endings

Project

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

Over the last several weeks I have been embarking on a project to increase my wall art.  I’ve lived in this apartment for five years now, and it is about time that I make the walls my own, instead of just putting a few things on existing nails leftover from someone else’s decorating.

It is a bit strange that there are any leftover nails, since the apartment was rehabbed before I moved in, but either there was a laziness about my apartment’s painters, or the nails that stayed were deeply embedded and left after some effort for removal failed.  But regardless of why they remain, I have used them for my own purposes, and put up a few pictures in the places that had some hardware already installed.

When my daughter and I moved in here, I had recently had surgery and couldn’t lift anything, so friends and family loaded my belongings on one end of the move, and nearby family unloaded those belongings and placed the heavy things in the places to which I pointed on the other end.  And while I am very grateful for the help that I received, once we were alone in the apartment that first evening, it still seemed overwhelming.  Unpacking each box and placing everything where it would come to belong was arduous, and more so because I wasn’t supposed to carry heavy things, and I own too many heavy things.  Even the boxes of bedding become heavy if you pack tightly enough—and I packed tightly enough.

So, turning the bare space into home took a long time.  And filling the spaces where we had left items behind also took time.  I’ve always used moving as an opportunity to purge, and I got rid of a lot of things before the packing even took place.  But over time, I had furniture and shelving and décor to make this house a home.  Except the walls.

I don’t know if it is the habit of moving every year for many years, or my own feelings of not being able to put roots down, or not having the energy to measure and countersink and nail that has kept the walls mostly bare.  I suspect that it has more to do with the feelings, but I can’t always find reasons for what I do with precision.

I do know that I have somehow shifted my thinking, and I want to cover the walls with items and words and pictures that make me feel comfortable and at home.

But, like all the projects around here, this one is about a quarter of the way to completion.

I have the habit of not finishing things.  And it isn’t because I am lazy … though I can claim fatigue and illness keep me from getting things done.  It probably has more to do with boredom.  I start a thing excited about the process of doing and with great expectations for the final product.  But hours or days or months down the road, I don’t find it fun, and I don’t care about it much, and I completely lose interest.

This habit results in all sorts of unfinished projects.  In a corner, there is a bin full of denim and denim strips that is meant to be a braided rug.  On my drafting table lie two unfinished canvases that are meant to be art over my bed.  In another two bins there are piles of fabric that are to be used for quilt making, once I can figure out how it is that I used to sew—clearly it is not a skill that I remember with ease.  There are coasters my mom painted that never got a coat of varnish as her dementia began to affect her art, which are still waiting for that coat of varnish.  I have a ball of yarn still wrapped around knitting needles in a bag, a potential scarf with multiple holes, because I suck at knitting, frankly.  There is a pitch fork setting on the landing where I requested the landlord leave it, so I could plant a row of lavender bushes along the side fence.

I clearly don’t discriminate.  Sewing, paper crafts, photo albums, gardening, and painting all sit unfinished and create disarray in my office/art studio space. I have tried to work out, time and again, why I lose interest in everything and complete almost nothing.  And I have no answer better than “I am an innovator”.

It is true.  I am an innovator.  I have all the ideas and little of the follow-through.  If I could be paid to think of new and interesting ideas, I would never have another financial struggle.  I am extraordinarily gifted in brainstorming, creating, and starting things.  I am really bad at the finishing of those things.

And while I don’t know that innovation is the full reason behind me not completing projects, it does point to some truths about me that should not be ignored.

I lose interest.  I need to be drawn into a thing, and it has to keep revealing itself as new and interesting. And I suspect this applies to all of my life.

The other day I had a second date with someone.  As we talked over our cups of tea, she told me the same story she had told me on date one.  She repeated the same information not just once, but twice, in one date—and the second date.  There should have been new things to talk about on date two!  And, just like that, I was disinterested not only in the repetitive stories, but also in the person telling them.  I wasn’t drawn in.  She didn’t reveal herself in new and interesting ways.  I even wondered if she was dating so many women that she didn’t actually remember to whom she had expressed what stories.  And our own story has likely ended because she told me hers twice.

That might seem harsh to some—especially those who are very accommodating and accustomed to routine.  But it doesn’t seem harsh to me, because that is how I approach all sorts of things.  I need that interest and I need that newness and I need things to change.  The reasons behind that need are vast and complex and numerous, I suspect.   The reasons are also, likely, contradictory—adding to the cognitive dissonance and dichotomy that I am prone to struggle with in life.

I think that I might always want change because I am afraid of stability, and I am afraid of endings, and I am afraid of stasis.  But I am afraid of those things because I want those things.  (Yes, I am aware that makes no sense.)  I would love to end the moving and find security and become a permanent fixture in a space of my own.  But I don’t believe that I am capable of that ending and finding and becoming, based on the events of my past.  I’ve lost faith in the idea that I can be home.

Security was very much lacking in my youth.  And not because I wasn’t offered a loving home or my needs weren’t met, physically.  My parents worked hard to provide for me, and I am ever grateful.  But I also felt captive and wanted to escape my childhood home, my town, my church, my school, and more.  I never felt home and safe and whole in any of those spaces.  I still don’t.  I might never feel home and safe and whole in those spaces.  And because I didn’t feel home and safe and whole, I longed for that.  I looked in all sorts of places for that feeling.  I think a few times I came close to finding that feeling, but something always stepped in the way, and restrained me as I tried to reach out for it.  Every time I thought I had found wholeness and a place to call home, it was torn from me or shattered or inaccessible.  And every time that shattering and tearing happened, I became more convinced that I wasn’t allowed to feel home.  I would never be whole.  I would never stay.

So, I keep moving, and I don’t dare to finish the projects and put the things on the wall.  I fear that the moment I claim this space as my home, it will be taken from me.  And that threat looms larger given my financial stress and disabled status.  I don’t trust that this is home.  I don’t trust that there will ever be one for me.  I’ve lost much of the hope that I can own a home, or feel at home, or ever be whole.  And my projects are like my soul—not complete.

I think there is some comfort to be found, however.  And I think that comfort comes in the starting of every new project.  I believe that the constant beginnings mean that I am still fighting toward the idea that home can happen, and that wholeness can be found, and that art installation isn’t necessarily a death sentence for the walls around me.  I trust that the new projects are proofs of the security and ownership and stasis to come.  I believe that one day my longing will be answered with fullness, and all of these projects can be completed—even the project that is my soul.

It might still take some months or years to complete the rug and the quilts and the art pieces for my walls.  And maybe some of those projects will be crossed off the list and the materials discarded or repurposed at some point.  But many of them will one day be finished and added to my home.

I have created a comfortable space here, in my spacious and sunny Westside apartment.  And even if it isn’t my permanent home, I am determined to claim more and more of it, for the time being.  I have finished some projects—building an amazing desk, creating a peaceful and inviting yoga and meditation space, curating the perfect guest room items to make others feel welcome, putting together the bits and pieces that come in the box of pre-drilled furniture items.  I think I can safely say that I will complete more projects over time.  And I think that I can safely say that I will work through the challenges of wholeness and home that present themselves as I work on completing those projects.

Hopefully, at some point, I can find enough peace and wholeness within myself that I don’t feel the need and longing that creates strife for my spirit, and makes me fear the loss and lack that accompany insecurity.  I still work to keep new ideas of a beautiful future at the forefront of my mind.  I work to keep on creating and brainstorming.  I imagine the home of my dreams.  It isn’t extravagant and it isn’t large.  It is just comfortable, bright, and happy.

And there are lots of finished projects on the walls.

Birthday

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

I  started bawling while I typed out a text to my daughter.  She turns nineteen today.  I can’t even wrap my head around that.  That tiny seven pound bundle of smiles and tears that was placed in my arms all those years ago changed everything about life and love.  And I know that lots of people will say things like, “I didn’t know what love was until I became a parent”.  I don’t really subscribe to that.  What I will say is that I had never felt love so deep and so full and so beautiful until I held that gorgeous bundle in my arms.

I think this is the worst part about human development—that we forget that moment when our parent first held us and looked into our tiny face and beamed love toward us.  All the late night feedings, and lullabies, and peek-a-boos, and looks of love and joy are left engrained in the mind of a parent, but lost for the child.  And by the time we start remembering our parents’ actions and interactions with us there is discipline and disappointment and distraction between parent and child that wasn’t there in those early days when all we could possibly show our babies was unadulterated and unconditional love.

I realize today, in ways I never have before, that my own mother looked at me that way once.

It was hard, listening to my siblings express their views of my mother and who she was to the funeral director as we sat planning for her funeral.  They knew a different woman than I did.  That was painful, and illuminating.  They received and remembered love and generosity and selflessness.  I remembered a harsh and argumentative history of always feeling not good enough and being a constant disappointment to my mother.  I loved my mother dearly.  I couldn’t figure out how to like her for most of my life, but I loved her.

But once, she looked in my face like I looked into my baby girl’s face and she felt only love and joy and possibility.  I wish I had the ability to remember that moment.  I wish I knew that look and that feeling more fully.

My mother was the first person to hold my daughter at her birth.  I was divorcing by the time I gave birth, so my husband wasn’t present for the birth. (That was probably good, because his attendance might have led to me being charged with murder, or assault at the least.) My mother took his place at my side, and neither of us could have anticipated that she would be at my side for 40 full hours of labor, but she was.  And at the end of the two day ordeal, I was too exhausted to hold my own child.  So, the pictures of my baby meeting her grandma precede the pictures of her meeting me.  I was thinking on that long ordeal yesterday, and what it took to get this beautiful nineteen year old woman into the world, and how my mom was there for every moment.  And I remember, exhausted as I was, seeing my mother look at that baby in that moment, with more love than I knew she was able to give.  With more wonder than I thought possible, and with more grace and generosity and selflessness than I knew she had within her.

I didn’t understand in the moment of preparing for my mother’s funeral that the way my mother looked at her first granddaughter was also the way she viewed me.  But she did.

When I texted my daughter this morning I told her all the things I wish that I had heard my mother say to me when I was nineteen.  And I didn’t do it on purpose.  I simply realized, after offering all the love and encouragement and pride that I could muster in a text message, that I wished my mother had been able to tell me those things when I was that age.  She didn’t, or couldn’t, or didn’t know how.  And that was why I knew a different woman than my siblings—because I couldn’t remember that love from when I was so little that the discipline and disappointment and distraction became primary ways of interacting, and when I was old enough to know my mother well, we were divided by so many differences of opinion and a similar stubborn will that we couldn’t express well the love that had been there at the beginning.

It was there at the end.

The end for me was years before her death, but the first year that she began to forget my face, when she clung to me as we said goodbye after a visit and cried and repeated over and over and over that she loved me.  She was trying to make up for lost time and opportunity, I think.  To say it enough that it would sink in—be remembered.

It is remembered, and so is the moment when they placed my daughter in her arms and I saw my mother’s face turn to pure love and the fullest joy.

My daughter is one of the best people I have ever known.  And she brings me all that love and all that joy every day.  She is intelligent, compassionate, caring, kind, generous, selfless, strong, loving, loyal, talented, and exquisitely beautiful.  She follows her dreams.  She calls out the bad and promotes the good.  She gives her last dollar to someone who asks, just because she can’t bear to see people in need or in pain.  Since her childhood she has offered her all for others, climbing up on the counter to reach foods and bring them outside to passing homeless men and women from the age of seven, at least.

And while I find her utterly fabulous, we also have differences of opinion and similar stubborn wills that make it difficult for us to see eye to eye at times.  But, unlike in my relationship with my mother, I have learned to let go of some of my stubbornness, and to let my daughter hold her own perspective and pursue what matters to her.  My mom couldn’t let go of that control—the desire to shape me into what she believed I ought to be, instead of let me be the person I was.  For my daughter’s sake, I am trying to let go of that control.  Sometimes I fail, but I apologize when I realize I have done so.  I look back to those moments of late night feedings and peek-a-boos and lullabies and I hold onto that picture of love and joy, and at the humility I felt—so undeserving of such a beautiful light in my life, of a being who offered me so much and stole nothing.  And I seek to let her be that light today, without my interventions.

It can be hard to let go, as the birthdays pass by.  It can be hard to remember that moment of love, looking into a newborn face.  But I encourage you to hold onto that moment.  Remember it when your child colors on the walls, or when they pee on the living room floor, or when they break your favorite vase playing a sport indoors, or when they bring home that boyfriend with the crazy hair and the smoking habit, or when they hate piano lessons, or when they want their nose pierced, or when they quit their job, or when they marry an asshole (I mean, some of us do), or when they tell you they hate you and you are stupid and they wish they had some other parent, or when they fail at a subject in school.  Remember the light they were and the love you beamed back at them.  Remember that life is short and goodbyes are difficult and loss is devastating.  Remember that no matter who they become or what they do or how they succeed or fail that they are that bundle, placed in your arms when all there was between the two of you was love.  Hold that love close, and speak of it often, and share it with your child and share it with the world.  Because all of us want to be remembered in the end as the one who is loving and generous and kind.

Let love be the thing that is remembered, from the beginning to the very end.

Blank Space

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

 

I spend a lot of my life looking at blank space these days.  The empty bed where my dad slept the last few days when he visited.  The gap left in my rear molar when the rest of it decided to suddenly crunch its way out of my face.  The empty lot where a neighborhood house was recently demolished.  A whole lot of other space that just seems to need filling.

But the space that frustrates me most is the blank whiteness of my screen/page when I write two or three paragraphs and then cannot write more.

I’m not sure why this space is so oppressing and so frustrating, but it is so. Perhaps it is because the page mimics my life.  I’m not sure what comes next, and I look out into this blankness, unable to discern a clear path to the next line, or paragraph, or page, or chapter in my book (both literally and proverbially).  I’m faced with the blank space where once there was a whole list of opportunities not to be missed.

When my dad was visiting last week he talked about how it didn’t make sense for people to wait for “someday” to do the things they dream of, and he keeps encouraging people to have their adventures and follow those dreams now.  This idea wraps around him now, adding regret to his grief.  I know that my parents kept putting away money for someday, and someday didn’t come. Sickness and death came instead.  Returning to the Netherlands, vacationing in warm places, going to the grandkids’ music programs and graduations and possibly even weddings—all these are lost to my mother, and many of them don’t carry the same joy they once did for my father, since they dreamed such dreams together and now if he does adventure, he does so without her at his side.  I trust he will adventure, but it will always be bittersweet.

As Dad was saying all of this about not waiting and seizing the moment, I realized that many of my saved-for-someday moments were already unreachable.  They have already escaped my grasp.

Chronic illness and chronic pain steal so many moments.

I already know I may never be able to afford a house, a trip outside the U.S. (much less leaving the continent), or the travel and adventure I imagined in my youth.  And I also look at the possibility of finding a partner and the possibility of fulfilling work with doubt and concern, where once I wore the rose-colored glass of a healthy woman—sure that all the good things would come in time and I would one day have my dreams come true.

Now I just look forward and see that blank white space.  I don’t dare dream for things that will always be out of reach.  I don’t know what I might be able to accomplish in this day, much less in the rest of my lifetime.  And I don’t see the possibility as much as I see the pain.  The pain is hard to deny.  The loss is difficult to deny also, but the pain…it fills every moment.  Blank space and pain.

In recent weeks I have tried very hard to find the positives in my life, and to seek out ways to add positives.  I joined a gym with a pool.  I worked on my writing course a bit.  I deleted negative voices filled with doubt, judgment, and general toxicity from my sphere (aka, my Facebook page).  I colored mandalas.  I started a new art project.  I rearranged some things in my home to create a small “sanctuary” space where I can meditate and do yoga or stretching with ease.  I did all the good things.

And yesterday, after writing and swimming and leaving my house and getting some sun and having a massage and creating and doing all the good, I couldn’t move.  Don’t misunderstand and think that I did all the good in one great motion, and that I overexerted myself into pain.  That is not the case.  Instead, I did all the things that are good for me, in moderation and over some length of time.  I did all the things that should, according to the experts, be helpful and good.  And I ended up in tears and debating a trip to the emergency department in the night.

And then, in a painkiller plus muscle relaxer plus anti-inflammatory plus alcohol state of acceptance (which allowed me to stop considering the emergency room), I realized that I was being foolish in the sense that I was seeking to win a fight with my illness.  It isn’t uncommon for people to call themselves “warriors” or “fighters” in the sense that they fight their symptoms and their illness.  I think it makes us feel better to believe that we can win.  But my chronic illness can’t be beaten to death without beating me to death, I suppose.  And that doesn’t seem like a good end to my story.

I think that my story should end with good and gratitude and love and joy and peace.  That is what I want to fill that blank space.  I don’t want to fill it with tales of fighting and losing and fighting and losing and fighting and losing and then dying.  I want to fill it with laughter and hugs and a full heart and mind and spirit.  And deep down, I know that means accepting pain and living with it, not fighting against it.  The warrior mentality isn’t one that I can easily rid myself of….Wonder Woman covers my desk and my walls and my coffee mugs.  And some of that warrior is still needed to accomplish life—to get out of bed and to stretch and to swim and to eat greens and to figure out a way to lower the cable bill while still accessing the next season of Game of Thrones on HBO, even when those things feel impossible. But, some of that warring needs to cease.  Fighting to write more or write faster, fighting to open that roasted red pepper jar that my hand isn’t strong enough to twist loose, fighting to hold onto any “American Dream” that still assaults me every time I see a realty advertisement, fighting to find love instead of letting it alight upon my life with beauty and grace—these wars need to end.

The thing about that blank space that we all need to recognize and embrace, is that it is blank.  It isn’t filled with our fears and doubts or our dreams and successes until we put them there.  Too often I let other people write my narrative, or I accept the narrative I think “should” be mine according to the socialization and assimilation that surrounds me.  What would happen if I embraced that white space on today’s page, and I accepted that whatever is written is mine to write?  At the end of the day, I write my own narrative.  My story is mine.  And I don’t need to be the warrior who overcomes her pain to run that marathon she wanted to run 20 years ago.  I can be the lover and the peacemaker and the best-selling author and the philosopher just as easily, and with just as much success and greatness.  Fighting has sort of been glorified for us, in American society (and others), as though the story need be one of overcoming the obstacles and working against all odds in order to be good and inspiring, but I am beginning to see my story more as one of accepting that the mountain in front of us needn’t always be there to be climbed.  It can be there to look at and enjoy, and then we can hop in the car and drive around that mountain.  We don’t need to kill ourselves trying to do what society calls success.  We can rename success.  We can begin to accept or deny challenges, based on what we want to accomplish and love and seek to add to our story.

I won’t be running any marathon.  I will hopefully continue to swim until 10 laps doesn’t hurt me anymore, but I won’t fight to get in all 10 every time I swim.  I can accept 4 laps for today.  And I can accept 4 laps forever and call that success if I recognize at some point that my body will never make 10.  Goals can change.  I don’t need to fight for something that hurts me.  I can just change my expectations and accept my limitations.  I may still buy a house someday.  I may still marry a lovely person and share life with him or her.  I might not.  But that won’t mean that my story is one of failure, because I am beginning to recognize that I write the ending, and if I believe that love and joy are the end goal, then there are a million roads I can take and still be the heroine of my story.  The blank space doesn’t need to frighten and frustrate and oppress, because it doesn’t need to be filled with fighting a losing battle.

I’m going to fill my space with wins.  I’m going to fill my space with choosing acceptance.  I’m going to fill my space with the knowledge that my disease affects me, but doesn’t own me.  I’m going to fill my space with loving others.  I’m going to fill my space with loving myself.  I’m going to fill myself with reorganizing the way I think of success and failure.  I’m going to fill my space with things I enjoy, whenever possible.  I’m going to fill it with beauty and grace and love and peace as often as I can.  I’m going to write my story as an adventure story with a happy ending, no matter that much of society would consider a woman who spends her days in pain and doesn’t overcome that pain a crappy story.  It isn’t theirs to write.  It is mine.

Don’t fear the blank space.  Embrace it.  Fill it and mold it and shape it and create it any way you choose.  It is yours.  And whatever your story may become, I know that I would love to hear it, and to share mine with you.  (I guess this post already begins to share mine with you.)  Let’s write our own narratives and share them with one another and with the world.  Let’s create a space where, no matter the circumstances of your life, your story is validated and appreciated.  Wouldn’t that be the most beautiful of endings?  Wouldn’t that be the best possible use of blank space?