“Have you started to realize your freedom yet?” asked a friend recently, wondering how I was adjusting to my mother’s death in March.
In this month’s blog, I write about the changes in my life and perspective following the March death of my mother. After finishing the job that always felt primary, taking care of my parents until the end of their lives, can I learn to live fully for myself?
Also, works for sale are now available on my website! All original pieces, they are signed, matted and framed using conservation acrylic. Check out the new portfolio! (link to new portfolio) I’ll be adding to it regularly.
And please check out the Mixed Media show at Five Deuces Galleria, running through July 30. I have three pieces available for purchase at this very cool exhibit featuring over 40 artists.
Letting Go, Finding Purpose
I haven’t written much about my internal state these past few months, since my mother died. Initially, I wanted the focus to be on her, not on me. It was her time, a time to remember and cherish her long, remarkable life.
And my thoughts have been on my father also, the bright young farm boy encouraged by an elementary school teacher and mentors in Future Farmers of America (FFA) to look beyond his insular community to bigger opportunities. The first of his family to go to college, as was my mother, his world opened up at Auburn University and then much more due to World War II.
Like others of his generation of rural kids, the Army put him with city boys, Jewish boys, Italians and boys of other ethnicities, and broke down the prejudices in his thought and language.
It would take another few years, and a new President, for racial segregation in the U.S. military to be broken down, at least organizationally. But in reading my father’s letters to my mother from that time, I see his language changing. In part that was due to her, and in part to his own growth and evolution.
He was elusive, this man who didn’t remember receiving a hug from his own mother until he was 19 and home for his grandmother’s funeral. This man who learned how to hunt not from his father but from his older brother. The boy mostly raised by his older sisters. The baby, born years after his siblings, who was so emotionally disconnected from his own parents.
And his wife.
And his son.
The good man, whom everyone in church and community admired for his good deeds and good demeanor, who raged at home when his internal emotions reached the tipping point. The tipping point, of course, was not foreseeable. He was a bomb that I knew would explode, but never knew when.
He loved me. He did things for me to show his love. But he could not express it in words.
Or a hug.
All memories now, these thoughts of my parents. After a lifetime of tending to their emotional needs, and overseeing their care and physical circumstances the last part of their lives, what felt like my lifetime job is now over.
The only child, the lonely child, the child with interests and needs and desires that always made me different and feel separated from my peers, even to this day, the little boy who craved the touch he never got, is now in his retirement years.
My parents encouraged and enabled me to do so many things, despite the emotional disconnect. Flying, studying in Europe, working in politics, writing music, even running for Congress.
But during all that time, those things always felt like they were secondary, that my real job was to take care of them. And of course, I always knew that one day I would have to come back to Florida and manage winding down the family business, involving besides me two of my mother’s brothers and their children. I would have to live through, and play out, the previous generation’s unhealthy patterns of behavior to arrive, someday, in the promised land where I was no longer in business with family.
We sold the last piece of property two years ago.
And now that my mother has died, I can physically do things that weren’t possible before.
I can travel and live abroad, finally immersing myself in Spanish enough to become fluent, or spending more time in Berlin, my favorite city.
Or spend a season in London, where I went to school in the 1980s.
Or go to places never seen, dreaming new dreams.
Can I allow myself to dream, to live big? Will I?
The old shackles are still there, not in my day-to-day but emotionally.
Can I shake them? At an age when you would think I had figured this out, but haven’t, can I learn how to escape the emotional enmeshment with my parents and especially my mother?
Can I learn how to date and be honest and communicate my needs and figure out what I really need and want emotionally, sexually?
I used to think everyone else had figured out these core human competences and that I was the defective one.
Now, of course, I know I’m not that special. In my experience, everyone struggles here. The lucky ones find each other early in life and figure out a way to grow over time.
Well, I’m not one of those.
“Do you realize your freedom yet?”
I’m starting to.
A few days ago, I walked into my mother’s empty apartment and was overcome by waves of memory, grief and loneliness. I sat on the floor of the bedroom where she died and sobbed.
I wasn’t expecting that. I don’t imagine it will be the last time. Grief comes on its own schedule.
New Collage Art this Month
This month I’m adding two new pieces. Blue Moon: From My Balcony 6 is a new geometric collage composed entirely of photos taken from my balcony, overlooking Tampa Bay and the adjacent harbor, Albert Whitted Airport, Mahaffey Theater and Dalí Museum. There are literally hundred of carefully cut pieces of paper in this work.
Focus is a fun piece made with layers of carefully torn paper, arranged around a central opening into a world of your imagination. What do you see?
Have a great month!
Blue Moon: From My Balcony 6, 22”x26” collage on paper/mat
Focus, 20”x20” collage on paper/mat
