Offline

It wasn't when people in my feed started explaining what Trayvon Martin did wrong (yeah, Trayvon).  It wasn't when a former babysitter typed, "Hey, black people" I suppose to get my attention and the attention of my black people friends as she explained our experience to us.  It wasn't when one after another, black men, women, and children were shot and killed by police or sketchy white neighbors or strangers and were shown no justice, but I saw only posts about home renos and favorite cupcakes.  It wasn't Colin Kaepernick and all he inspired on one knee getting character slandered and pummeled.  It wasn't the endless reaction and outrage to every post begging the larger community to recognize that Black Lives Matter did not take anything away from them but that All Lives Matter spit in the faces of folks they called "friends." It wasn't that.

It wasn't when Brock Turner got away with a rape that everyone knew he'd committed or my revisited trauma when listening to the comments made about "the kinds of girls and women who are sexually assaulted" and the acknowledgment that a black girl or woman in such a predicament may as well keep that shit to herself since no one even gives a fuck about the white girl behind the dumpster.  It wasn't one more post about the "gay agenda" and how proud some families feel about "kicking that no good kid out on his ass" because he was somehow born this way but-not-in-my-house-dammit.

It wasn't even watching the unfathomable rise of a straight up racist, misogynist, rotten to the core blowhard in the run up to a presidential election, or seeing friends with friends who support this horse's ass telling me there was nothing they could do about their friend's or family member's opinion and  go on about their lives.  The build up of racism, misogyny, rape culture, misogynoir, misguided, uneducated and under-educated thoughts and theories that were breaking my spirit.  As one childhood friend or acquaintance after another showed themselves to be completely ignorant and unable to use any amount of reason, compassion, or empathy to the plight of peoples other than those that occupied their tiny American, suburban lives, I became discouraged, heartbroken, and wrecked.

I was keeping up with and reading too many articles that painted a bleak picture of our immediate future and I was internalizing the anguish of our collective souls. I was seeing my friends in pain, confusion, despair.  Every single day.  I'd always come here to find connection I didn't have off line and now on line was threatening my sense of peace, already tenuous, and sending me to the panicked dystopian hell where everyone who looked like me, loved like me, and felt like me would be on the run.  Not even the hedgehogs and kitties and other cute things could save me.

When we got to Barbados my offline life was so unbearable that the retreat into the internets saved my life.  I didn't want to admit that I was startlingly unhappy, suffering from postpartum depression, and realizing I actually knew very little about how to love and be loved and wasn't going to get it from my husband or distant family.  My husband who'd seemed like a charm in New York was distant, unavailable, and overwhelmed in Barbados.  He left me to the care and handling of the home and the children and retreated deeper into his own pathos.  I did not know how to ask for care and comfort in all the ways it might have taken to get it, but I did know how to surround myself in a virtual world with people who would empathize with me, would root for me, pray for me, and wait for me to arrive every day to share.  I needed that love and fought like hell for it no matter its imperfection and its empty promise.   

Life off line is messy and beautiful, hysterical, passionate, and tormented.  There are hours, days, weeks of high energy, high impact, live on stage business that exhaust, rip apart, and tear at the seams of everything.  Whether I am dealing with my daily grind, my midlife struggles, or empathically feeling the torment of human existence, off line I often find myself gasping for air and trying to catch my breath as I see compassion and empathy exit the building.  I've tried to share that on line--my hurts, my hopes, my fears, my anger even, but it often feels too tempered.  I don't fight.  I choose my words carefully.  I listen and acquiesce.  I am imploring, conveying, hoping, and posting about things I love.  My children, fashion, decor, music, art, and all people and especially black people because I love us in our struggles, in our hopes, in our relentless pursuit in the face of unending trauma.  I swear I hope I am convincing, showing, revealing who I am, who we are in every mundane, daily moment, but I don't know. I don't know anymore if I am succeeding in either space.

My life on line is beautiful, I'm not fronting.  We are a photogenic family who take lots of photos of the major and minor adventures in our lives.  There is witty banter and dry, in-the-know wit and humor.  I have always been good with a comeback and can put together good images.  In the face of the funk I can plant flowers and hope.  I love a cute animal doing an insanely cute thing and am extremely passionate about the people, places, and things that I love.  I am a well edited and curated catalog of incidents, moments, and images.  But it is all edited.   An artist edits her work, her writing, her paintings, her collection, her life to tell a more cohesive story.  An unedited showing would be all over the place, full of contradictions, promises and lies and love and fear and darkness and light.  

I hopped off line because I wanted to be in a private space to mourn and I didn't know what to say.  I was hardly able to speak in real life and didn't want to flinch and wince and lie or rant and scream and plead in the place I'd come to seek like minds of the ether, people I know, I've met, and still have to meet.  I ducked out when I wondered what more I had to give or contribute. When I thought I'd nothing else to share or say and that, as I have since I was a young girl begging my parents to see me, shouted myself to hoarseness to no avail.  I bowed out and eventually watched from the sidelines.  I am lonely sometimes.  So lonely.  I am scared and hurt and frustrated that we are not seeing or hearing each other.  That people who have not lived outside of a world of privilege are still leading the conversation about whether or not our lives are even relevant, let alone how to heal all that separates and divides us.  On line or off, I had to admit that I am still watching so much happen on the outside, feeling all of it, and screaming, screaming, screaming my head off in the most polite way.  And I am not sure who can even hear me or gives a damn.



(c) Copyright 2016.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

This moment: RIP, Prince

I stand outside myself when I remember the moment.  I see myself, just out of the shower, hair wet, towel draped loosely around me, when my phone pings the "illuminate" ringtone which tells me my sister needs me or wants to make me laugh.  I don't rush to it, know it will be there until I check it, and put on some underwear first.  The rest of my clothes are on the bed but I don't grab them just yet, instead I pick up the phone to read the message.

Prince is dead. Devastated. Mess.

And I am naked except for the underwear I just put on and need more clothes because I feel so naked but also need to call her.  I want to be dressed.  Because I will remember this moment and want to be dressed.  I don't want to be crying in my room, which I am now doing near hysterically, as I fumble for the TV remote and the phone.  I reach my sister and the news channel at the same time and she is saying yes but I don't see it on TV so maybe it is not true.  Because why would it be true.  Because it can't be.  And I keep putting on my clothes but also a blanket over my still wet head to wait for the news on TV.

It's there.  A still of Prince from Purple Rain and that 1958-2016 at the end.  The marker of time.  I think, "I'll die in your arms under the cherry moon."  I think, "Until the end of time, I'll be there for you.  You own my heart and mind, I truly adore you."  I think, "Baby, baby, baby...what's it gonna be tonight...."  The first songs that coming from my subconscious to my head.  He's gone.

The moments, hours, days, and now weeks that follow I move in a slow jam of molasses.  I am going through life's motions but the pull at my throat and the corner of my eyes and my solar plexus and my chest don't let me forget that I feel profound loss for someone I don't know but who helped me discover myself.  The journey he led me on at various stages of my life by sharing his cannot be overstated.  I've heard it said that when one is, say, tripping on psychedelic mushrooms or acid, a good guide, someone who has already experienced the effects and visuals, can help navigate the emotional roller coaster, the drama of the alternate universes, and the mind-blowing imagery of that sojourn.  My life with Prince's music has been such a trip.

Some nights I react to his passing in the lower chakras.   I actually drop to my knees with ache and longing.  I feel untethered and disconnected, empty and ungrounded.  Prince gave me license to be in possession of myself and to connect to the energies, physical and psychic around me.  I felt the hair stand up on my arm, my heart beat faster, my head spin, my legs go weak in the landscape he created.  I dared not be ashamed of my otherness, my sexuality, the magnetic pull and attraction between souls.  

"They feel the heat, the heat between me and you."  

There are no words for what the 15 year old me felt when she first heard those lyrics.  I felt like I'd been told a secret, that something lurking inside would be impossible to hide when I discovered my soul's mate.  I don't think I'd ever stood face to face with a boy at that time, let alone felt his heat, but I knew something wicked and delicious and terrifying would happen when I did. Songs of love and longing had not been so visceral for me until that moment.  So much of Prince's music took me through the full range of emotions, love, sex, heartbreak, pleasure and pain.  The sacred and the profane.  The spiritual longing, the seeking, and the command he took on stage, in the studio, on the screen made him both pilgrim and guide.  

I loved that Prince did not apologize for his blood, sugar, sex, magic (to quote the Red Hot Chili Peppers).  He was all those wicked things and a vulnerable man cub. He was music's Mowgli walking through the jungle of the human psyche in all its dank, dark, delicious earthiness.  He was sexy and naked and sweating and sweet and looked at us all with those wet eyes and everyone fell.  He was so real as to be surreal.  So truly enigmatic that no matter how often he was asked to define himself, he believed in not doing so, he was.  That he is gone in a blink takes away a pocket of that magic.

I'm haunted by his passing as much because I loved him and his music at a time when I was flowering into my own being as that I, and so many others, had no idea how he was suffering.  I am haunted by the man alone, by the tunnels I imagine him passing through to get from studio to studio, the corridors and chambers of his secret spaces.  I feel stunned by all the work amassed, the work never heard, the work, the work, the art, the music that he kept making even when his fans still connected to the tried and true, the music that we knew.  I imagine him alone, in the quiet, with his god and his muse, creating and hurting, and being distinctly human on a quest for the divine.  I consider my own pain, my own loneliness, my own torment and compare it though I know I shouldn't.  I think of an artist in physical pain and addiction and imagine the sorrow.  And then the lyrics flood me and everyone in my life really for infinity because we have to listen to his music until I say stop and I have not yet.

And in this moment in my life, waiting at a stop light, mindlessly folding laundry, sending a message, reading, or dreaming, the songs come back, pop into my head like mile markers.  You've come by here before, they say.  Remember when you ached, longed for that boy, fought your own demons, wanted, needed.  Do you remember when you were alone?  When it was another time?  Another place?  And it was quiet and you were naked and out of the shower and had no idea which way the day would go?

I feel guilty for taking so long to let go.  My mood is revealed by what's playing.  One is warned whether or not to ask the question, show me the Beanie Boo, or ask for another something by my dancing or my silence.  After the call, I slowly, silently finished getting dressed.  I'd turned off the TV at some point probably to hear my sister better as we talked.  The house was still.  

If I gave you diamonds and pearls
Would you be a happy boy or a girl
If I could I would give you the world
But all I can do is just offer you my love*

(Prince and the New Power Generation, Diamonds and Pearls)

It hadn't been one of my favorites but there it was.  And I sang it out loud to break the silence.  And as I'd felt so many times before listening to his music, I wanted someone to offer their love.  

RIP, Prince Rogers Nelson

(c)  Copyright 2016.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Misty-eyed

I'm up early, before my alarm, with tears still wet on my face.  My eyes are fogged with sleep and the tears left over from the most hideous cry I had last night.  I stayed up to watch Misty Copeland on Independent Lens.  I know her story and have devoured so much about her as she's made her historic rise to principle dancer with the American Ballet Theater (ABT).  Like so many women, black women, with daughters and a love of dance and the arts, I have gravitated toward this tiny, elegant force, found myself spinning around her like a mama moon.  I am up early, before my alarm, because I am moved in the most spiritual of ways by an artist and her work and a moment that was a long time coming.

To say that Misty Copeland is inspiring is to discover that the word has been overused and that there are hardly words to describe this woman, her talent, and her trajectory.  This is the story of a prodigy, of an artist come to life, of a consgilieri and a coven (written in the best way so don't go in) of "firsts" and strong, able, successful black women who brought a baby light into the fold.  I was as moved by this group as I am by Misty's absolute command of her craft, her body, and her art.  That these women were called to be her guides by the incredible Susan Fales-Hill, a writer/producer/patron of the arts and education, that they met the call to protect and nurture this artist who was sure to take her place in the pantheon they'd begun creating with their life achievements, filled me with a love and pride that is indescribable.

I have loved dance since I was a small girl dreaming of all the major roles in classical ballets and  watching Michael Jackson and Solid Gold.  Much of the latter part of my childhood was spent in the studio and I trained many days a week.  My dance teacher, a ball-breaking Russian dancer, hurt by her turn as dance teacher to the suburban kids of New Jersey in her basement studio, still found a way to push and pull me and try to make me into something. She told me there were very few black dancers out there and that those were not players in the mainstream dance companies.  She did not say this with callousness but matter of factly.  I did not know about the Dance Theatre of Harlem and though I had enjoyed Ailey, I wanted to wear pointe shoes and perform the classical pieces I'd been spoon fed.  I can't say that I even let myself dream of a chance at a career or a life in dance as I believed that there was no place for me in the arts and that though the arts were enriching, there were better things for one to do with one's future.  

I was no Misty Copeland, she's an incredible talent, a force, but I was good.  Good enough to dream about it and phantom dance through every song, sound, and watched performance.  Good enough to hear the muse calling to me, but not quite sure what to answer back or how.  This is the struggle of a young artist or performer.  Feeling full of the spirit but needing commitment and guidance from a master.  I gave up before even trying to find such a mentor, convinced that to dance was a pipe dream for me, that there were more "serious, important, pressing things" in my future.  I have regretted this for all my life.  Not because I thought I should or could be a dancer, but because I stopped speaking a mother tongue, a language I loved and understood to babble on in one I could only mimic.  

I am absolutely mesmerized by the delicate balance of power and grace in this young woman.  I have loved other ballerinas, followed their lines, studied their hands and their feet, seen the longing heaving in their tiny ribcages, watched their sternums expand and contract with each gesture.  I have moved with them, hypnotized as they moved across the stage in a seemingly effortless dance that masked the years of training and hours and hours of work to prepare.  But to share with my daughters a dancer that looks like them, that is shy and sensitive as they are, who, despite her fears and loneliness persevered is a precious gift.  To be the first, the one and only, forging a path of one's own are themes that I have sought to share with the girls in literature, movies, stories, music, and art.  Girl power and black girl magic has to come from me.  I cannot wait for them to find it on their own or worse, never discover it or not believe it.  

As a small girl, I had the great fortune to meet and even dance for Judith Jamison and the Alvin Ailey company backstage.  My mother had gone to college with "Jam" and we'd gone to see them perform.  I remember the sound and the fury of backstage life, seeing the dancers in street clothes but full stage make up, smoking cigarettes, laughing, flirting, smiling.  I remember their beautiful bodies, their taut, black and brown bodies, and the feeling of the stage behind me and the seats of the empty theatre in front of me.  For years after this wonderful moment, I carried that rarefied air in my lungs, all that hope and desire, that longing, until it slowly faded.  When I watch Misty Copeland, I feel like that girl again and I am soaring behind her, carried along in her wake and pushing her forward with my hope and love for her.  I have been taken in by this historic moment and feel such pride.

 I don't know if my daughters will keep dancing, don't know if this is what calls to their spirits, but I am grateful that they have seen a dancer achieve what seemed impossible and hope that whatever they might believe is impossible now seems a little less so.



(c) Copyright 2016.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Self portraiture/Selfie revelations

I have been away from the blog for nearly two months.  Keeping up with any regularity, any true perspective during the crazy, heady summer months proved to be impossible for me.  Both of my children are now enrolled in "big girl" school and save the early season calendar crunching, I have time to get back to me. I'd started this post months back when a friend on Facebook tagged me in a photo of a T-shirt that said, "Hold on, I'm taking a selfie."  I do take them.  Have for years before they were called "selfies" except then I was not using my iPhone or computer to take snaps, I was staring into my face in the mirror and drawing or painting.  I did and continue to use self-portraiture as my medium of exploration.  Whether in the visual arts, writing, acting/voice work, or dance, I have used myself in the work, sometimes as the work.  I am searching, seeking, looking, longing.  I don't mean it to be indulgent, snaps and right-back-atcha winks, or reverential.  As an artist, I am trying to understand, define, relate, connect with the world. 

I had two painting professors that I adored.  One I not so secretly crushed on and the other was truly one of the best people in my life, a true, dear friend and mentor.  They both guided me to portraits and self-portraiture in Western art, classical and academic as well as modern and post-modern.  In both art history and my studio classes, I devoured the canon and sought answers in life painting, focusing on real life, true light, a strong degree of academic emphasis, still life, portraiture, figure drawing and painting, landscape.  I admired work that was imaginative, imbued with fantasy, and whimsy but felt safer and more grounded (I am, indeed, a Capricorn) with the familiar.  I can still recall the afternoon when the focus shifted and I saw myself as subject, not only as author. 

These two wonderful teachers gave me permission, even demanded that I look for something in my own gaze, in the curves of my face, in the soft angles where light hit my skin, creating shadows and depth I'd never considered.  I was a little embarrassed really to be staring at myself so long, gazing, demanding, imploring, seeking answers to all the questions, moving paint or charcoal, graphite or pastel to tell a story, maybe about me and maybe about something else, something more.  But I did prove to be an always available subject, one whom I felt comfortable tearing to pieces, putting back together, pushing and pulling the paint in ways that were not always beautiful or safe or pleasant.  I was less fearful making mistakes when using myself as model or subject, more willing to look past the surface and scratch for something else, something that transcended just that moment in time.  When I failed to find what I was looking for, I could try again and again and again, the onion skin always peeling back to show me something else.  I am always peeling back and looking for something else.

Other than adolescent punishing sessions of miserable inner dialogue in the bathroom mirror, I didn't like to gaze upon myself.  As a teenager my skin was terrible, I wore braces for years, and frankly, any therapist of mine will tell you, it took me years (or until yesterday or the day has not yet come) to find myself appealing.  Maybe it was the 80's aesthetic where I was surely not listed in the beauties table of contents or my developing self-deference to make myself smaller and more invisible, but regarding myself left me deflated.  Only in dance, where I studied more the lines I was able to make with my body did I emotionally and spiritually connect with my body, my image, myself.

And now I am here.  I take pictures of myself and make pictures of myself and reveal, little by little, something of myself in the writing--stories, blog posts, Things My French Husband Says About Me.  To me, the portraits, the selfies, the posts, the stories, the scripts, interpretation of dance choreography helps me serve the muse.  I am not the first to use the medium to explore, to discover, to share.  Western art has a endless number of self-portraits and other portraits that reveal much more beyond the beautifully handled surfaces or even intentionally challenging ones.  The cool part is being drawn by the image or the page into something greater than was expected.  For both artist and audience there is a dialogue, language, challenge or confrontation, reassurance or connection.  When I am looking, when I ask, when I cry, scream, yell, whisper to be seen or heard, it is not because I believe I am the only one to search.  It is because I believe we all are.  I don't believe, wouldn't dare think that only I have found myself in front of the mirror staring into my eyes, searching for my soul, marveling or mourning some experience in life.  That's not my intention at all.  I am saying use me.  Use me to reassure yourself, to steady yourself, to believe yourself, to react, to assault, to doubt, to question, to challenge.  To find solidarity or solitude.  To be human in all its torment and glory.

It is humbling, sometimes crippling.  It is challenging and sometimes sobering.  It is lonely and sometimes isolating.  It is uplifting and sometimes otherworldly.  Looking at myself, in my study of just a life, mine, I hope I have found a way to connect to humanity and  to the divine muse.  If you cannot find a way in yourself, use me.


(c) 2014.  Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.

Black Magic Woman

A friend of mine shared a post on the Book of a video of Carlos Santana's "Black Magic Woman". As I sat in front of my computer listening, taking myself back to my childhood, I recalled how I loved that song.  Loved that song because I believed that he was singing, "black, magic woman."  When I listened carefully to the words, I felt stirring inside myself a truth, a truth because I heard it sung, called out, pleaded on the radio.  It was the promise, the proof that there was such a thing as a "BLACK, MAGIC WOMAN" and that maybe, as I suspected, I might be magic too.

When I discovered the black, female writers--Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Nikki Giovanni, Jamaica Kincaid, Maya Angelou--to start, I discovered a world that for me had been just a secret.  I heard and saw and read things about myself that I'd never heard or seen.  I did not grow up in the company of black folks.  Yes, we had family and many close friends, but our community, what surrounded was white.  I read these books with a longing, a desire, but also a realization of a hidden truth about me.  These authors, along with many other artists (of music, visual art, dance, poetry, fiction writing) from all different backgrounds taught me the power of myself and that in the face of my every day loneliness, deep down there was magic. 

I was loved by my grandmothers and my aunties, was held in their care.  But it was the arts, from the creative spirits, seekers, seers, and black magic women and men that I first heard the call.  My ballet teacher gave me the techniques, but when she asked me to feel it, to dance it with passion, I'd close my eyes and trust my magic to lead my body.  When Marvin Gaye sang, "What's going on?"  I heard something I'd never considered before and heard it like a rush of adrenaline in my veins.  I saw Judith Jamison with Alvin Ailey as a girl because she'd to college with my mother and invited us to watch her and meet the dancers.  She is a presence to anyone, but to a small girl chasing the muse, she was a giant in every sense of the word.  I sat at the knee of any performer on television and closed my eyes listening to orchestration, composition, lyricists who said what my heart believed it was dreaming all on its own. 

What I loved as a child was that though I found all of these people beautiful, otherworldly, and "gifted by God" (an expression I heard so often with the church ladies and aunties) they were not all traditionally beautiful; they were more.  Their beauty came from another world.  They were not charmed as much as possessed.  Possessed of spirit, talent, direction, and passion.  The light and energy radiated.  Navigating the mainstream and the shadow world was done in secret and done every day.  I could not articulate the how and the why, I just felt it. 

When Maya Angelou passed this week, I was left with a sensation similar to the moments I'd learned of my grandmothers' passings.  Maya Angelou I'd come upon quietly.  No one handed me a book and told me there were secrets in there.  But I'd heard her speak with that deep, knowing drawl resonating and vibrating with the power of a lion's roar but as direct and sharp as a crossbow, as humble and loving as a whisper that tickles the tiny hairs on one's ear, and as sure a voice I'd ever known.  I believed her and trusted her.  I loved her and everything she brought to me.  Everything she promised me just by existing and not surviving, but thriving.  She was BLACK. MAGIC. WOMAN.  And she told me I was too.  I could hardly believe her so she reminded me again and again.

With her passing, the breath was knocked from me and tears fell involuntarily and uncontrollably.  I felt strongly that I should absorb her faith in me, in all of the black magic women.  Women who need to give themselves permission to do their magic, to try their wares, to release their tethered souls, to soar.  By her example and her wisdom and her guidance, there was no way for me to deny the possibilities. I see her dancing to that song, giving in with abandon, being so remarkably human and otherworldly at the same time.  Dare I do it too?


(c) Copyright 2014.  Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.

Winter birthday wishes

January 2nd usually marked the return to normalcy or a soft landing like the movie stuntmen made onto that huge pillow at the end of the holiday circus.  Rather the celebration of the Christ child and  the baby new year than me.  While I didn't want to be forgotten completely, I was happy to get back to life as we knew it with a tiny secret tucked behind my ear, kissed there by the aliens who, in the dead of night, have always given me promises of a good future, not just resolutions but truths to which I was completely committed.  I still believe in the probability of great achievement even in the face of total chaos and seemingly impossible obstacles.  Though I have never been good at the holidays, what with all the celebrating and wide opened hearts on display, the arrival of the girls brought a chance for me to live them with different eyes, a more gracious heart, and a sense of wonder and hope.

Every year since I can remember, the arrival of the "winter holidays" has brought a little bit of tension, a little bit of the blues, and an eerie calm like the dead quiet of the first inches of a massive Nor'easter falling heavily on whichever sleeping town or block I was living.  It feels somewhere between a whisper and the ringing in the air after a scream.  I can hear my breathing.  Sometimes I can see my breath.  Always I am aware that I am alive even if I can't move from the cold or the fear, and am fully aware of my surroundings even if I want to run.  Always I feel awkwardly alone even when surrounded by crowds of family and friends.  Alone but not quite lonely.  Here, but not quite here.  I can't be lonely with the two people standing on my neck, whispering in my ear, chatterbugging to my face.  Maybe that's why they came to me.  To connect me to place, pry open my wintered heart.

2013 was hardly different from previous years--family ups and downs, community involvement, extracurriculars, doctors' visits, health checks and scares and reassurances, travel, work, parenting, craziness.  I don't think I have counted my "best or worst" years since I was a child when the best or the worst was defined by gifts I received or didn't, skills I acquired or didn't, loves found or lost.  Now, every year starts off full of promise, more than 1/2 full with the days firmly on one side, ahead of me.  Every year I know that I will peel back the onion to find some other truth about myself, my soul's journey, my desire, and my fulfillment.  I make no promises other than to try to remain open to whatever comes, to avoid (or try not to bring it all the way to insane clown posse meltdown) the panicked shut down when the world delivers what I expected but for which I had somehow been poorly prepared.  At the beginning of every year I have promised myself, "This is the year for me.  This is the year I will find the path, stay on it, actualize."  I say this every year.  I believe it every time.  I don't write the directions, don't set the map in stone and quickly wander from the path...or perhaps discover the one worn in the ground, not paved.

I followed the breadcrumbs back to a language I'd almost forgotten I spoke.  Many speak it more eloquently, some with grace and agility, others flexibility, but when I speak to them too, they understand.  In 2013 I returned to dance. When I was a girl who hated her voice and was sure no one cared what I might have to say, there was dance.  When I needed to free myself from the torment of the bad years and celebrate the joys of the good, there was dance.  When I had a secret to keep, something that I needed to protect, I could dance around it, seal it in.  And then I stopped, quit moving altogether, froze, and then allowed myself to believe that another form of exercise, maybe the machines at the gym, maybe an abs class, could suffice.  They couldn't.  Not yoga, even with all the breath and meditating and connection to the divine, warmed my soul.  It was dance that first connected me to my own life force.  Reclaiming it was so helpful to everything in my life. 

When I was a little girl, my mother asked for the same things for her birthday, Christmas, and Mother's Day.  Peace and quiet and for everyone to get along.  We thought that was the craziest request on earth.  "That's all she wanted?" I'd wonder.  What a waste of a rub of the lamp.  You can have anything three little cherubs and a workaholic husband can offer!  I get it now.  As I reanimate the creative back into my life, each day becomes mine to do with it what I will.  I can ease myself out of the tepid pool of suburban monotony and feel passion burning me up again.  I want that more than I want anything else.

I have, and have admitted, struggling with the daily expectations of raising children and running a household.  I want to do them both well.  Hell, I want to do everything well, but I believe that I bring more to everything in my life with the creative spirit and energy weaving throughout.  At the start of every year, I remind myself of this.  Somewhere along the way the priorities shift and I find myself making excuses, putting off making art, writing, dancing, and allow the minutiae of parenting and being married to be more important.  I'm going to do better this year.  At least I am going to try.

My husband was gone for Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Years and my birthday.  He has been for nearly every one of these holidays since we've been together.  I have stopped allowing myself to suffer this and surely cannot let his absence during these days define the entire year.  Or me.  Or my life.  I don't want to be defined by absence or by a "lack of."  But when he returns and asks what I want for all the holidays I missed, it's not a necklace, a scarf, socks, or new boots that I am after.  It is some of that quiet, some of that peace, some of the space where I can create or believe myself able again.  It is solitude and my own communion with the end of the year and the start of my new one.


My birthday starts up the music, begins the lightly playing song that guides me through the year.  It is wintry and quiet and moody and grey and cloudy followed by bursts of sun in a cerulean blue sky, cold as hell frozen over, that thaws into a promising spring.  I've bundled up into it and survived the shortest day of the year and the longest parade of holiday celebrations.  And on this day, I danced and wrote and drew a little sketch.  Running head first, out the window, to the stunt man's pillow down below.  To the new year.  Mine.



(c) Copyright 2014.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Artist Mamas

"The planet does not need more successful people.  The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of all kinds."  -- The Dalai Lama

After dinner last night, I sat in the kitchen, twinkling with sparkly lights, reflecting and refracting off the wine glasses, water goblets, and other shiny surfaces, talking to two friends, women, glorious women, intelligent women, creative, artistic, witchy women about being artists and mothers and how to juggle the two.  All three of us are completely committed to our children, not just raising them and providing them with their basic needs, but instilling values, a strong sense of self-worth, strength, showing them art and culture, and opening their little minds to everything we're able.  It is hard for us, we agreed, to commit entirely to art-making and creating, when the job of raising children, our children, requires such a deep commitment of time, energy, and attention.  Our husbands, all artists, were free to attend to, develop, hone their talents, explore and create, and frankly, for two out of three, make a living.  It's a pretty exciting endeavor, actually. Two artists trying to make art and raise a family with all its joys, trials, love, and crazy-making tedium.

Creative people are pretty darned sensitive.  And when I say sensitive, I don't mean touchy or particular.  I mean able to use all their senses to observe, experience, and participate in the world.  Maybe I cannot speak for all creative types, but I can speak for myself.  I feel it like tingling or sizzling nerve endings.  The slightest gesture or note or word can leave me turning it in my mind for days, making connections to thoughts and memories past, wanting, needing to make it into something.  I find it hard to reconcile this urge as immediately as I once could now that I have children, and the desire to care for them, tend to them, nurture them, and raise them seriously cramps my time, concentration, and ability to hold a thought for more than thirty seconds.  I keep voice memos for myself full of ideas, carry a composition notebook, and squeeze in moments of the day and night to write, draw, and think, but it's just not the same as getting into the mucky muck and creating at will.

The energy used in creating and art-making and in having children emanates from the same chakra.  Being a mother, making a home, a family, a unit, taking care of us feels like creative, spiritual work.  I find absolute joy in some of those moments.  The same as being in a studio or in front of the computer or wrestling with my thoughts though, I often struggle as well.  There is a drive, a need to do things a particular way, with particular energy, concentration and connection that frustrates me when I am unable to do so.  All that said, I still want to make art.

There is an image of the artist as selfish and preoccupied, often ridiculous and caricatured.  Focused, yes.  Burdened, sometimes.  But I think the artists, the intellectuals, and the thinkers are going to change the world. We lead a spiritual charge, want to effect change, see the world that exists between the tangible.  We are the whistle blowers on the status quo, the makers and doers at a much deeper level than our current culture suspects (or expects or accepts).  An artist suffers as a child, at least I did, which is probably why my commitment to my children is so strong.  I remember the loneliness, the drive, the feeling different and alien and I want to guide them should they find themselves with this gift (as I already suspect).  It doesn't much improve as he or she enters adulthood. The best he can hope for is to find a group of supportive individuals, perhaps artists themselves, alongside which to write, paint, dance, sing, compose, cook, play, sew, design, think, and see.  Allowing the girls to see creative mothers and fathers, working in whatever milieu, professionally or as a side gig or passion, gives them proof that they are able, should they choose, to follow this path and meet some incredible people, do incredible things, change the world.

Trying to describe the creative spirit, the drive to someone who does not feel its pull is like trying to explain the change of pressure in the atmosphere. It is like attempting to reveal magic, not the trick but the real thing. It is like hearing a ghost in the attic, running upstairs to see it, and then being the only one who did. It can be isolating and lonely and frustrating and lovely and wondrous. It is all those things.  I cannot say what drives me to write other than a desire as strong as my life force that begs me to sit at the desk, table, bed, floor and get something down, to share, to connect, to define for myself what I have observed, experienced, seen, felt, breathed.  I can only hope that I am connecting, that I touch a chord in the hearts, the minds, the souls of whomever stumbles upon it.  It was the same call that I heeded to dance, to act, to paint.  I had to.  I needed to.  I wanted to.  I still do.

While visiting with my family over Thanksgiving, I was toying with ideas about longing and need, feeling that longing and wanting to explore it, when someone entered the room to ask what I was doing.  When I said, "Writing.  Like I try to do every night," I was met with, "telling everyone about your life on Facebook?"  To which I replied, "No. WRITING."  The slight so quick, so easy that it gave a chuckle to the offender.  The tears, the emotions only sometimes show on the outside (and they didn't that night), though I put it in the work.  I take comfort in my community, my tribe of artists, creators, healers, and others who value my role as storyteller, as connector to the ether, to the soul and find no need to belittle it. 

Sitting at the table with these women last night, being considered, taken seriously, asked about art and mothering and living and loving, I was left speechless by how difficult it can be sometimes.  I really didn't know what to say.  I wish there was something that I could finish, that I could offer, that I could fully commit to.  The days when I try to write or draw and am constantly interrupted by the girls because they want to chat or read or tell me something incredible or eat or use the bathroom or go on a playdate, whatever, I am seriously beside myself.  Then I berate myself for being upset when their demands are not exceptional, their needs, even wants, not unreasonable, just bothersome and disruptive when I am searching for just the right phrase or just the right line.  They are just being children and I, their mother.  To whom should they direct their questions, desires, thoughts?

Recently I began a series of drawings (well, so far one) that relates to some imagery I have used in the past.  Sometimes I need to see work I've done in the past to continue the dialogue or theme, to remind me while looking at the strokes or colors or techniques used just what I was getting at.  I have been so excited by this piece, at what it has me thinking about, considering, that I want to work in this visual medium again after years away.  I am excited and nervous and thrilled and scared.  Having my ladies, my wise women close, because they understand my drive and my passion for creating and parenting, is a true blessing.  A tribe I have longed for since my years in Boston and during my tenure on staff at AIX Restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where nearly everyone's day job was creative and we all got together at night to "serve."  Finding the balance between the two, depriving no one, denying nothing is the exercise.  Being a good mother and making art is the goal.

I have so many friends who have found the way for themselves to do it both, to do it all really.  They have hands that reach out and help them, make sacrifices that I have not yet allowed myself to make.  They may miss being the Mystery Reader, be unable to attend the class party, but are doing insanely exciting work in visual arts, acting, music, voiceover.  Perhaps, in me, there is fear, distrust that I am truly capable, talented, good enough, whatever the scary message may be.  Perhaps I really do just need the little one to get to kindergarten where I will feel better about leaving her.  Those abandonment issues creeping up pretty much anywhere, anytime.  They inspire me, these mamas.

Whatever the medium, I am trying to tell stories using myself, my individual experience, my life, to connect us, to allow us to commiserate, consider, discover, wonder.  After all the years I have lived, I have finally decided to accept this as a gift and have begun the process of letting go energy that does not support this and reaching out for guidance, community, healing, and love.  Ultimately, I hope to be a mother that Lily and Virginie can trust, believe in, and love because I have offered them safe ground to experiment and grow physically, emotionally, spiritually, psychically, and openly.  I believe the only way for me to do this, for ME to do this, is to make art, create, express every day that I am able.



(c)  Copyright 2013.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.