the other side of then

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it is more often than not that the title of a post arrives and swirls around my head or is jotted on a tiny piece of paper magneted to my fridge for months before it is written. its the same with paintings: the title of a piece will land in my mind and when it is time i’ll build the piece around it. when this one landed it was well over a year or maybe two ago and had everything to do with my daughter getting older, and nothing to do with the world being rocketed sideways as a result of the orange one’s second term in office and the inane group of unqualified cohorts he has given agency and placed in positions of power. how quickly those five words became telling in a completely different way. but all of that is something i do not want to give any weight to, especially here, definitely not here.

maya – who now goes by evan – is 23, and as some of you know, has been living on her own since 2024 as part of CIP, a program for young adults on the autism spectrum. she has thrived in ways ricky and i hoped she would, and in ways we didn’t expect. of course all of the things i have loved and celebrated about her these many years are still beautifully present and a deeper piece of who she is. sarcasm, tenderness, empathy, intelligence and her particular brand of painfully dry wit. the sadness and concern i felt as her departure sat out on the horizon was quelled after it took her about twelve hours to adjust to being on her own. so as i am now freshly sixty-one, and evan is finding her autonomy, i look back at our first two decades together, a span of years that now sits solidly in the past, and feel such joy and gratitude for what is the hardest and most delicate dive i’ve ever made.

parenting an autistic child is a path that took me places i never could have imagined. it is exhausting, terrifying, exhilarating, and humbling. victories are never so big, and the stumbles and hard moments wrapped me in a sadness and powerlessness that felt impossibly vast and broke my heart in two over and over again. it is hard to imagine that those moments still exist – and they do – but they are less frequent and lack the gut punch they used to. we have learned as a family how to ride them out, and evan has learned as a young woman who has grown so much, to curb and recover from an emotional explosion quickly, and with a grace that reflects her evolving maturity. she will be home this summer, and will be with us for a while as she is working toward a degree in journalism and these are her final months at CIP. it will be a big shift for all of us, perhaps me the most. after the fear of letting my only child live on her own and away from me, i embraced the stillness in my empty little house, the only sound in the late hours the clicking of dog nails on hardwood floors and the occasional inebriated teenager stumbling by outside.

in all of the suddenly open time and space it seemed a million things happened. i made a big career shift. there’s a new car in the driveway. the dogs suddenly got old and lost their collective hearing. evan started university at csulb and ricky went back for his masters degree. charly the cat showed up a week before evan moved out ~ i believe ~ to soothe me through the transition, and left eleven months later after a stroke left her blind and without movement in her back legs, just a week before evan came home. it is so like my universe to give me a gift to carry me through that first year on my own, then teach me the lesson of saying goodbye when charly’s little body just couldn’t go any more. i was heartbroken for weeks, and cried all the way to baltimore for a job in florida the day i had to kiss her sweetest face one last time before she left me. but then evan was home for summer, and even with the movement and changes that had taken place for all of us, life returned to much of what it had always been. walking the dogs twice a day, spaghetti on saturday night, homework and mom-work at the big table, afternoon coffee and spontaneous dance parties in the kitchen while making dinner. it’s the glue. the moments of coziness and comfort that carry us through the harder ones. and though my daughter will be back in the wee house and at ricky’s house as a 23-year-old in a matter of days, and we will pick up where we left off, it will be different, necessarily so, for we all have our own separate lives.

when evan left in the summer of 2024, i had just sent out a tiny group of photos (in sheer terror) to what would become the first agency i signed with as an older, classic model. when i heard back from them i almost fell off my chair, even more so days later at the end a zoom call when they offered me representation. since then i have been signed with three other agencies, flown here and there to be part of adventures i could not have foreseen, met the kindest, most talented people, and worn several sexy swimsuits in front of people, accckkkkk. all while confronting my shyness, my aging face and body, imposter syndrome, and gaggles of gorgeous women and men taller than me, younger than me, and with the body i had three decades ago in the blush of youth, five yoga classes a week and a five-mile sunday run.

i loved the strong thirty-year-old woman i was, but in the decades since, through ups and downs, becoming a parent, weathering relationship storms and life storms and heart storms, i am no longer her. and though i miss her, and miss waking up pain-free with boundless energy and fewer wrinkles, i am so interested in the woman i am growing into. at thirty, without even realizing it, i was engaged on a daily basis in what i now recognize as self-care. i slept eight hours a day, rode my bicycle for pure pleasure, carved out time to read, bake and paint, and attend three to four yoga classes a week. There was space for long conversations with my friends, other women, as we navigated young marriages, kids, career, and the demands of exceling at all of them. As timed moved, and our babies got older, single incomes doubled up again, and the insulated bubble of all that was disappeared. for me, so too did that piece of me that knew how important it was to integrate taking care of myself in to my life as a daily or weekly practice. perhaps being self-employed, losing my marriage (but not my rick) and being mom to my unique and singular autistic daughter pushed those practices to a place i couldn’t reach or remember. whatever the reason, i pivoted somehow to caring for others and letting go of caring for myself.

and so i find myself here, in the opening years of what i hope will not be my last strong decade. it is a strange set of moments to be working toward a revived practice of self care, as the world is a dumpster fire, and so much is needed from all of us. but for that very reason, i am learning that my nervous system can only take so much of the outer world, and is necessarily going inward for calm and and a sense of balance. i am relearning how to say no, something i knew intuitively in my twenties and most of my thirties, before becoming a parent at 38. i am reshaping my sleep patterns to include more hours than the six per night i have lived on for the past two decades. i have arthritis in three of my fingers and a recent understanding that i have moved from osteopenia to osteoporosis, an especially daunting reality as i am still very much a painter, something which nourishes me deeply and which i want to do long into the coming years.

there is a less encumbered time in my life i am working to downshift back to, all while trying to open my eyes wide to what really matters, and what is okay to let go of. i have friendships and relationships that have ended, much to my sadness, but i have learned that some have seasons, and are only here to teach or support where it is needed, or are simply a place to give and receive love for a time. My gorgeous 88-year-old mother is living an independent and lovely life, but needs coziness with family and friends, coffee dates, loads of laughter and a bit of spoiling. i am busier than i’ve ever been, but finding ways to carve out time to be with her. it feeds us both, and after a lifetime of her thinking of my sister and me always, doing the tiniest and biggest things to make us happy since we were so very small, i have found there is a deeply profound feeling and rightness in doing that very same thing for her where i am able to. and most recently, though i have longed to own a home again for many years, as has rick, we have had conversations lately about letting go of that idea for ourselves, and working together to purchase something for evan. if we didn’t live in such an expensive part of the world it might be possible for each of us, but what a beautiful thing it would be for our daughter at the very least. if we are lucky, perhaps there will be an opening in that same way for ricky, and for me.

for now i am here in my little house, in my encore career, in the grounding space of painting, chasing a different set of stars. i am so lucky in this life to have known very young who i was, how to describe boundaries, what the handful of things were that compelled me and needed to be pursued and lived. some of these were here, and some on different shores of different countries. my career has not been an orthodox one for those very reasons, and i am so grateful, for looking back, i see from this vantage point that i have been able to do each of those things that pulled at my heart, and my talents, since i was very small. i have been an illustrator, curator, manuscript editor, business owner and designer. i worked in non-profit and corporate enough to know neither of them were for me. and here i am at 61, taking deep breaths and walking in front of the camera. these stars i choose to chase now are perhaps not the brightest, like the ones we see in our youth as a sky full of possibilities, but they glow with a different sort of light. that of rest, and quietude, and nature, of knowing i can not do for everyone, and relearning to do for me. a light that is time with my family and my closest friends and my love, who have sometimes been short-sheeted as i worked to do it all. finally, a deeper light, one made from decades lived, adventures chased, wounds healed, wrenching goodbyes, and love grown in earnest and over history, my history. it is different, this side of things, and it is strong, and forgiving, and knowing.

the tender movement of time and space

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maya was down a few weeks ago with a scratchy throat, so i made her the hot toddy we had growing up when our throats were sore. maya doesn’t remember having had it, which is strange as it is a soothing mix of raw apple cider vinegar, hot water and honey that i drink even when i’m not sick. maya loved it and from the kitchen i said yes, me too, as she brought her empty cup to be rinsed. reaching to take it, the room zoomed and tilted for a quick second and suddenly i was back in my childhood home, sinking deep in to the orange sofa under the sick-comforter, my dad stirring honey in to a mug, i love lucy reruns on the tv.

those triggers, of smell, or sound, or an unearthed remembrance – that pull us completely out of our present and in to an encapsulated set of moments that exist only in our memories and our heart – never fail to blindside me in their astonishing, exacting, just-as-it-was-ness. i felt my dad as though he were in the room, so deeply, and i thought you’re here, you’re still here, i will always find you if i need to. thoughts of him are of course always quietly in the back of my mind, but there are those more powerful moments when out of nowhere i feel or sense him. in the morning shadow on my studio wall, sparkling in the dust motes when the sun hits them just so, his voice somehow intermingled with the johnny cash song pouring from a car radio next to me at the stoplight. the quiet ache of missing him and my loneliness for him doesn’t ever really go away; it just shifts like gears between low and high. for my sister it is the same, for however bullish and egotistical and unsolicited-advice-yielding as he could be, my father loved us, and all of his family, to the moon, and was available always for a hug, a long conversation, a dirty joke, a dirty martini. his death, almost eight years ago, was my first great loss outside of a few flattening heartbreaks and some moments i would pay to revisit or re-do. i’ve lost friends and loves, but saying goodbye to my father so unexpectedly and suddenly knocked the wind from my body, and it never came back in quite the same way.

it was the first time that i remember thinking, okay, so these are the moments. the crystalline, gorgeous, painful moments being a human on this planet means all of us will experience at some point. for many of us they float a sky length away and don’t enter our younger psyche except as something that will happen later, well beyond the consuming thoughts of love, accrual, sex, success, family, failure and joy that shape our opening decades. these sorts of preoccupations are natural as we brightly rule our singular and unique kingdoms while we’re here. but here’s the thing. for all of the intense focus on self instead of the collective or the community, we are here, taking up space and oxygen for a mere breath of time as it extends from the past, sits for what to us is a lifetime but to the universe is just an eyeblink, before continuing on to a billion different futures. time does seem to speed up, acutely so when we acknowledge at some point in our middle lives that there is less of it in front of us, and its movement, its perpetual march, and the spaces we create within it, are so fleeting and tender.

here, in the last years of my fifties, at a time when the sky seems to be falling, and a global chill descends upon most of us who are paying attention to what is happening in the world, i work harder than ever to create beauty. I could outline the gloom (and its possible cures) that exists currently, and i have tried, for my daughter, to do just that; to assuage her anxiety and alarm at what she and her generation are privy to politically and environmentally on a global scale every single day. we talk about weather patterns more disrupted than we’ve witnessed in our lifetimes due to climate change. populism and nationalism on the rise. atrocities of war taking place in ways we hoped and trusted would never happen again. consumption and waste and planet-choking materials filling our waterways, our atmosphere, impacting our bodies and animal, plant and sea life in every stretch of land here. my daughter is 20, and wonders constantly where things will be in 10, 15, 25 years. i look for answers, because that is my job as her parent, and her friend. and though we discuss and explore and share what we’re both seeing online and outside our door, and how much overwhelm we feel, i stay away from telling her, this is how it has been for millennium. wars have raged, over land and religion and money. borders have been marked and walls have been built. humanity has taken what they need when they need it. tragically, the speed and scope of how much we need as the earth’s population grows, and the tools and technology available to us to fill our endless hunger, means we have tipped the scales to an extent we may not be able to come back from.

i have searched to understand why i hesitate to point out humanity’s failings to maya. i have come to realize that although i feel deep pain and bewilderment when i look past my one little life and see the mess out there beyond my own horizon, i am at the very same time still enchanted with the magic that is this planet. much more so than i when i was younger, and self-immersed, and trusting blindly that the earth will keep turning and endings will mostly be good. from a more seasoned viewpoint over here, those preoccupations diminish in significance, replaced with the truths and absolutes of this rotating sphere of life, which are dazzling. it is astonishing to learn how earth continues to live and support all living things after millions and millions of years. astonishing to acknowledge the finite and delicate recipe that must be maintained to sustain that life. astonishing to witness, even in our brief time here, her constant evolution, her inherent nature to create balance, her tenacity and power. and most importantly, to realize how desperately she needs our care.

if you watched the nova series ‘the planets’, at one point you saw a linear diagram of the planets and our sun aligned by size. it was stunning to take in how tiny our planet is, and as ridiculous as it sounds, seeing earth, in the context of and dwarfed by a vast universe and its other enormous planets, brought a sort of calm and acceptance that would seem counterintuitive upon realizing our infinitesimal position in a very big picture. feeling that smallness was a sort of instant wakeup call that my time here, in my little house, in my lovely beach town, in this state, this country, this continent, on this planet, is only as big and significant as i make it, as any of us make it. and what i know is that the biggest bigness any of us will feel and create here, is fueled by loving and caring for each other.

and so this is what i choose to give to my daughter. to move from the very big picture which can be overwhelming in its doom and gloom, to the smaller pictures that make up our lives. to embrace what is so essentially human about the human race. so much of it has to do with ritual, and tradition, and comfort. those moments we carve out amongst the chaos to embrace stillness and sit in beauty. an evening walk. curling up with a book and a pot of hot tea. setting the holiday table for those who will come to celebrate. the warmth of wrapping your hands around a steaming cup of coffee. singing full out to the car radio with the windows down. being with the people we adore as much as we are able. dancing in the kitchen with a pal to motown while chopping tomatoes for the spaghetti sauce. choosing grace, and graciousness. being with animals, and spending time outside, among the trees. maya pushes back about the imbalances in the universe and how she is to embrace all of the beauty and warmth i’ve tried to bring to her as though those imbalances don’t exist. i remind her, they are man-made, and as such, must be man-unmade. how to do that mom, she asks. and i can only say, be true, be kind. have a light footstep on this planet. be present, and notice where there is need. keep your eyes open to others who are hurting, but describe boundaries to protect your tender heart. have integrity. love well, and deeply. live well, and deeply.

in a week my best friend, the one i have adored and cherished since the moment we met at 17, will arrive from amsterdam to soak up some sunshine and my family’s love of her for a deliciously long set of days. i’m not sure what we will do during that time, but i know we will have morning coffee and evening cocktails, and that the spaces in between will be perfect and imperfect and possibly even tough a few times as we lead such different lives, so many miles away from each other, and will adjust to being together. i will look in to her face and she into mine, and we will see things we haven’t seen before; wisdom, sadness, a new wrinkle or two, a spot or freckle that wasn’t there last time, a fresh inlet or outlet of happiness. and there too will be all of the moments our lives have intersected, our memories spanning decades close by or at a great distance. and signe’s face, the one i love so much, will be as beautiful as it was the day we first noticed each other at a language camp in central holland 41 years ago.

and when signe is gone, and it is just me and maya sitting at the table having coffee together, i will tell her, this is why. why we stay. and persist. and foster hope. for the people we love, for the deep tears and hysterical laughter. for the gorgeousness of good food and the comfort of your favorite old sweater. for seeing the lilt of your true love’s wrist a thousand times and breathing in their scent when they lean in to kiss you. for family and friends, how we nourish their souls and they ours. how one day maya, you will get on a plane, move through time and space to arrive elsewhere, walk through a few doors, and see in front of you a face you recognize, have longed for, and a love that spans everything, and makes it all make sense.

awetism

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saturday mornings here in the wee house start with fresh, dark coffee and chocolate chip pancakes. maya pours her first cup and lets me sleep in until she jumps in my bed demanding frothed milk for her second. these mornings are slow and sweet, and at this time of year, the heater is on, the dogs are snuggled together in the doggo bed, and kcrw is on the radio as i am warming the milk.

often the soundtrack to our morning ritual is the 9am radio show ‘life examined’ hosted by jonathan bastian. if you don’t know or listen to him, you absolutely should. his is a measured and gentle approach to all sorts of current and compelling topics that cover philosophy, wellness, addiction, individuality, love, and loneliness, to name a smattering. this morning’s episode was ‘autism, it’s not a disease, it’s a different way of being’ and as it was announced – while i was frothing and maya happened to walk through the kitchen – we locked eyes, cracked up, and high-fived as maya moved on to the living room.

my daughter is autistic. she doesn’t have autism, she is autistic. i frame it this way because autism is not something one has or contracts – like a disease, affliction, or disability – it is simply who one is. maya’s dad and i knew early on that maya was responding to the world around her in ways that were atypical of most of the toddlers who were a part of our lives. her pals would see the ocean when we’d gather at the beach and make a run for it. maya would be in my lap, fearful or uninterested in the expanse of sand and water in front of her, instead focused intently on a leaf or beach pail or sleeve cuff. she would not dance to the music we played for her but instead turn the cd cover over and over, running her fingers over the corners and ridges. she obsessed over books while the other littles were dressing up as princesses, and was reading by the time she was three.

ricky and i did enough research to know that maya’s autism was asperger’s, now called autism spectrum disorder, years before she was diagnosed. maya is deeply intelligent, perceptive and empathetic, with a quick wit and wickedly sarcastic sense of humor. she never really had the terrible twos and though we hit a wall around four, it was all very normal developmentally, and happening to friends of ours who had little ones around the same age. by this time ricky and i had separated, and as we were finding our way out of marriage and back to friendship, we continued to spend time together as a family. maya would hit sudden snags of frustration, communication or navigation, and i would watch as ricky would dispel the situation with humor. it astonished me, him inherently knowing how to de-escalate tough moments before they took hold (when they did it could take hours to restore calm) and so i watched and learned to emulate what he was doing. maya grew to understand the dynamic, and as she got older, would hit back brutally with one-liners or one-uppers as some of the tougher moments were collectively circumvented by wit.

elementary school was a perfect cocoon of safety and nurturing, and maya’s intelligence and tenderness was seen and supported by most every adult there. but she struggled with social dynamics, and when work or life had me unexpectedly driving by her school at recess, my heart would dissolve in to a thousand pieces seeing her alone on a bench with a book while other students were playing tetherball, jumping rope, or having snacks together. it happened more than once, and i would sit in my car and cry, then call ricky. maya and her classmates were getting older, and the unconditional kindness that had been a part of all of them when they were very young was disappearing. kids were noticing that maya was different, couldn’t keep up with shifting social norms, had trouble navigating dynamics, and was starting to stim more acutely to counter her anxiety. middle school kicked things in to high gear as hormones took over, and we watched our lively and beautiful girl get the wind knocked out of her again and again. maya made and lost friends as they matured more quickly and moved on, was bullied and harassed, and ultimately became very singular, eating alone, spending her time out of class with her nose in her phone, constructing a thick armor of deflection to protect herself.

many of the conversations ricky and i had over those years of middle and then high school circled around the idea of getting maya to adjust, integrate, normalize. it was not because we didn’t adore our daughter exactly as she was, for she is remarkable and funny and sweet beyond belief. but every parent knows the pain of witnessing your child hurting – it fills you with an ache that is bigger than any ache before it, and you will sell your soul and your most treasured possessions to take it away. i walked into maya’s high school – a tiny charter in a crappy neighborhood that we thanked our lucky stars for every day – and found my daughter sitting in an almost comatose state on the floor of the faculty lounge. she was fifteen, had gone off her meds without telling anyone, and plummeted into a loss of coping skills right in the middle of a morning class. i sat on the floor of that lounge with my arms wrapped around her and rocked her for an hour before gathering up her things so i could take her home and snuggle her into bed.

maya went back on her meds and told ricky and me she had thought she didn’t need them. the darkness and inability to function scared her, and seemed to mark a moment where she began to recognize and own her autism. life resumed but there was still that singularity – she didn’t have a special friend or group she connected with in school, and was overly connected to her online community, who had found one another on instagram & twitter during middle school. we worried, we got involved, we backed off. we scheduled frozen yogurt dates, looked for places where she would find like-minded, like-hearted teens to connect with. nothing landed. we worried some more. and then the pandemic hit.

maya’s high school was shuttered mid-day on march 12th. we got the call to get there as soon as possible; i pulled up to see maya’s classmates in front crying and hugging, not knowing when they would see each other again. i couldn’t spot my girl anywhere, and then out the door she came – petite, carrying her ridiculously heavy backpack, and trying to hide the biggest cheshire cat grin stretching across her face. i jumped up and down in front of our car so she would see me waiting, and when she did, she ran to me, throwing herself in to my arms, giggling and hollering and freaking out. the look on her face and the energy surrounding her were so anchored in who she was as a younger person, it took me a few moments to recognize both. even under that backpack a heaviness was lifting, and there in the mix of her happiness i cried, for the sudden knowledge of all the anxiety and masking and self-critique she carries every day was palpable and devastating, and the thought i kept having was how deeply exhausted my child must be moving through the world never feeling settled. we grabbed lattes, headed home, and i watched maya exhale years of stress for the rest of the afternoon, and the weeks and months that followed.

fast forward two and a half years. maya is in her second year of college. one year ago almost exactly she had surgery on her jaw and came through an intense three-month recovery with grace and tenacity. six months before that she graduated from intellectual virtues academy high school with honors, having thrived for a year and a half schooling at home and taking her first college course during her senior year. all of the loneliness, the heartache, feeling atypical, neurodivergent, always on the outside – all of these things i would wish away with a magic wand if given the chance. but in the same breath i use to articulate those words and that pain and this wish, i must also acknowledge that there is a resilience and fortitude in my daughter that got her through a set of months and years that many of her neurotypical peers couldn’t navigate. very slowly maya is integrating back to school on campus, she naps almost every afternoon which has quelled the exhaustion, and she is maturing, albeit more slowly than most. she is scathingly cynical and funny in the exact same moments she is innocent and unworldly. her tenderness runs deep, her touch could calm a wild horse. she struggles and lashes out and beats herself up for not being normal. what’s normal, i ask her, and why would you want to live there, where the landscape is just an average of common traits and behaviors? she laughs and rolls her eyes at me.

maya is still singular, but rather than trying to remedy it, i let it be what it is and trust that maya will find her people and her place when they are ready for her, and she for them. we are working to open doors that will allow her that kind of connection. she has her online community still anchoring her – at one point she told me that without them she may not be here – so i bless them and smile big when i hear her belly laughing in her bedroom as they navigate this turbulent world together. in the end, hers may be a path that is shared with only a few souls who get her. how lucky they will be. how lucky i have been all these years, witnessing and learning and guiding where i have been able. i’ve written it so many times before, she is my teacher much more than i am hers. her insight, her lens on the world, her armored outside and deeply sensitive inside. she is my valentine, my girl, my one and only. she is brilliant, lovely, autistic. she is perfect.

negative space

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sometime in my late thirties, i inherited, from a friend who was downsizing so she could travel, a beautiful armoire that was so enormous ricky and i couldn’t get it through the front door of the elegant old apartment we moved in to after we sold our house. for years it sat in our garage, playing witness to us jumping up and down cursing after ramming our toes or shins in to it, and sucking our stomachs in as we crab-walked between it and the wall of ricky’s studio. it was a behemoth piece of furniture which for rick was in the way of necessities (mountain bike and drums) but for me held the promise of a future space with wider doors and bigger rooms where beautiful behemoth pieces of furniture could happen. it was all a bit strange because it is almost identical to an armoire i drew before ever seeing it for a children’s book i was working on. stranger still because years after receiving it and ultimately finding a house with wide and lovely doors that it could move through, i learned that the person commissioned to design and build it was a very handsome boy i grew up with, attended the same high school as, and perhaps had a wee bit of a crush on.

the power space holds has grown more impactful as i have gotten older. i feel it keenly as i move through my daily life, and now that i am painting again, there are additional layers of space sitting upon my existing preoccupations with space that i also have to attend to. mostly because when a painting is started, regardless really of subject matter or storyline or content, a new space is being created. however it resonates, a little universe that wasn’t there before you made it is now alive in the world, to be beguiled by, disregarded, or anything in between.

i experienced this a short time ago when i was invited to participate in a small group show at a gallery where i live. the piece that showed had been in my studio for months in various incarnations of what it would become, and as happens to me when working on a painting, we had become very good friends. entering the gallery for the art opening and observing it amongst other works, occupying its own lovely space as a thing in the world, took me by surprise. within the context of its new, albeit temporary home, the painting became, right before my eyes, something different and separate from what it had been on my table. It was all grown up, and didn’t need me anymore. if paintings were allowed to have drivers licenses, it probably would have driven itself away from me (in this case to its lovely new owner’s home) without even a backwards glance.

in august of this year i enrolled for a week of online planning sessions with a brilliant art mentor in colorado, then began my first three month program with her in september amongst a wonderful group of other artists from a few far corners of the world. the lot of us have been practicing art for most of our lives, and are at various stages of our careers. many are far more established than i am, having been at it for considerably longer. for me, having just pivoted away from 15 years of designing graphics to fine art, every ounce of everything was brand new and exciting and terrifying. the week long planning sessions were intense; i imagined this was because so much had to be packed in to just five days. it turns out a lot can be packed in to three months as well.

i stayed the course until my daughter had jaw surgery in november, after which the space and momentum of our life got physically very small as we honed in on care giving, cooking small meals that don’t require chewing, and tending to our collective emotional health. it is hard for an eighteen year old to be with at least one of her parents 24 hours a day, and her temporary loss of autonomy meant ours was gone as well. truthfully it has been secretly delicious having my daughter captive and close by these past six weeks, but the planning and energy required has pushed to the back burner much of what takes place during our normal lives. the narrow scope of our new routine probably would have been much harder to manage had we not all been prepared by eighteen months of studying and working from home during the pandemic.

weeks passed and the work piled up. with maya healing at home, there wasn’t enough time in a day to get to all of it, and in the evenings when i usually find a few quiet hours to be in the studio, i was depleted. my daughter was doing beautifully in her recovery, something that should have been enough to bring a restful mind. instead, i felt overwhelmed. i had created a binder for the bounty of tasks and materials coming weekly for my mentorship, and the paperwork took on a life of its own, appearing to actually proliferate while i slept. so many emails and assignments were going unanswered, and in an attempt early one morning to organize and get a handle on everything online, i knocked an entire cup of coffee on to my laptop keyboard just as maya was jumping on zoom for her first class of the day. 

i sprinted for the kitchen and a stack of towels. by the time i got back to my computer it was making a sad little moaning sound, and the power light actually dimmed slowly and blinked a few times before going out entirely. i realized in that moment it was the motherboard’s last breath; i had murdered my laptop. the next hour was an almost out of body experience as i blow dried the battery after getting instructions from my computer-fixer-wizard-friend, and tried not to cry. i opened up the back of the computer and ceremoniously laid towels over everything inside that i could get to; not so much as a eulogy, but to soak up the little puddles of liquid that were everywhere.

with my laptop unavailable and after a few minutes of feeling utterly lost, i realized there was nothing to do but make another coffee, and wait for my computer wizard who wouldn’t come until end of day. i had to rethink and adjust to a day that would not involve anything online. no design, no photo editing, no homework, no banking. an incredible sense of calm washed over me. i had been dismissed from the planned obligations of the day, and it opened before me like a wondrous place i hadn’t visited in a long while. 

my glee was unexpected. the possibility that my hard drive might be damaged, that i could lose hundreds of files of old work, old correspondence, letters from a life time ago, passwords no longer used, saved recipes never cooked, was exhilarating. i’ve got old school 4 x 5 transparencies of most of my artwork, and maya’s entire childhood in photographs saved on an external hard drive. what, beyond that, is really important? if the contents of my hard drive were irretrievable, damaged, obliterated, the sun would shine just as brightly and life would continue on, mine included. the weight of years of work lifted, the unfolding space of the day shifted, and i felt impossibly light and free. i had to ask myself, when did i get so tethered to my life online and the devices that keep me there?

that day changed things. it took one seemingly disastrous moment to be reminded that the amount of time and mental energy required and taken up by obligations and dalliances online is damaging and absurd. i have been compelled and affected by physical space most of my life: it has driven my connection to art and design, inspired me to travel, pushed me to write and explore the landscapes built of words. somewhere along the line, i had allowed the world of my 22 inch monitor to take on the import of larger, freer, more compelling views.

anyone who’s done a bit of art study will know that if negative space goes wrong, it will demand more attention than what created it. once negative space is seen, it can be hard to unsee. but if you want an image to maintain the value you assigned it, its resulting negative space has to remain neutral or serve as a contrast to your central focus. i think of it as the quiet parts of an artwork, a place for the eyes to rest, or a vehicle to make the louder components sing. i also really like it as a metaphor – those things that need to be sent to the background, that are there to support and make shine what is primary. so it makes sense that i am choosing to see my time online as the negative space in my life now. it must exist to embellish the things that are my central to my work and life, and stay in the background where it will enhance my endeavors, not shape them. negative space is not in itself something bad; just the necessary counterpart to all the positives.

i no longer go to bed with my phone close enough to pick up, and i start my day at the pretty marble table sketching and having coffee with my girl while the {new} laptop is safely tucked away. computer and mobile now have a bedtime, unless i am on a deadline or enchanting long distance call, all tabs are closed and the laptop at least is shut down. i don’t want it getting any big ideas, or a misguided sense that it gets to occupy the foreground again, any time soon.

 

simplicity

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when i was ten or eleven, my best friend megan’s birthday meant spending a day at magic mountain for the first time. there were a handful of us there to celebrate, megan and i wore matching osh kosh b’gosh overalls and i had my silver hoop earrings on, having finally had my ears pierced for my birthday six months earlier. we rode every ride we could, standing in line for roller coasters and twisters and rides that spun you around. it was exhilarating, and i remember later that night, back home and in bed, still feeling the plunge of the roller coaster, the fear as we rounded a corner and it felt the car would fly from the track, the adrenaline and thrill and terror of it all. i was dizzy and exhausted, sinking in to the familiarity of home while hanging on to the rush of the day behind me.

it is a similar sort of ride my family has been on, with all the measured ascents, crazy curves, and blinding plummets of a roller coaster. my sister and i spent a small and intense set of years doing what we could for my father as he sat at the edge of alzheimer’s and dementia. since losing him almost three years ago, we have jumped through hundreds of hoops as our gorgeous mother has faced her own set of health scares, surrendered in to retirement, and let go of her house, her bird’s eye view of the glorious mountains we grew up with, and her community. just to be close to us. she always wanted to live near the ocean; after crossing 3 billion t’s and dotting 2 billion i’s, we have, at very long last, been able to help her do just that, and she is now settling in to her freshly remodeled, cozy little house a long road or two from us.

i spend a fair amount of time thinking about gratitude, and responsibility. i suppose that’s because life, for the most part anyway, feels like a gift. and though i look around and see the utter and profound mess that is our world currently, i am still so grateful for the beauty of nature and of human kind, and the fact that i am one teeny participant in both for the blip of time that i get to be here. this particular blip of time in the united states the past two years has had me daunted and incredulous, and i have posted several times in different social media locales about how hard it is to explain the how’s and why’s to my daughter. the one who is 15.5 and angsty and angry and takes every single thing i say with a grand measure of disdain and even though she trusts me doesn’t trust me at all and somehow thinks my brain fell out of my head at the exact moment she hit puberty.

this push/pull has been a part of our vernacular for some time now. its preface is most often exasperation, annoyance, anger and in a final sweep before i am given up on entirely, the eyeroll. you know the one: it starts low, moves dramatically toward an upper corner, and is commonly accompanied by a sigh that could knock a root beer bottle from a fence post. following may be a door slam, the pitch of a book, or just recently, an f bomb falling squarely at my feet like a broken satellite as i looked down incredulously and then back up again in to the face of my daughter, surrounded by students, and parents, and school staff, right at the start of her high school open house. all i kept thinking was, wasn’t she just starting kindergarten? and also, if i twinkle my nose, could i maybe disappear?

back then, before our collective mother-daughter innocence was lost and her adoration of me was immense and unmovable, i wrote often in that other blog of maya’s tenderness, that cake batter smell that seemed to emanate from her very pores, and her linguistic acrobatics. maya is a deeply intelligent and complex child, and parenting her has put me on a path that has shown me i have more tenacity and patience and insight than i ever knew, or maybe just that i am a mom who loves my daughter with every fiber of my being. i have been taught again and again by maya in those exact moments i have been working to imbue her life with whatever knowledge my humble experiences may provide her. as much as i would like to think that as a mama my role is to teach her more than she is able to teach me, the truth is, we have been learning alongside each other for fifteen years now, and the playing field is probably pretty even. i am a better person for having parented maya; i hope one day she will be able to say she is a better person for having been guided and loved by me.

but until that happens, we are here, in the land of all things teen: anxiety, passion, insecurity, dread, bliss, possibility. the sway and rhythm of this dance are things i well remember from my own adolescent years trying to figure out who i was, how things worked, where the pieces connected. but my god that world – and it really wasn’t all that long ago, relatively speaking – would be utterly incomprehensible to my girl given the world she moves through, one that is both so big and so small all at the same time.

navigating my fifteen year old existence meant moving through a landscape fraught with emotional land mines, and those times were simpler. not easier, necessarily, but certainly not so nuanced (read: buried) by a vast and still unfathomable accessibility to images and ideas and perversions in numbers that sit comfortably in the millions. tens of millions. with just a keystroke or three, on phone or tablet or laptop, our kids literally have the ability to find anything. giving maya a mobile phone just before she started middle school shifted her dynamic in the world, and it shifted our collective dynamic as a family. it was a necessary evil we felt we couldn’t avoid – we wanted her to be able to reach us whenever she needed to as she left the tiny campus of her primary school behind and found more autonomy. but that little device in her backpack threw her in to a world of careless connectedness that i find incredibly unhealthy, and i long for the days when a cup of tea and a book were enough to make us both happy.

so as i close up the house on this cold and windy 25th of december and prepare to say goodbye to another christmas, and the new year hovers on a very near horizon, i look beyond a rain-splattered window to thoughts of what the path of 2019 will look like. this is my internal abacus, the one that always shows up in times of big transition – the weighing of what to examine and what to embrace, what to strive for and what to blissfully shed, how to live authentically and with kindness.

the distinct path i see is one of simplicity, and necessity. how do i live my fullest life, encourage my child to live hers, and maintain a space for the world at large and all the care that it needs? I’m not sure, and truthfully the idea of it makes me tired. for now, i think that this year, my 53rd, will be about a return to a more simple way of living, for me and my girl. i will work to see with clear eyes, to eat well and get both of us stronger. to create space mentally and physically, spend as much time as possible with a paintbrush in my hand, and less time in front of a screen. i want more rest, and reading, more road trips and walks in search of shells or stones. i want to find a tai chi class, learn how to make a soufflé, get back to rescuing some perfect dogs.

can i affect great change for me and my girl as one year ends and another begins? create clarity and grace and health and find more space for benevolence?

talk may be cheap, but i am going to try.

love in two languages

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this space. the one of writing. where everything left and and everything right and all the air and furniture and stacks of work stretching behind fade in to a sort of watery blur, and the tiny world around me grows tight and immediate. dogs asleep, kiddo asleep, house open to the night time breeze and sultry, lovelorn spanish lyrics just audible over the soft clack of keyboard taps. this is such a rare and perfect storm, i soak it up like a forgotten sponge. the quiet here is so complete it practically screams.

half of my birthday this year was spent with the sweetest travelers on a plane, where after the passage of eleven hours and about 5,000 miles, we finally dropped in to the low lands. the beautiful faces of my friends awaited me beyond customs, and within the littlest hour i was walking a neighborhood i haven’t visited since my thirties, arm in arm with my gorgeous heartgirl signe, in search of clove cigarets and a perfect glass of champagne on a perfect sunny patio to celebrate the arrival of 53.

 the first hours settling in somewhere far from the scope of real life bring release, where all the responsibilities and daily norms of one’s regular life fall away and what is left is this incredible open space of ease and emptiness. i am a terrible tourist; i can take or leave museums and boat rides and visitor attractions. but offer me a corner bistro or park bench or sidewalk cafe and i am joyful to sit for hours witnessing the changing snapshot of a place and the rhythm of life there. it is a glorious place, the vacuum of observation.

i waited for that open space to arrive, with this trip to a world i once lived in but have never felt i could call my own. but the neutrality of the observer never showed up, and what came instead was a sort of blinding nostalgia, unexpected and poignant. waves of remembrance hit and took me to my teens and twenties. to the years that i left california again and again, stretching and reaching for and creating a life in places that simply made more sense to me than the one i grew up in. places far from home.

within hours back in amsterdam it was as if a little film reel of memory and desire had begun, and during the days that followed, unexpected moments of lucidity kept showing up, moments that drove home the fact that in returning to southern california over twenty years ago, i had by proxy and without question returned to an ideal born of home and upbringing and environment in a place I never expected to live again. not a terrible thing, for my life since then reflects all that i deem important and lasting – raising my remarkable daughter, my family, my career, a commitment to my friends and authenticity and kindness and hard work. but a really weighty realization that surprised and threw me.

maybe if i were more flippant and less a seeker of meaning, these bursts of insight would be just a passing moment of many during a perfect week away. but of course those who know me know nothing ever sits solely on the surface. i have always been a digger, an excavator, a believer that real connection comes from real reveal. and in those early moments in amsterdam where i sank in to a different world than my own, all the crevices and pockets and places to tuck things that are the cadence and norms of every day life, were suddenly open. what swirled around like a whisper of fragrant smoke to fill them was a sea of bicycles moving through the city, the smell of fresh bread and dark coffee, rain drops dancing on sidewalks, leafless trees lined against a pale sky like a row of giacometti scupltures. gray light filtered in through elegant windows, and the round table in niek and signe’s dining room still beckons like an enormous anchor for the people moving in and out of their lives, drinking tea and coffee and wine amidst an always lively conversation. a table where love lives.

filling the even deeper spaces were the faces of people i have loved more than half of my life. signe my truest friend since i was 17 years old; niek the beautiful teller of stories who has loved her since we were all young and green; kester the tall one with a voice made of whisky and velvet, from whom adoration and light pours toward me like a beacon, a lighthouse, an unanswered question. those crevices, and pockets, and places we tuck the things of daily life, were brimming suddenly with the warmth of history, the longevity of affection, the power of longing and humor and tenderness. and for me, like an arrow cracking through the sternum and straight to my core, a wrap of love that filled the empty spaces with such delicacy and presence that it left me hearkening back to a younger me and a wonder of whether the place that was never mine could have been.

i could have fought it. the beguiling charm of a city i don’t know by heart but readily give myself over to, the draw of old friends, the warm embrace of adoring and being adored. if getting older has taught me anything, it’s that the rare moments of beauty are to be seen, celebrated, revered. how often are we presented with a chance to step outside our lives (or deep within them) to embrace the gift of something precious showing up? i allowed myself the indulgence of simply being there among friends, in love, in a set of moments as beautiful as have ever existed.

and when it was time to say goodbye, before the farewell tears started, i sat on the bed in the upstairs bedroom – the one i think of as mine – and packed my things to return home. in every piece of clothing, i placed a memory from seven days in amsterdam before folding them into squares and placing them in my suitcase. hours and hours later, exhausted and with a deep orange sun setting in a western sky, i opened the case, unfolded the clothes and watched as dozens of perfect moments, bouts of laughter, deep kisses and sips of wine fluttered from my wrinkled jeans and sweaters to land like butterflies on bed posts and door knobs and my ancient old dresser. weeks later, they are still here, bending their wings in greeting as i walk by, a wink of color and remembrance from a path i didn’t choose, and which i long for.

gratitude

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years ago, a thanksgiving came and went just like this one, and late at night – like now – with hot tea and under a dim drafting table light so as not to wake the husband and sleeping baby, i sat and wrote a thank you letter to share with all of the people i love. it was called this day, and as i recall, came to be written at the end of a day much like today: an ordinary saturday, one graced by a soft, almost-winter sky, filled with chores and tasks and a few simple meals, a few bursts of laughter, and an evening gathering of old friends and new that warmed like brandy and left me a bit awed for their kindness and authenticity.

my landscape is much changed from the one i occupied all those years ago {fourteen, to be exact} but i still feel very much as i did then. then my daughter maya was a little person in a very little world, one in which naps and diapers and pingu the penguinese-speaking penguin ruled our world. life was simple – although maybe that is just retrospect talking – and need based and lonely and impossibly sweet and challenging in its moment-to-moment tininess. motherhood did not come easy to me; i was 38 when maya was born and i had been traveling and living abroad and chasing images at the end of my paintbrush for a very long time. in the set of years before maya arrived – when it was just ricky and me – i was unlearning a traditional art school education, working my ass off, learning to be a designer, taking yoga every other day and rescuing dogs on every street corner i passed it seemed.

and then came maya. collectively we had no idea what we were doing, and singularly i was not prepared for how much of my life would come to a screeching halt as i shifted my focus to this impossibly small person with impossibly big needs. i was overwhelmed, in love, and terrified i would not know the steps to take on this incredibly scary new path. we sold our house and moved back in to the elegant old apartment by the ocean we had lived in. we paid off our debt and downsized. i could throw maya in her stroller and walk anywhere, including the market. i met moms, new ones, who were brilliant and gorgeous and brought creativity and community to my life and my daughter’s. i learned to let go of the me i had always been, and starting thinking and feeling differently about the world, as an us. once you make that shift, turn the corner in to parenthood, it seems impossible to ever go back.

a dozen years have passed since that suspended set of months and years was all i could see stretched around and beyond me. toddlerhood seemed never ending and as i look back i recall hundreds of moments i would give my eyeteeth to return to and experience once again. i see things i would do differently. things i would do the same. people i would wrap my arms around more frequently because they made such an enormous impact on my life and the life of my girl. you all know who you are, and though our paths don’t intersect as they once did when our little ones moved through the days along side of us, you all hold that particular piece of me that can only be described as my most grateful heart.

last week at maya’s high school thanksgiving celebration, family and students and staff gathered in a remarkable place maya gets to go to every day to learn and evolve and find out about who she really is. there were student exhibits and projects to view, and one in particular both struck and stayed with me. in maya’s philosophy class the students recently read and analyzed plato’s allegory of the cave. during the festivities we had a chance to visit a cave students had constructed. our wrists were bound – representing the chains plato’s cave dwellers were restricted by – and a series of blurry shadow images were projected on to the wall in front of us, fodder for what would be a student-led conversation on reality and assumptions after our time in the cave.

one of the questions eventually posed was where a loss or discrepancy may exist between the shadows {our naive construct of the world around us} and our ultimate understanding of the image behind the shadow {that which really exists}. i searched my mind for an experience or situation i could identify in my own life, where object and shadow contradicted the other’s existence, but couldn’t find a single place where a wash of reality had obliterated the nuance of shadow. this is not naivete – i have lost and fought and been knocked down and sideways plenty in my life. but reality – as harsh and glaring and unpalatable as it may be sometimes – has never been able to permanently eclipse the shadows i see. for me, life seems to have always been imbued with an understanding of shadow not as dark, or remote, or unreal. rather, shadow represents possibility, the necessary negative to a positive {or vice versa}, beauty, perception.

i sat on on my beautiful friend anne’s kitchen counter top last night with two women i never see enough of, and watched handfuls of her european friends pour in to the house for her annual post-thanksgiving potluck, food in hand and cheek-kissing everyone, including me. anne was moving between french and spanish and english and dragging me to the dance floor to shake my stuff amongst a dozen people i don’t yet know. the music was just right, candles were lit and shadows were being thrown around the room as everyone danced and played. anne looked at me and exclaimed in her soft accent, “everyone is so beautiful!” and she was right, they truly were. i have to imagine, it was the cadence of the music, the reflection of their swaying bodies and joyful faces, the shadows doing their work.

which brings me back to now, and here, and gratitude. for every sunset being witnessed at the moment the world quiets, there is a sunrise being seen by a world that is just waking. coffee cups lay stacked in the sink waiting for a wash here, while a squeaky clean cup is being pulled from a shelf there, and filled with coffee or tea in a thousand different languages. for love lost, there is a place of opening where love is discovered, and fostered. and for every object that occupies a space in the world, there too is its reflection, in shadow, claiming its own territory, its right to exist. a gift to us that says, see me, as you will, as you need to, as you are.

words, again

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where do i start, when me the writer has been gone so long?  i left fortydeluxe far behind in almost the exact moments i waved goodbye to my forties during a month that started on a wind-swept oregon coast with the most gorgeous amazing strong women on earth, and ended with strappy heels and leggy legs and a sequined slip dress on a twilight balcony overlooking hills that stretched to the ocean, with a very beautiful man who recognizes my soul as one akin to his sitting across the table from me.

i am a visual artist. since i was small i’ve been creating environments both real and imagined that people could enter if they chose to, and find a place to sit. i’ve always loved writing but didn’t know until i started fortydeluxe in 2009 how it was possible to build space – a visceral, almost physical space – with words. for those of you who read my little blog you know what a tough journey to a light-filled surface my forties were. i lost and gained so much it is almost impossible to trace the journey from being married with a toddler, to single parenting, single digits, the quiet space of singularity. god what an incredibly important and lovely journey it was, like landing on a big, flat, unexpected rock in the middle of a tumultuous ocean – water is rushing around you but you know you are safe.

2016, though not finished yet, has been a dramatic and crystalline set of months… heart-wrenching, flattening, poignant, beautiful beyond what i thought beautiful could be. i have weathered far more than i imagined i could, and i have worked ferociously to be a tall-reaching, stoic tree as those people i love the most have been pushed by strong winds, and have needed a place to seek refuge, lean into, wrap their arms around.

in the midst of this sort of myopic focus on family and loved ones, months passed and i realized how disconnected i felt from a huge handful of people who were always in my thoughts and on my horizon when i would carve out time to write. fortydeluxe had folded itself elegantly in to my past like an origami bird and i knew it was time to create a new space. after some consternation and soul-searching, i launched sparrowloom as a spot for me to embrace this new decade and celebrate the remarkable talents of other people, be they friends or strangers.

two things happened that i didn’t count on: the first was losing my father to pneumonia in february, and the enormous hole that formed in my heart where he still lives. second was the growing realization that as much as i want to share all the beauty i see around me and throw accolades at everyone i know every single day for their sheer tenacity and tenderness and giftedness, i am not done writing.

i’ve been rolling this around in my mind for weeks, weeks that have held both confusion and clarity as i consider living my life alone for a little while to recharge and manifest some calm. the overwhelm of the last year has left me depleted, and it seems i need to go inside and go it alone for a bit to quiet my life and gain perspective. it’s not something i necessarily welcome – it means letting go of a person who has met me in places so tender i didn’t know i could find them with someone. the idea of that loss has taken the breath far from my body more than once as i absorb what sort of pain it will mean.

where do we store pain, and can we hasten the time it spends with us or does it simply decide to pack up and go when we have learned what we are supposed to? i don’t want to learn again to let go! i have said plenty of goodbyes this year. but for weeks now pain has been sitting in my body – in my hips, up my neck, down my lower back, even in my ankles – and so i am compelled to pay attention to what it is saying to me.

this morning, early early before the sun came up but after the birdies had started singing and woken me, i listened to the rain falling and thought about words. water-saturated words, from rain, from tears, from the sadness of what is to come. a little of it all i think. cool air moved over my face from an open window, and i looked for pain in my body but was restful enough that if there, it was still sleeping. i thought about courage and resolve and authenticity and how i would write to make sure i committed to them all.

i am here again with words to remain true. to do the hard work. to see and be seen. mostly i am here with words because they give us a space to be together, if only for a moment.

kathy scott

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long ago when i lived in san francisco and hadn’t even hit 30, i worked with a wonderful woman named kathy scott. life took her back to chicago and though we at some point lost touch,  kathy found me online some years ago. that reconnect brought me back to her amazing kindness, beautiful handwriting and perfect sense of humor. it also introduced me for the first time to her photography, mostly black and white, purely street in content and capture. people are beginning to stand up and take notice, and with good reason. kathy’s gift for grabbing the spontaneous in a perfect frame flattens me. i have spent so much time contemplating her images…every time i go back to one it is as if i am seeing it for the first time, and i am compelled all over again.

River Mosaic

Friends

Dearborn

Walking Man

Big

City Light

On Her Way