Housekeeping

Lydia - pastel drawing on paper - 2007

Sitting here at the computer, I just had the thought,

 Isn't there some more laundry that needs to be done?

But there isn't.  I did it all yesterday.  I folded it.  I put it away.  I cleaned all the toilets.  I mopped the kitchen.  I went through Beckam's clothes and set aside the stuff that doesn't fit anymore.
As I vacuumed the entire house, I thought,

Look at you.  You are falling for the illusion that if you get everything done, you can relax.
You have to relax in the midst of everything, because IT is never-ending. You are funny, Sarah.  Tomorrow you will have no excuse not to write.

I called a woman I know to see how she was doing.  I called because her best friend had just died.
I asked,  "How are you? "
She replied,
"I'm ok.  I've just been cleaning a lot."

killing of the yellow bird - oil - 2006

Cleaning.  It is our best drug.  It is odorless, tasteless, and not a single house-wife can be faulted for it's indulgence.  It allows me the illusion that everything is exactly as it should be.  The red dish towel is hanging in my mostly green kitchen.  A perfect compliment.
Every pair of the kids' shoes are in a separate compartment.
The toilets without a single splash of urine anywhere.

Beckam slept from noon until 4 pm and all I did was clean.  What a waste of silence.
But sometimes I rebel against myself.  I don't know why I do this.  My Art Professor used to call it:  The War of Art.  Their is a book about it.  I just looked it up on Amazon.  It costs $9.85.  Their are 7 holds on it at the city library.  Apparently we all want to know how to win.  But I already know.  Just keep going...no matter what.  No matter what your head tells you, don't believe her.  She will tell you it's not important.  No one cares.  You are not different.  Nothing you have to express matters.  No one cares about your mundance experience.
In the face of all this doubt, I write anyway.  I teach anyway.  I paint anyway.
Right now I teach an adult art class at the family homeless shelter.  They are so excited every Friday.  They are excited for one hour of color and focus.  I know it will not change their lives.  It takes 1,000's of droplets to force a wave of change.

Sophie light - acrylic and pen - 2006

Another thing my Professor used to say is,
"There are literally 1,000's of art students in studios just like this, doing the same thing you guys are doing.  If you don't care about your art, no one else will either."

He'd say,
"If you don't need to paint, when you leave here, you won't."

Now it is 3 years later, and I need art more than ever.  I know it's cliche, an artist who needs to create in salvation of her soul.  Because without it, her soul will shrivel into a brown peel and be ground into the dirt.
I am ok with that.  Because I am not cultivating this soul for anyone other than the people I love, and they are worth it.  We are worth paying attention to.  We are worth aching for...attaching to.  I would rather love and suffer.  Here again I fly in the face of the detached buddhist I sometimes aspire to be.  However I am not other-wordly.  I live here.  I want to live here.

Traffic Stop

The disaster that was yesterday is now over.  Thank you sleep.
_________________________________________________
All I could do was slog through one task at a time on about 3.7 hours worth of sleep.
I kept Sophie home from school because I was too exhausted to get up and drive her there.
Instead we stayed home and finished her book project.
Brilliantly, I decided to cut open a feather pillow and give her a glue gun.
She added blue food coloring. sequins, graham crackers, and ramen noodles to the mix.

I tried to take solace in the shower.  I let the hot water lull my eyes into a daze.  I rested my forehead against the cold tiles.  After 4 minutes a tiny hand pasted itself onto the shower door.  Judging by the height, I could tell it was Pepper.
Mom, are you in there? I need you to open my fruit roll-up.
Fruit roll-ups for breakfast.  Awesome.  They do not involve cooking.
I open the shower and find a racoon looking up at me.
Did you find Sophie's make-up?  I ask.
She holds up the wrapper.

My friend Linda called to see if she could drop off tomato seedlings.  Hearing the voice of another sane adult brought tears to my eyes.  She doesn't know it, but her presence bouyed me up for the next wave of responsibility.

After cleaning the house, dropping the little kids off at the babysitter, and the gymnasts at their carpool, I drove silent and alone to work.  Again tears sat on the rim of my eyes.  It was only 2:45 pm.  I still had to teach my class, load their final painting project into my van, spend at least 2 hours doing touch-up on it, pick up the kids, make dinner, give baths, pick up the gymnast, make dinner again...

I stopped at a stop light.  I looked to my left.  A girl, about 22 years old sat on the curb.  Her hands cuffed and her face buried into her palms.  Her feet were splayed out like a baby giraffe.  She wore Converse.  Her feet were small, size 6, like mine.  Two cop cars were parked on either side of her outdated maroon sedan.  I strained to see if I knew her, but her head was buried deep.  Her lime-green purse had been purged, along with the rest of her posessions.  It looked like maybe she had been living in her car.

And it all stopped...

On Friday I will be sober 8 years.  This girl was me.   I wonder if she felt relief because the cycle had stopped for a minute.

As I drove the rest of the way to the school my thoughts were:

Thank you for letting me go and teach my class today.
Thank you for this mini-van and it's 2 carseats.
Thank you for my kids.
Thank you that I have a home for them to be...and spread out...and thrive.
Thank you that I am not in that cycle anymore.
Thank you that I am sober.
Thank you for the clear eyes that are Sarah - for eyes to see far beyond pain and inconvenience into the heart of things.

Google dispels ghosts

Sophie just woke me up at 5 am.

Sophie 2006

"Mom, I have this really bad pain in my side."

I jolt up like a piece of bread from a toaster.
Appenidicitus.  Can kids get appendicitus?  Get the iphone and Google...

I don't show her this mental panic though.  I caress her head and gently lead her to a hot bath.  I turn off the sharp lights and light an orange scented candle for her.  Then I squat on the toilet seat and Google appendicitus in children. It is most common in children over 10 years old.  She will be 11 in 3 months.  It could be, let's relax.  She tells me it is a "pulling" pain.  It could be muscle soreness.  She is a gymnast and spends 16 hours a week flipping, stretching and crashing.  It could be that.

After 15 minutes she tells me it doesn't hurt anymore.  I help her get dressed and put her back to bed.

Lately more than ever, it seems there is aways something.  I deal with strep-throat, teething, boy-crushes, forgotten homework, abscessed teeth....tooth extractions, and we have $7 dollars left until Friday.  This means the kids will be eating cereal, pancakes, ramen noodles, and My Little Pony fruit snacks.  I cannot afford to have a rigid ideal.  I need to flow with the other 4 lives in my family.  I don't have to.  I want to.

How exhausted would I be if I HAD to exercise and eat as I did 5 years ago?
My list of acceptable foods was maybe 15 items long.  I was not allowed to skip runs.  Exercise was necessary to allow myself to eat.

Now I am loose with all of it.  When I feel that quick tightening, I remind myself, this is all a gift.

When Sophie came in with the ghost of appendicitus on her shoulder, I thought,
Well, I guess maybe I'm not running this morning.
Now it seems perhaps it was just a ghost, and I am free for the moment.

Reboot

People have been asking me, Where is Chrysalisbreak?

I am wondering the same thing.  In conversation I keep telling people, I can't WAIT for summer!
I am doing something I am not technically supposed to do.  I am living in wait of a future time when things will be better, when I'll have more time, when I get to do what I want.
This is a set-up.  My life will most likely not slow down, ever.  Rather it will gain in momentum as my kids gain in size, age, and angst.

The thing about mindfulness, about spirituality, is that it doesn't work in my future life.  It only works now.  If I wait, and starve my soul, I wither very quickly.  I become a barking beast who hulks around the kitchen with eyelids slumping low, seeing nothing, and waiting to pounce on the next kid to spill their macaroni and cheese.

When I look in the mirror, I see the places exercise will not touch.  They become thick unnecessary growths.  I wish I could cut them off in the shower.  My solution to this is to stop eating.  My mind still reaches for relief in this way.  If I stop eating so much these growths would not exist, and I would feel free, unburdened.
I imagine how I would look if I had time for myself.  I would be like those moms who have matching work-out clothes.  I see them at my job.  I work in the daycare at the rec center.  They come in wearing colors like cantaloupe, mint and hot-pink.  Their shoes always look new, and their hair is clean even though they're about to get all sweaty.  They go to Zumba or Pilates or cycle for 90 minutes.

When I am quiet.  When I am centered.  When I am awake.  I don't want to be one of those moms.  I want to be exactly what, who where I am.  I take my kids climbing and we get dirty.  I look in the mirror and see a familiar woman.  I see someone who is doing her best.  I see someone strong.  My kids can spill their cereal, and I can say, It's alright, let's clean it up together.

Woman Before a Mirror - 1897
Henri deToulouse-Lautrec

So I'm writing today, so I don't have to wait for life to start.  I'm writing so I can eat breakfast.
Another thought which keeps passing across my forehead is,
Have I stopped writing because I think I'm "all better?" Do I imagine that because I've written this eating disorder blog for a year, I am somehow done?
This is certainly not true.  I still carry the clipboard everywhere I go.  I check off the boxes each time I see a woman.  This sucks.  Plainly sucks.  I wish I didn't do it.

• skinnier than me      
• bigger than me
• thicker waist then me
• eating less than me
• wearing the right shorts for her legs
• it's 3 pm - how many calories have you consumed today?
• is she bigger than the last time I saw her?

Really, this is just my brain trying to figure out whether or not it can get away with going back to old ways.  It is constantly rebooting and looking for a person who is successfully undereating and overexercising.  But every time it tries, it is now confronted with the truth.  The truth is:  no one gets away with disordered eating.

I don't have to look for very long anymore.  Now the reboot happens in seconds, and I can see the actual person very quickly.  I can also find myself after a few deep breaths.    

symbiosis

My tidy husband has swept old journals back into their box and up to the shelf.  I had hoped to pick up where I left off yesterday.  Now they are out of reach and I am left grinning at my childishness and his care-taking of me.  He prompts me to wear my seatbelt, to bring the insurance card, to vacuum the mini-van. I accept all this guidance because I know I am only mostly an adult.  Like a teenager, I still believe I don't need a seatbelt, and all ailments will be cured with a stout, sweaty 4 mile run.
When I wear high heels, our noses meet.  Without them, my head rests under his chin.  This creates an illusion.  He is stronger than I am.  He is taller, wider,  heavier more capable with his rough mits for hands.  I used to hold his palms in mine and study them.  I'd turn them over and over like a sandy, beach treasure.
How can they be so dry and not hurt?  How can you just let them crack and bleed?  How can there be spots  which will never come clean?  Engine grease is pressed so deep into the crevises that it didn't even come out on our wedding day.
He can withstand things I can't understand.
He props up my everyday life.  He is my steel frame.

Pepper and Dad at our first house

Because he of him, I am free to simply tell the truth and let it be.
I get to write without worrying that it will ever be lucrative. He offers me a luxury far better than any object.  I have stumbled over this often, but never told him.  Without Andrew's support, I would feel immense pressure to BE something.  One thing I learned in school, when you MUST be creative, it is nearly impossible to think of anything good enough.
Without a partner, I could not be a whole-hearted artist and a mother.  My energy would be sucked away by the daily tasks and expenses, which he assumes for me, for us.

I get to be with our kids every single day.  I greet them when they wake up and hold them in their jammies.  I sing to them, "Good morning to you....we're all in our places...with bright shining faces."
We stay in our p.j.'s until 10, and make pink waffles.
They move in and out of days with ease, one trickling onto another like a pond accumulating a delicate soul.

Sarah

This is my gift to him.  This family.  Sarah, Sophie, Pepper and Beckam.

Sarah to fold into at the end of the day. Sarah to sit on the back of the toilet and listen to his stories while he takes a shower. Sarah to make morning coffee.  Sarah to dance with at weddings.  Sarah to catch eyes with across the room and to know without words.

Sophie

Pepper

Sophie to battle and to adore.  Sophie to challenge his authority and make him laugh at himself.  Sophie to flip through the house and stir up the air.  Sophie for tenderness to Pepper when we have none left






.


Pepper to wear sparkly shoes at the end of whispy legs.  Pepper to squeeze into Dad hugs.  Pepper to ask questions from her world of imagination, "Do elephants use their trunks like a telescope when they swim under water?"  Pepper to remind us to read books and to slow down.

Beckam

Beckam to marvel at the strength of his noggin.  Beckam for being stout and studly.  Beckam for his red hair and for looking just like Grandpa Andy.  Beckam to snuggle the tags of his tattered blankie.  Beckam to bop his head to a music beat in the back seat.  Beckam to bring us all together, and sew up our family tight.



Thank you husband.  For being exactly what you are.

Blind spots

The Golden moment - 60" x 48" acrylic 

Back sore like a set of old scaffolding threatening to collapse.  Every morning I wake up with aching muscles.  I can always find my age somewhere, in the arch of my foot, the small of my back, the ridges along my waist or bolting up the front of my thighs.  It used to be I could run everyday and experience no pain.  I could climb rocks in the desert from sun to sun and not ache.  Now I am always aware of my deficiency.  And once again, I am having the experience of "Those old people knew what they were talking about."

I am not fresh anymore.  I am not invincible.  I am not immuned to the rigors of time.
Yet, I always think I was "better" in the past, and this is not true.  I imagine I was more free, strong, honest, creative...so I look to my old journals, and I find that I have been doing basically the same thing all along.

This one's from 2005.  The year I quit drinking.

 Degeneration of sunflower 60"x 48" acrylic  2008

"Talking about writing as artists and dreamers do.  
In our flip-flops
 in our lounging
 in our thick-rimmed glasses
 in our apathetic shaggy hair
 in our youth
 in our uncertainty
 in our sickness
 in our hope.

barely able to breath through the cloth of our pretense we are all eager to try.
It is so satisfying to put it out there - all that we know.

And  I jump right in 
wagging my tail, tongue sloppy, eyes darting for the next bone."

6/2001

These are the sunflower series I painted in school

"Last night I was haunted by my artwork.  Every painting seemed to be alive and so desperate. Each one had been intended for the answer, but instead became just another beautiful expression of something so much smaller.  Ironically the sadness was in the beauty.  You would think that was the whole point, to create something beautiful.  But that's only part of it.  It is to create something which reflects the madness I feel. To stop it in it's tracks long enough, and completely enough that I can look at it and find peace.  So that I can know it has some sense.  It is real, and not merely circumstance or pre-programmed feeling.  That's why I'm in such a hurry."

I suppose there will always be some sense of inadequacy.  Maybe I will always know that the perfect expression is impossible.  Because I have blind spots.  But what a shame it would be, if I let this keep me from trying to express what I do see.

Owning Orange

So, I've been invited to write for this blog called: owningpink
Trouble is:  I haven't been writing.
I go onto the site and it's all about the transformative power of telling your own story.
It says if I can teach what I know, to even a handful of people, I will be amazed.
And I am.
I know.
This last year of writing Chrysalisbreak has brought me to tears on so many mornings.
It made me hear my Sarah voice again.  The one I never doubted as a young girl.  She is the one who has always known where home is.  The one who wrote pure poetry at the age of 11 and never stopped.
But I undervalue her still.
Because it is still easier to have no needs.
My writing has stopped because I have stopped valuing her - me- whatever.
And now I'm crying again.  It happens so subtly, like falling out of love.
I don't understand these airbrushed photos of women who always have time to wash their hair....and blow-dry it.
I don't understand their struggle and how they turned it into money.
I don't understand how I would ever fit.
I don't know that I want to.

looks simple right?

Because women who are sick don't believe women who are well.
At least not that well.
Not well enough to be on Oprah.

But I started out this whole thing because I realize I will never be "fixed."
There is nothing to fix. I wanted to help people like me, if I could.  I thought, "At least we won't be alone, and maybe we could have less shame.  Maybe I will learn something."
Apparently, I was not the first one to have this thought.  People are making money with this idea all over the internet.
They're called life coaches, and they are replacing God.  Or maybe they're just supposed to be the conduit, I don't know.

Last weekend I sat in my kitchen with a good friend picking at my salad.
Not eating it.
"I don't know,"  I trickled, "I've never known this version of myself.  I'm afraid I will look back and realize that I was asleep.  That I should've been more passionate or that I mistook slumber for peace.  Maybe I just feel quiet because actually I am asleep......I probably am."

But if I'm writing.  I know I'm not asleep.  It flows like water, even if it has to find the one crack left, it will come out.  And by "it" I mean the truth.  I know it because I cry and I find myself writing things I never would have known were there.

What is there now?
I am afraid I will be absorbed by my husband and my kids.
I'm afraid I already am.

Yesterday I went climbing and remembered what I am capable of.
I realized, I am not 20.  I realize it even more today.  I walk like an arthritic woman up the stairs.  I have to gather my breath when I pick up a kid, and I make a funny face like I've just sucked on an atomic fireball jawbreaker.
My thighs ache.  My ass aches.  My lats ache.  My abs ache.
I felt fear.  I dragged my kids through the dirt.  I carried two toddlers up and down mountains.
I climbed a crack that kicked my ass 12 years ago, and it did it again...but not quite as bad.
It was me - it was Sarah - doing all that.  Sarah whose hair turns to fire in the sun.

I watched 10 year-old Sophie climb a 5.10a crack.  She never voiced fear.  She was a tiny woman in her taut calves and the arms of her father.
The trail up to the climb  is the same one I hiked 11 years ago when I was in labor with her.
I called my Aunt from the top,
"I think I'm in labor."
"Where are you?"
"Up in the canyon rock climbing."
"Why are you in the mountains if you're in labor!?  Get down and go to the hospital!"
"It's not that bad yet.  I'll go down soon..."

I can withstand so much, but not stagnation.  It will kill me faster than anything.

Sophie took this picture of me, and I didn't know it.  So I guess it's pretty accurate.