idea of me coming here, after she cancelled the first trip I had planned. Yet she claimed to love me, as much as I love my own child. And I thought to myself, Yeah, if you only had a clue because I would never treat my child this way.

Wow! I feel some better now, I am really angry at her, but I don't want to be. I didn't want to let her have that much impact on my emotions. I bit my tongue and talked less often on the phone with her, so I wouldn't have to listen to the life story of the guy who came to fix the thermometer yesterday, and how sick she was feeling, and how un-empathetic I was, and maybe at the end she would remember to ask how Baby Bear was, and how I was. And I really wanted to yell and say, "Do you know how crazy this is? Why would you even consider getting your eye lids lifted when you can't even get out of bed in the morning? Does anyone really need to listen to the same woes for seven years straight, or was that really twenty years straight, because when I think about it, everything you're saying now I heard back when I was a teenager. And if you really want a close mother-daughter relationship, can you actually talk to me with out bringing up the one time I was really angry at you Christmas fifteen years ago; and maybe figure out how to get over all the hurts you can remember from the time you were four and your memory kicked in?" And finally, "How f-ed up is that, that you and Dad would lay in bed and think about killing yourselves, deciding not to because you weren't sure who would take care of us kids? And now you've gone and done it, both of you, forty years later? Couldn't you see the metaphorical train coming, and get off the track?"

But, I was a decent daughter and never said any of those words, because if I had, she would have hung up the phone and never spoken to me again, ever. And I loved her, and she loved me, as much as she could love someone else. And it wasn't even close to enough.

Did you know that three out of four of my son's grandparents killed themselves? My husbands father did it a very long time ago, before Papa Bear's first son was born, before Papa Bear ever left the midwest.

So I am also angry at my mother, for the love of mercy, isn't two enough? Although it is almost comical, in a black comedy sort of way. Okay, two overly testosteroned grandfathers do themselves in, that's a little scary, considering I have a boy. What kind of legacy does that leave my son? But then, my mother does it, too? Now it has moved into the ridiculous. Two was bad, but three is just plain nutso, crazy, looney-bin material. So maybe I need to thank her, except that I was still waiting for her to wake and be a part of my life. And it hurts me more now, than the first one did. There is such joy, love, beauty to be found in the world, and she couldn't see any of it or was it that she wouldn't see any of it? It's all about perspective, you can always find meanness, ugliness, and hate, if that's what you look for.

I choose the beauty and love.

Summer Groove

I'm here again. Thank you to those who've left comments about my mother's death. It's been alot of work, physically and psychologically, and I have the lighter load than my dear brother. I am reconnected to my extended family, and that is wonderful! Like a warm lap to crawl into.Did you ever read Peace Like a River?

It's a really good book, sad and intense, and my story is nothing like it. But the words "peace, like a river" says something to me: peace, like a river, flows over me, flows through me, and I am myself again, relaxed and warm, connected to

the people, earth, trees, and sky around me. I stretch and fill myself from the edges of my fingertips to the top hairs on my head, and down to the leathery bottoms of my feet. Did you know I used to feel like I was living inside a helmet that was about two inches thick--peering out at the world from under a visor. Luckily I left the helmet completely behind sometime in my mid to late twenties. But, still, sometimes I don't feel fully stretched to the end of myself. But today, I feel my skin tingling and I am all there. Pure flow, fully in contact with the world.

Ironically, that wasn't want I had planned to talk about when I sat down to blog. I just wanted to post pics of some of my latest endeavors. To say, that the business of traveling is done, and the furniture from my mother's estate has arrived and been integrated into the home, and now the three of us are finally relaxing and reconnecting with each other for two weeks of lazy, hazy, summer days. (Before it's off to the races again with a new school year. We start early in the southwest, and our district starts back right away the 1st of August).

So I've been sewing of course! But what, not the stuff in my pile of WIP's, but a new mini quilt and doll clothes of all things. So here are some photos:

Maybe next time I'll tell you why I'm making doll clothes. Living in the west, and liking empty wooden bowls, collections of pinecones, rocks, and acorns, preferring jeans and t's and a fresh, clean, make-up free face, I forget what a girly girl I really am at heart.

A Little Something

I think it's been since March that I've machine pieced and April since I hand pieced. So finally, today I was able to sew on the machine. It's a small mourning quilt. Although I think of it as a death quilt, rather than a mourning quilt. Why, I'm not really sure. Maybe because I didn't sew any tears into it. 

Seeing the edges of myself again

I just heard two coyotes howling right outside my window. Literally! They were in the alley next to the house and then they walked down the street. No, they weren't wearing any clothes. It was very exciting. Wild dogs sound absolutely nothing like domesticated ones. It's ethereal. I cracked open the window so I could hear them better, and got a whiff of desert after a short rain. The ocotillo, weeping tree, and cactus were silhouetted by the faint glow of light from the synagogue  on the other side of the alley. 

It reminded me of how much I love the night outside my door (usually the back door, but in this case a front window works just fine). I love the desert, in all of it's stark beauty; it makes me feel peaceful just like the rivers and the trees do, even in the middle of city. I was calm inside and just being, just listening. 

I was born an east coast girl, but have definitely become western. I live in a city in the desert where coyotes use dry river beds as thoroughfares into urban sprawl, a juxtaposition of wildness and civilization.  I'm aware of where I come from and how lovely it is to be inside of Nature.

I've dosed up on my allergy meds so I can sleep with the window open and let the desert air in. 

Clearing

I lay in bed this morning, after my first real good night's sleep in weeks and felt clear.  I rediscovered the freckles on my leg that make a pattern much like the big dipper. I had forgotten about them. I realized had I stopped looking at my body. I would look at it in the mirror but not up close and persona. 

I am now parent-less and that changes things. For the last seven years I was waiting for them to decide to step out of their misery and  be a part of my life, to be a part of Hayden's life. 

 After coming out west, I  stopped behaving and responding the way they wanted me to, so I became selfish in their eyes. I have been hoping they would see the way I really am, full of joy and love. 

I also practiced compassionate detachment, watching and observing, loving them, but not becoming embroiled in emotional turmoil that surrounded them.  Let's face it, after your own mother decides to write you out of her  life two times, you better detach, if you want to survive. Walls aren't any good, since they end up hurting you.

My father ate a gun two years ago, and my mother reached out to me. If anything was going to be a catharsis for change certainly my father's suicide would be. I waited to see what would happen, but nothing did. She chose her own misery, and continued in the same cycle of mania and depression she and my father had shared for forty years. 

Two weeks ago my mother shot herself. And now she's gone, leaving a pile of crap behind, my brother, and me. 

Oh let's really screw with the kids and leave them with two suicides instead of one. 

(And our grandchild with three, since his paternal grandfather gassed himself long before he was even born.)

So here I am, and  I realize I need to look hard at myself. As much as I had let go, I was still waiting and hoping they would realize I was worth having a relationship with. 

How much of me have I still been defining by the relationship (or lack of) I had with my parents? I don't know. Less than I did, but not zero. 

Who am I without my parents? without the weight of being cast out? without the weight of detached love? without the weight of hope and disappointed? without the tangled web of insanity just outside the front door?

No, I don't feel light yet, like I am going to float away. But I am feeling clear. I am not being judged anymore, and what will change because of that? Who am I now, all by myself? I can really let go now, let go and let go and just be Peace. I can let go of the tension I must still be holding in my body, of waiting for another bomb to drop . There are no more bombs. I can live without a war going on in the next city.