Making Art

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Art museums take my breath away. I am always awed by human creativity, the ways that people choose to express themselves, and how often they make simple objects needlessly beautiful. Then I stand in front of Greek marble sculptures and know that people have been doing this for a very long time. I wander to the next gallery that has ancient stone statues and I realize we have been creating art for even longer than we’ve had recorded history. That long ago sculptor was driven to create by a very similar creative impulse that leads me to write. Standing in a museum I can see all of this and I feel connected to all of the best of our history. Humans are amazing. It is nice to be reminded of that, because wading around the internet and watching the news so often shows me how humans are terrible.

I sat at the table and listened to my friend Mary plan her birthday dinner. It was to be a multi-course formal event. She picked anchor items then she planned complimentary courses. I listened to her discuss with her husband the merits and detriments of various pairings. Once the dishes were selected, they talked at length about the order of presentation. I squelched my impulse to reassure them that their guests would be happy with any order. This wasn’t about appeasing guests, they were discussing the artistic presentation of food as part of a formal dinner. I was watching art in the planning stages. Later this evening I will get to participate in the culmination of the planning, shopping, chopping, and cooking. This is not an art that will ever end up in a museum because it’s very nature is ephemeral. It is my friend raising a necessity (food) to an art form and I’m honored to be able to participate.

Dinner settings

We began our tour of the Chicago Art Institute in the miniatures gallery. In the 1930’s Mrs. Thorne took dollhouse decoration to an art form. She commissioned teams of artists to create accurate miniature replicas of period rooms. Every single one was stunning. I was most charmed when there was a doorway or window that I could peer through into a back bedroom or a garden. I very much wanted to shrink myself and go explore those gardens. I suspect that Mrs. Thorne was ridiculed on more than one occasion for wasting her time and resources on so frivolous a pursuit as miniature rooms. I think that every artist or creator has their work belittled at least once. Yet her creation is marveled at today. Her rooms are carefully preserved by museum staff so that they will be available for my great grandchildren to admire. I am grateful to the museum conservators for this and for the Greek marbles that they tend, and the impressionist paintings, and all the other things that fill my soul when I look at them.

The last gallery we wandered through at the art museum was the Folk Art gallery. I looked at weather vanes and homey little chairs. I pondered why Folk Art is different than Art. The sign on the wall implied that the difference was in training and skill. I don’t quite buy that. Some of the folk art pieces were every bit as lovely as pieces found elsewhere in the museum. Then I thought of Mary’s planned birthday dinner and of the thanksgiving dinner I created for my family last November. Mary’s dinner is an art, mine was a folk art. Mine sought first to be comfortable and pleasing. Mary’s seeks to be beautiful and esthetically pleasing both to eyes and educated palettes. There is intrinsic value in both sorts of creation. It is true that Mary and I laughed at some of the items in the Folk Art Gallery. There was one clock case made of layer upon layer of wooden strips cut into zig zag shapes. It was busy and while not exactly ugly, definitely not something I’d want to look at often. Yet I could see how much loving work had gone into the creation. Some artist loved making that clock case.

In the Thorne Miniature gallery the European rooms ran along one wall while the American rooms were on the other. Stepping from one side of the hall to the other provided a distinct contrast. The European rooms were all large and highly decorated. The American rooms were smaller and practical. Yet both were beautiful. Just as Mary’s elegant dinner and my homey dinner are both beautiful. Just as folk art and fine art are both beautiful, even when they are kind of ugly. I love that humans make things needlessly beautiful. I love that we are all artists, creating in different mediums. Some create books, others well-run classrooms. Some make buildings, others sandcastles. Some embroider tapestries, others knit scarfs. Some create with expertise and skill, others with skill-less fingers but a strong desire to make something anyway. That is how we all begin, with pure desire to create. The skill comes later.

Art museums remind me that we are all artists, we all create in our own way. I think if we spent more time remembering that, the world would have more of what is lovely about humanity and less of what is not.

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Being on Skype while Female

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I resisted getting a Skype account for many years. I just didn’t feel a need for it. Then my daughter went to college and suddenly Skype offered a valuable way to keep in touch with her. I installed it and learned how to use it. That was lovely.

What was less lovely was that I kept getting pinged by strangers who wanted to add me to their contact list. The profiles all had male pictures and the messages were usually along the lines of “I saw your profile and thought you were beautiful. Want to chat?” So I removed the webcam shot of myself as the profile image. It wasn’t a great picture anyway, but it did make me visibly female. That slowed the contact requests for a while. But it did not stop them.

This past week the rate of contact requests increased a lot. I’ve no idea why. It was getting annoying. I wanted Skype to be a private place for me and my kid to communicate. I didn’t want it to be social. Blocking the requests was fairly easy, but they kept coming. So I went to my profile and set my gender to blank. The contacts still kept coming. I finally resorted to renaming myself on Skype to something that sounded neutral-to-male. The combination of all these things appears to have worked. I’m glad I found a solution to my problem. I’m sad that being on Skype while female = available for romantic solicitation.

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Meetings and Guilt

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I’ve had a lot of meetings with teachers and school administrators in the past few months. I’ve had even more in the past two years. Many of these meetings take place because I call for them. My kid is in crisis, life has become untenable, things must change. I’m always aware that urgent meetings are a disruption of the school personnel’s regular schedule. The meetings certainly disrupt my life and I know that teachers/administrators are every bit as busy as I am. This means that I enter these meetings with a strong urge to apologize for inflicting my kids on the school. I am always aware that there is more I could be doing to resolve the issue. I could support my kid more, be more regular at declaring homework time, establish a more firm bedtime. It is only recently that I recognized my deep emotional belief that it was my job to help my kids function normally in a classroom, and if they didn’t, that was a failure on my part. Pulled out into rational light, I can see how ridiculous this expectation is. Yet it was there in my head and it caused me a lot of grief.

I hit a turning point last November when I sat in a meeting with my son, his counselor, a student advocate, the vice principal, the principal, and a special ed teacher. All of these busy people sat with me and my son for more than an hour while I talked about what we were experiencing, what we’d done to try to resolve it, and expressed a need for help. As I talked, I really could see that we had done every possible thing that was in our power to do, yet my son needed more. Which the school staff identified and moved to provide. The help was wonderful. Even better was walking out of the meeting and realizing that they didn’t blame me. No one was standing in judgment to evaluate why we’d ended up in the emotional pit. They just asked if we’d prefer a rope, ladder, shovel, or backhoe as the means to get out.

After that meeting I began to stop blaming me. It was hard. I had to break long time habits of thought. As we were digging out to a better place, arranging therapy, adjusting medications, changing the school schedule, I learned that I was most helpful to everyone else if I simply said “This is where we are at today” without burying myself under an emotional load of guilt. In problem solving, how you arrived matters less than where you’re headed.

The frequency of meetings has begun to trail off. I’m looking at a March that might be completely free of teacher meetings. I would be fine with that, because it would mean that the arrangements for next year are made and no one is in crisis. In the interim, I’m glad that the only meetings I have coming up are routine meetings about school schedules for next year.

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Calendars, Jumbled Thoughts, Journeys and Growth

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Lately I’m spending a lot of time looking at my calendar. In theory I’m doing this to plan for the days ahead and to keep myself on track. That part is necessary, because I’m prone to distraction lately and I need my external reminders for what I hope to accomplish each day. But there is also something else that is driving this staring-at-the-calendar behavior. I’ve had trouble putting my finger on it, but it feels a little bit like waiting. It’s almost as if there is a coming deadline after which my life will clear of the minutia and leave me space for long and slow thoughts. I miss my long slow thoughts, the unrolling of words in my head. Everything feels jumbled up there and I’m not sure how to unjumble it.

This is one of the things I hope for from my trip to Chicago. I hope to get far enough outside my usual context that I can see clearly all the things I’ve been in the midst of doing.

I am fortunate to live in a network of friendships. I attend a church where the members are my neighbors. Most of us have lived here for many years. Many of the women here are kindred spirits, yet I often forget to talk to them. I forget to look outside the walls of my own house. When I do, my head is so full of unspoken thoughts that I’m a little afraid to start talking for fear that my avalanche of words will overwhelm my listener. So, I parcel things out. I talk of parenting to one friend. I talk of business to another. I talk writing with a third. There is some mixture in what I say, because it is hard for me to talk about any of these things without mentioning the others. Then when I’ve been talking for a while, my friend will say something like “Wow, you’ve got a lot going on.” These are affirming words. I need to hear them, because sometimes I wonder if I’m just being weak or silly when I’m being buried in the stress of my life. Surely I could have planned it better and not needed to dump on my friend. Then there is the other quiet thought in my head, the one that knows it is time for me to change the subject. Because I’ve only told part of my stories and my friend already thinks I have too much going on.

Used to know a family who always lived in emotional crisis. They were always fighting or recovering from fighting. They feuded with neighbors. They created drama everywhere they went. I would sit and talk with the mother of this family, trying to help her find peace and calmness for her household. Yet, without fail, any time peace began to be established, they would do something to create a new crisis. The family didn’t know how to exist without it. Crisis was familiar. Peace was uncomfortable and strange to them. I lost touch with this family long ago, but I expect they are still careening along, colliding with the world and being angry about it.

When I view my life and the endless stream of things I am managing, grieving, afraid of, or depressed about, I sometimes wonder if I am doing the same thing. Do I live in stress like a fish in water, so that if I’m ever at risk of emerging, I do something to plunge back in? I hope not. I want to believe that I’m helping my loved ones traverse a difficult but necessary passage. I want to believe that I am experiencing a period of stress and recalibration.

“Don’t worry Mom. It’s all going to be fine.” Link says these words to me often. Usually when I’m pushing at him to accomplish something because I am afraid of the future that I have pictured. I try to believe him and I try to stop pushing. My conversations with Link have changed in the past year. They work best when I manage to listen to Link instead of the clock ticking in my head. It is the ticking which tells me I’m running out of time to teach him the things he needs to know. As if I will have used up all my chances to teach on the dawn of his eighteenth birthday. Link says he feels like a seed, small and protected now, but ready to grow into something big and amazing. I believe that too (when the clock isn’t in my way.) I see the potential that is in him. Yet I am a gardener and I know that not all seeds reach their potential. Link is amazing, more amazing than he believes, and I want him to fulfill his desire to go out and make the world a better place.

My thoughts of seeds and gardening send me wandering out to my front flower beds, where I have pansies in bloom. We’ve had a strange, warm winter here in Utah. Most days are forty or fifty degrees. My pansies are little troopers, putting out bloom after bloom, even when the nights drop below freezing sometimes. I’m grateful for the bright color as I walk up to the house. It fools me into feeling like we’re in March, not February. March is when winter recedes and spring begins to make its presence known.

Perhaps that’s why I keep looking at the calendar. I’m waiting for spring to come, not just outside, but inside my heart. I’m waiting to see signs that the Link seed will sprout and grow. Or for green growth inside me. I am not so foolish as to think that my son is the only one with learning to do. On the calendar I look back to see how long ago we arranged for good growing conditions. I look ahead wondering when I can hope to see green. And I hope for hospitable growing weather. I have to believe it will come.

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Failing to Write Despite My Best Intentions

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I had a lovely post planned yesterday. It’s half written. But then Patch needed an x-ray for his hand because it was getting more swollen and painful not better. That chewed up three hours of day. The verdict was a tiny fracture in a tiny hand bone and the treatment is a giant splint with a bandage that covers his entire hand and forearm. The injury means he can’t play cello for three weeks. This required communicating with his cello teacher. Kiki has been overwhelmed at school and needed emotional support. (She dropped two classes and cleared the air with roommates, life is better.) Link and I are still finding balance with the new schooling format, and unfortunately we’ve also still got some clean up to do from last semester. Math classes march onward even when students are too overwhelmed to pay attention. Gleek has been facing more homework than usual and she still has her history fair project looming. This required a quick meeting with one of her teachers.

It seems like this is the story of my work days. Many of them are impacted by appointments or meetings as I work with various schools to make sure that my kids are getting the things that they need. Other days are drained of energy as I continue to work on processing the emotional load that accompanies all the various adjustments that we’ve been making. This leaves me with slivers of days where I can lose myself in work. I frequently feel that I’m failing at all of it: the parenting, the work, being creative.

Yet things are better than they were, for which I’m very grateful.

I’m pondering all of this and turning over ideas for my LTUE presentation on Breaking Through the Blockages. Obviously I’m not going to be able to hold myself up as a shining example of a person who gets writing done no matter what. I don’t. Instead I’ll have to dig in and discuss the various reasons I sometimes fail to write and what I do to counter those reasons. It rarely has to do with lack of time. I’m also pondering what prevented me this week and how I’ll make next week different. I’ll start by not letting any of my kids break their bones. We’ve had enough of that for a while.

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Oh the Places I’ll Go

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First up, I need to clarify that I will not be at FanX in SLC later this week. The last couple of years Howard and I went all-in for Salt Lake Comic Con and FanX. We learned a lot and hope to participate in future versions of these events. Unfortunately for 2015, by the time the dates for FanX and SLCC had been announced, we already had conflicting events on our schedule. We opted out for this year. I must admit that this week I’m very glad that I get to have a normal work week instead of tooling up for a massive convention. Having a major event in January would break my brain I think.

In two weeks I’ll be taking a trip to Chicago, because sometimes I should just go visit my friends even when there isn’t a convention involved.

I will be at LTUE in three weeks. I’m very excited about this. We’ll be fetching Kiki from college, so she’ll be at the event as well. They’ve given her a solid amount of programming, which makes me glad. The remaining Tayler kids are likely to sit the show out at home. Though Patch really enjoyed his day at Salt Lake Comic Con last fall and so he may want to come for a day at LTUE. We’ll see.

For further information regarding my whereabouts in 2015, you can check my newly updated schedule.

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January: Wrapping up and Moving Forward

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I woke up this week. Not literally. It’s not like I spent the first three weeks of January (and November and December) sleeping all the time. I was awake far more hours than not. Yet this week feels like waking up. It is like remembering what well-rested feels like because the baby began sleeping through the night. That analogy is actually fairly apropos. Because this week I was not called over to a school to manage an emotional crisis. Not once. Which is a startling difference from the last few months when the vast majority of my work days were interrupted.

January is always a strange month. The beginning of it is often buried in tasks that are required to tie off the loose ends from the year before. I always have piles of accounting work to do. This year I also had many meetings, doctor’s appointments, and arrangements relating to my son’s new schooling format. Additionally, we had new health insurance. We’ve had the same insurance plan for a decade, so I had to wrap my head around the coverages and costs. The process has made me realize how very bad our old plan was. For the first time we have help covering all the mental health care that we’ve been paying out of pocket. So the news was mostly good, but I couldn’t be sure it would be until I started using the plan. January also needs to launch the new year’s efforts. This means that I have to wrap my head around the project list and start moving toward new goals. I used to be able to do all the transitioning in the first week of the year, leaving the rest of January for a mid-winter project. This year was more complicated. There were lots of loose ends. There are also lots of projects to launch.

At least now I’m finally rolling on new and exciting efforts. LTUE is only three weeks away. They’ve posted their schedule and I’m excited for the topics I’ll get to discuss. Before that I get to go on a personal trip to visit a friend, which I’ll very much enjoy. I’ve finally contacted a cover designer to get better covers for the Cobble Stones books. I’ve been etching glassware to see if I can find a process that is feasible to produce product for Schlock customers. We’ve also been having Schlock RPG meetings for the big project we’ll be launching later this year. The one thing I haven’t done enough of this week was working on actual writing. Some weeks are like that, but I really need to get back to it, particularly since my solo presentation at LTUE will be about breaking through writing blockages.

It has been a good week. I’d like to have another one like it.

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Wistful and Grateful

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I wish that I had the spare energy to dive into my son’s science fair project and exploit it’s educational value. I long for the patience to encourage him to do every step himself. I want him to learn about putting together a complex undertaking and to feel accomplished when it is done. Instead the project lands in a time when I don’t have that energy to spare. The project will get done, but it will not be the educational experience it could have been if I had more to spare.

Ditto my daughter’s history fair project which has a similarly grandiose intention, and which falls on the same week as my son’s science fair project.

I’m grateful that my kids have schools and teachers who offer them amazing opportunities to learn. I wish that we didn’t have to turn down so many. But there is no way that we can do science fair, and history fair, and spelling bee, and geography bee, and knowledge bowl, and after school robotics class, and orchestra, and, and, and… We have to choose. I wish there were some way to transport a portion of these opportunities to other children who have slim pickings in the opportunity department.

I feel guilty for complaining about abundance, even though I know that abundance can cause as many problems as scarcity. I particularly wish this on civil rights day when I think about the words of Martin Luther King, think about how far we’ve come as a society, and how much better we could be than we currently are.

I’m grateful for the people in the past who helped forge the world I live in. I’m grateful for my friends now who are willing to put themselves in the line of fire to forge a better world for my children. I hope that I can be one of them as I’m needed. This is a day for wishes and gratitude.

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Educational Off-Roading

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There are things I don’t realize I hope for until the moment when I realize they won’t happen. In that moment I am smacked with sadness just as I have to figure out how to readjust my expectations. It was somewhere in November or December that I realized Link’s high school education was going to veer sharply from the standard path. He needed it to. I needed it to. Yet I still had to find that part of myself which had expected “normal” and make it let go.

The new plan is a partial home schooling arrangement. Link does most of his coursework through online packets. Most of the time he does that work in the computer lab at school. Sometimes he does that work at home. He still has a few regular classes on campus. I’m functioning as the enabler, assistant, and aide. I don’t make the curriculum, but I assist him in understanding what he is expected to do. Link loves this new format for school. For the first time he isn’t constantly overwhelmed by noisy classrooms where the coursework goes so slowly that he tunes out and misses important assignment details. He doesn’t get surprised by assignments being due when he didn’t even know he had one. He doesn’t have to fret over knowing he has an assignment, but not being sure how it is supposed to be done. All of the instructions are right there in front of him, patiently waiting for him to absorb them and do the work.

I can see how this arrangement is going to be good for him educationally. We’ve spent years adapting his school work to allow him to keep up in a regular classroom. Now he has to struggle with types of assignments that he’s never done before. But instead of simply failing an assignment and rushing onward because the class can’t stop for him, he will be required to re-do assignments until he has learned the necessary skills to move onward. In the areas where the assignments are easy for him, he doesn’t have to sit around and wait for other students to catch up. For a student like Link, who has some significant learning disabilities that impact some of his educational capabilities, this is brilliant. Especially since Link also has some off-the-chart educational advantages in other areas.

It seems like a perfect plan, but I’ve spent quite a lot of time being afraid that it won’t work. I fear that it will cause as many problems as it solves. In this plan Link has to sit for hours in a room mostly by himself. He has to keep himself working. He’ll have to work longer and harder hours than he has been used to doing. Unlike regular classrooms, those hours will all be focused thinking. Some of the skills he’ll have to learn are how to run the necessary software and format assignments for himself. There won’t be a teacher there tap-dancing and trying to keep him engaged. Instead it is just Link, the material, and Link’s own motivation. It is very possible that Link will not step up. That he won’t work at a rate sufficient to keep him on track for graduation next year.

This is one of those hidden hopes which I have had to acknowledge: I really want my son to graduate with his class. Ultimately the decision to do so is up to Link. I’ve done everything in my power to turn that goal from impossible to possible. Now he has to do the work to make it happen. It has been important for me to see that graduation goal. Even more important is for me to consciously recognize that I may have to sacrifice the graduation goal in service of a much more important goal: preparing Link to be a self-sufficient adult.

This is one of the other potential drawbacks of this plan, social isolation. In order for Link to be ready for adulthood, he needs to interact with other people. He needs to learn how to socialize and make friends in ways that he hasn’t yet learned how to do. He needs to figure out how to communicate his needs and how to listen to the needs of others. Sitting in a room by himself does not help him accomplish any of the important social learning which happens in high school. We’re going to have to figure out other ways to make sure he learns those things. That will mean more work for us as parents. This whole plan is a lot more work for me than the standard educational route. On the other hand, I’d much rather do this work than what I have been doing in the past few months. I was constantly manageing emotional crises as Link began to despair and consider himself a failure in all things. This new educational approach means that for the first time in years, Link can picture himself succeeding. We are both very aware how fortunate we are that the administration at his school is willing and able to support this plan. There are other schools in our school district who would not do the same.

We are now at the end of the first week and we have mixed results. Link loves it, but we’ve been confused by assignments frequently. I had to purchase and install Microsoft Office to make sure we had the same tools at home that Link has at school. We’ve spent lots of time just figuring out how to find necessary information, how to take the tests, how to submit assignments. And at the end of this first week, Link had a moment of despair because he could see that the work was all going too slowly. He thought he would fail at this too. I told him it is too early to tell if this will work. We need to keep going, ironing out the wrinkles, giving this our best try. So we’ll keep rolling along bumping our way over weeds and gullies as we travel parallel to the standard path.

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