The Mother You Didn’t Have

If you spent more than 15 minutes looking for a Mother’s Day card because reading the sentimental ones made you feel like a hypocrite, sad, or guilty, welcome to today’s blog.

Prickly plant seedhead.

If your childhood was happy and you had a mother who gave you everything you needed and no card is sweet enough, today’s blog is not for you. And most likely, you are with your mom, being happy.

Anna Jarvis, who invented American Mother’s Day in 1908 was angered by the commercialization by the early 1920s. So you are not alone if you think the holiday is a lot of hype for cards and candy. Most likely, that’s not your heartache. You never had the mother you wanted. The one who comforted you and praised you and loved you when you were unlovable and  helped without anger when you sewed the pieces of your gingham skirt together backwards. Twice.

Maybe you chose not to be a mother and everyone asks you why, or you wanted to be a mother and it didn’t happen for you and you are still pretending that’s just fine.

It’s complicated. Whether your mother was cruel or uncaring or clueless, the pain is there. If your mother is still alive, you probably won’t be able to have the big turnaround, awakening and happy ending your friends keep promising you. If your mother is dead, you may replay scenes, wondering if you had acted differently, if the results would have been different. You’ll never know, but a wild guess tells me No. Some things can’t be changed, fixed, or healed. And never by one person. Two people, a mother and her child, might be able to cobble together a relationship, but it’s hard.

The relationships between mothers and daughters is always hard. There is unwritten jealousy between age and experience and youth and naivete. There is anger in lost opportunities and unmet expectations.  For some, the fact that you were a daughter was enough of a disappointment to fill a lifetime. I ran across this quote yesterday, whose poignancy was hard to read:

“Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn’t. ” – Marge Piercy

But here is a truth you might want to hear right now, today, on Mother’s Day. You cannot be anyone else except the person you are today, with all your faults, experiences, hardships, joys, stumbles, successes and backslides. That is also true of your mother. No matter what happened, your awareness and work brought you to where you are today.

And starting today, you can choose to be generous and kind and patient. Maybe

The long shadow doesn’t have to haunt you.

not with your mother, but with the women who surround you. The ones who work with you and don’t meet your expectations. The pretty ones who get promoted ahead of you.  The ones who don’t take the opportunities you wanted and they have the freedom to turn down. All those women you meet on your path during the day. You can swallow the angry remark. You can wish them well. You can choose not to judge. That is your choice now. And choosing that freedom instead of choosing retribution is worth celebrating. Today and every day.

–-Quinn McDonald’s mother has been dead for almost 10 years, and the shadow still falls across the path on some days.

The Hard Work of Hard Work

When I teach work skills to the unemployed, there is a section about re-writing your resume for online job applications, and I tell the class the two steps that are vital to make your resume visible. Inevitably, someone asks if they need to post a new resume for every job application. When I say yes, there are frowns.

Without direction, you are just wandering. Image from rambling-frans.blogspot

Hands shoot up in protest. I hear about a friend who never updated his resume who got a great job, a woman who wore flip-flops and torn jeans to an interview and got the job, the cousin who got laid off and in a month the boss begged them to come back because they were indispensable. It’s the urban legend and Holy Grail of the unemployed–there is a job that is wonderful, pays well, has a great boss and is easy to find. And then comes the clincher: all you have to do is manifest it by believing, or praying, or following the steps in The Secret.

The horrible truth right now in Phoenix is that there are not enough jobs for everyone who wants one, and the only way to find a job is to keep looking for one. It’s hard, tedious work, and the best person is not always chosen. But you can’t stop trying. And while I believe in prayer and having goals, and positive thinking, I do not believe in magical thinking.

I do not believe that the websites that promise you the “job of your dreams” if only you click on “tell me how” or takes you to another page that doesn’t list a price for anything, and calls the money they are scamming from you, your “investment.” I’ve seen the same websites for finding the partner of your dreams, the SEO of your website’s dreams, and the secret that will make your video go viral.

What’s missing from all of this the is practical application of the ancient Arab wisdom about losing your transportation: “Pray to Allah, but tie up your camel anyway.”

I believe in hard work. I know that people with connections often get the job before people who would be better suited. But if you don’t have connections, you are going to have to work around that lack. In the end, it is doing the heavy lifting, the tedious application, the refusal to give up that moves you along your journey. You can chose to sing to make the work easier, laugh to make the time lighter, or pray for spiritual support and strength. In the end, what you get from your effort is what you put into it. There isn’t any other way.

—-Quinn McDonald has not yet manifested the magical short cut. So she’s doing the work, plodding along the trail, and keeping a journal.

No Safety Guarantees

After the police arrested the Marathon Bomber in Boston, one of the students interviewed said, “Now we can go back to our life. We don’t have to be scared anymore. There is nothing to fear.” He’s so very wrong. The idea that two bombers caught make the problem go away is a false one. And every time a terrorist attack occurs, we (understandably) want it to be over so we can have our lives back. Go back to what we were doing before we had to think about dying. But that isn’t real, and our lives have changed forever already. There is no going back. There is no closure. People died. People had their legs blown off.

And still, there is a huge difference between living IN fear and living WITH fear. When we live with fear, we understand the world around us is unsteady and not in our control. We promote kindness, compassion and understanding because that is what we can do at the individual level. We understand that death is not within our control, and that someday we, our family and friends will die–maybe of old age, maybe of disease, maybe because a terrorist bomb found us.

Fear, from beaconblog.com

When we live in fear, we become suspicious, angry and controlling. We trade essential freedoms for the hope of safety, and wind up with missing freedoms and no guarantee of safety.  We refuse to think about death as anything except a cruel cheat, and something that happens to others. And we lose our creativity.

Fear is the big scourge of creativity. Fear robs us of flexibility, agility, choices, and the glory of uncertainty. When we live in fear, uncertainty is the enemy (along with almost everything else.) Instead of spending time in creative thinking, we spend time in isolation, developing rationalizations for “them” and “us” thinking. Anything different, unusual, or non-conforming is suspicious, maybe even dangerous.

The very root of creativity is in different, risky, and strange. There are many countries whose citizens have had to adapt to war–Somalia, the Sudan, Mali, Palestine, Israel, Pakistan, Afghanistan–all have innocent citizens whose lives are directed by war they don’t want, and don’t agree with. But yet, there they are, in the middle of a war, still trying to feed the family and provide a normal life for their children.

Creativity is both exciting and calming, involved in giving up and expanding anew. But let fear in the studio, and it vanishes. Fear makes you small. It takes courage to be creative. But it’s worth it.

—Quinn McDonald’s mother was lost to fear. She doesn’t want to follow in those footsteps.

Photo Struggle

It’s so normal to add a photo to your Facebook page, your blog, even your business card. We have cameras in our phones, and use them, sometimes more often than phoning. We change our profile shots, we Skype so we can talk face to face. It’s  the new normal. There are big, bloviated reasons for loving photos of ourselves. “We are visual people, so we want to know the person we are talking to,” says a well-known blog marketer. “We have an affinity for faces, and we like to look at others,” says a coaching company, who won’t let you have a listing without a photo.

But the real reason we want to see photos is one we talk less about. We like people like ourselves. So we look for people just like our ideal self. We eliminate by age, by gender, by race, by clothing, by glasses, by teeth color. We judge. We eliminate not by experience or content of soul, but by looks. Photos are handy for that. It wasn’t too long ago that a college admission form had to include a photo. Guess who didn’t get in? The ones that “just wouldn’t fit in” at that school.  At the same time, of course, we espouse equality.

Watch out for those grapes and apples–they have more carbs than you might think.

Here’s my experience of equality: Since last October 3rd,  I have lost about 50 pounds. That’s the weight of the average seven-year-old. I am the same person I was 50 pounds ago. But my life is different now. I get help in stores more quickly. People in clothing stores are polite to me.  Grocery store checkers don’t comments on the contents of my grocery cart anymore.  I’d used to hear, “Is this all for you?” Or, “How long will this last you?”

While I still need to lose weight, it’s been a record-setting three weeks since a complete stranger came up to me and suggested a diet. This used to happen three to four times a week–a woman (it was always a woman) would step up to me at the library or grocery store and suggest a diet that had “done wonders” for her.

When I mentioned diabetes, I was often told that I had brought it on myself, by eating sugar (or gluten, or not enough kale, or whatever people felt like saying.  A well-known crafter once said that fat people took up too much space in the world. Thirty of her friends agreed with the statement on Facebook. Some of them belonged to minority-factions themselves, but did not feel compelled to consider their piling-on as defamatory or hurtful.

So, no, I didn’t want to post a photo on my site. Because we absolutely, positively judge the overweight as undesirable. Fat people may the the one group that we still make fun of, tease, taunt and feel self-righteous and justified in dishing out the mean-girl words.

When we want to describe a problem as difficult to overcome, it’s a “big, fat” problem. If a business “trims the fat” it becomes “lean and mean” which is a good thing.

The changes in my life are profound. I have chosen to control my blood sugar by diet. No “just give yourself a little insulin and have this cake.” No pill to cover a guilty pleasure of a glass of wine. It’s an incredibly hard choice to make, but it makes me be aware of how I live and how I choose to nourish myself. There are no more treats in the way I defined them–no more cookies, no chocolate covered ginger, no fresh cornbread.  There cannot be, ever again. It is not a choice I recommend, because it reminds me of loss. In my case, it also fills me with gratitude, and the desire to make the same choices again. I get sick if I make mistakes, so I make fewer mistakes.

And yes, I had a head shot taken. Not because I lost 50 pounds, but because too many workshops, training and speaking opportunities won’t come your way unless you have a head shot to show. And because, for me, this is who I am. If you don’t like the photo, you absolutely won’t like the personality that comes with it.

--Quinn McDonald still has weight to lose. But she’s moving ahead step by rocky step. She will always wish she could eat ice cream, but she will never have to give up Inktense watercolor pencils.

Rick and His Journey

Journey showed up in the front row of the first class I ever taught in Arizona. She was tiny and frail and before class she told me she has stopped journaling. As the class was a journaling class, I asked if she knew the reason. She didn’t know, she said, she had journaled for about 40 years and suddenly had stopped. Should she be worried? Maybe she was distilling, I suggested.  Journey hadn’t heard about distilling–waiting to see what becomes important when you stop writing.

After class I told her about distilling a journal–reading through older journals, looking for phrases that defined a moment, writing that explained an event economically, a string of emotions that tied the past to the future. Journey loved the idea and we corresponded about the process.

When she came to my next class, all smiles, and she brought the distilling journal, filled with sketches and ideas. She had started to journal again.

Journey got her name because she ran away from home constantly as a child. She never got far, but she didn’t quit, either. She had a lot of traveling to do, a lot of world to see.

Journey wasn’t an illustrator, but she had an amazing intuition and insight. She began to send me clever gifts as she traveled on business– and they always made me grin in amazement at how well she knew my mind. A journal made from a cookbook from Powell’s Bookstore in Portland. Index card holders for my index card obsession. A giant, three-foot pencil that looked like my logo. She gave for the pleasure of giving.

Her eyesight began to fail, and one day, she took a class I was trying out in my apartment. I asked her how she had driven the two hours to get to class. Rick, her husband, had driven her. He never came in, he waited for her as she took classes. He never complained, he brought work to make the most of the time.

Last fall, Journey told me she was ill. I asked if I could come see her, and she said No, she was failing and she didn’t want me to see her looking ill. It was hard. But respecting her wish gave her the privacy she wanted. More important than my need to see her.

We exchanged emails; every time I had vivid dreams about her. She made a decision so hard and filled with tough courage, it made my heart ache. She was not going to fight her disease, she was going to die in full dignity, at home.

Last week, when I was in Sedona, I took a copy of my book with me to show a class member. I woke up from a dream of Journey so vivid it took me a few seconds to realize it was a dream. A few hours later, when I got up, Raw Art Journaling was open on the desk; open to Journey’s contribution to the book.

Image from http://the4onerun.blogspot.com/

So I was not surprised when I heard from Rick that Journey had died while I was in Sedona. He had cared for her himself, watching her slip from his life,  making her comfortable as they saw the end and the beginning come closer.

I wish for all of you a Journey in your life– a spark of determination and creativity, a blast of insight and love. For me, I will keep a spiritual light on in the window for her. She read my blog first thing every morning, before breakfast. This one is for you Journey, and for you Rick. You are my heroes.

—Quinn McDonald has met and loved amazing souls in her life. And she thinks many of them are still with us.

The Noise Inside

Yesterday’s responses to the blog about music in an art class were incredible. I blog about creativity because it’s not always easy to do the hard work that creativity demands. And it’s not always easy to ask for what you need to be creative or to keep working if you don’t get it.

Standing up for yourself, from Annie’s Ink.

Those of us who step up into our creativity every day get told “No” a lot. Sometimes we have to accept No, and sometimes we have to use No as a starting point and keep working through it. It’s hard to know when to accept and when to push on.

Your suggestions, support, ideas, and solutions floored me. They were wry, helpful, insightful, and smart. Some were even funny. I read a lot of blogs, and I rarely see the community and the deep wisdom that shows up in the comments on my blog. But most of all, I felt heard. I felt part of a bigger group that lives in different places and has had different lives and still shares experiences and emotions.

What caused me so much of a problem in the class was the feeling of being “other” and “different.” It’s a big issue in my life. As Pema Chodron reminds us, in her book, When Things Fall Apart:

. . .nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. if we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. it just keeps returning with new names, forms, manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves.

Writers and artists are always going to be the “others” and “different.” It’s part of our job. We won’t fit in smoothly. Creativity demands we see things from many perspectives, make meaning in new ways, and show those ways to a world that doesn’t want to change. Seth Godin, in his book Tribes,  calls creative leaders “The Heretics in the Boardroom.”

From Lady Employed, in a post about standing up for yourself, which includes this gem: “but I have a rule that when I am wondering whether nothing is something, it’s usually something.

Yes, I was raised not to make a fuss, to always think of myself as the least important person in the room, to never call attention to myself. And yes, that is hard to overcome.  For years,  I have been a warrior for social justice. And sometimes, I get to think of myself as someone who needs a slice of that justice. And asking for it in a calm way is my right.

One of the commentors, Katherine Colgan, said something that rang true to the bone. And then I remembered–it is what I discussed with a coaching client to resolve her problem just last week. What I can do for others, I struggle doing for myself. Here’s what Katherine said:

I would have talked to the instructor privately at the next break, explained my difficulty working with sound, that I was finding it difficult to concentrate, that I was losing the benefit of the class and feeling really bad about that, and that I was hoping she could help me. If she seemed nonplussed, I would offer whatever solutions I thought were appropriate and ask what she thought would be best and fairest to everyone.

See? No victimhood, no demands, just a steady working toward a solution. Thanks to everyone of you who left a comment. You make me smarter and stronger and I depend on your wisdom.

The best ending to the discussion is that I heard from the instructor. She offered an apology, which I thought was brave and kind. She also wished I’d talked to her directly. And next time (because I know Pema is right, and I will run into this again) I will put on my big girl panties and express what I need, instead of letting the Inner Critic tell me I need to suck it up. Again.

Thanks for all of you for showing up, for speaking out, for offering support. It’s an amazing experience to be in such excellent company.

--Quinn McDonald is filling up a gratitude journal with what she learned in the last 24 hours.

 

 

The Noise Around Us

“There is music everywhere.
This is what strikes me most about my first few minutes walking about the flying city of Columbia in Irrational Games’s upcoming BioShock Infinite”
—.From Erik Kain’s review of BioShock Infinite in Forbes magazine, Dec. 07, 2012.

It’s hard to be different, an outsider, and still feel part of a group. Living in Arizona, and having a different view on immigration and, well, a lot of other issues, I have learned to keep my opinions to myself. After all, if the dentist has sharp instruments in your mouth and is on a rant, you don’t want to disagree too strenuously.

There’s such a conflict rising in me when I hear someone saying something I don’t agree with, particularly if it’s mean. I think the quote attributed to Edmund Burke, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” or the William Butler Yeats quote, “The  best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” It’s from the poem The Second Coming.

This is how I felt.

So it was that I felt really conflicted in a recent class, when one of the participants, without asking, turned on her iPad and began to play music loud enough for all to hear. She insisted she had to have music to work. Unfortunately, I can’t work if music is playing. Yes, I know this is odd. We are surrounded by music. My bank has a braying TV on all day, so does every doctor’s office, airport, restaurant, car repair shop, sports equipment shop, pet store and harware store. Still, my studio is quiet. For me, being grounded and in the moment means being quiet so I can hear what I’m thinking.

In class, I asked, somewhat fearfully, if we could work without music. Two or three class members said they liked music. There was no vote, and about 12 class members, so the three who spoke up weren’t a majority. But no one agreed with me. So the music stayed. There was no offer of compromise. No agreement that when the music-needer went to lunch, she could turn off her iPad. The woman at the table in front of me began to sing with the music. I’m sure she was all heart, but she was also off-key. For three days, it did not change.

And so I sat at my table, trying to focus. I had paid a full fee to be in the class.

And this is what it sounded like (just to me).

Did I have a right to ask the music-needer to put on earphones? I lacked the nerve. So I put mine on and listened to white noise, which helped me focus, but I stayed unhappy.

I had to do a lot of self-management, and felt alone and disconnected. Not one person suggested that we alternate or that a vote be taken. When I tried to turn down the sound when music-needer went to lunch, she came back, turned it back up, and asked the women who agreed with her if they wanted it on at lunch. Yep, they did. Still, only three.

Finally, I had to settle. I was not going to get a ruling from the instructor, who had been present for the conversations. I was not going to get a break from music-needer. So I went back to my earphones and did what I usually do when I am distracted and unheard: reviewed goals. Set priorities.  I’d come to learn the technique, to create a piece with that technique and to get feedback. That part was happening. So my goals were being met. Past that, things were not going to go my way, but my top priority was met. I sucked it up.

I’m still not sure if I should have done more. I don’t know what I could have done. A vote might have clarified things, but it would have had to be called by the instructor. I was aware that I wasn’t in charge, and wasn’t getting support. Past that, I was also not getting what I needed to work in class.

What are the rights of people who prefer silence? Or who prefer music? Where is the line between getting your way and bullying? When class participants disagree, is compromise possible?

What would you have done?

—Quinn McDonald is looking for answers, and trying to be fair.

 

Evolution of Koi

When artists are juried into a show, one of the standard requirements is that the piece contain “the hand of the aritst,” or sometimes, more directly, “the fingerprints of the artist.” What juries are looking for is evidence that an artist has a personal viewpoint, an original take, a fresh viewpoint. That concept was one of the great lessons I learned in the collage class I took this weekend.

I started with a traditional Japanese koi painting, done by many artists:

From there I did the underpainting, trying to keep to the original shape. But already the chop, the red-square signature block was gone,  the image was rotated to make it horizontal, and the traditional poem was gone. The painting also gave the fish a lot more background.

In class, there were problems to solve. To keep the original background smooth and even, I’d have to apply a single sheet of paper over the board, re-apply the fish, then collage them on. While that’s a choice, it didn’t feel like collage to me. I wanted to show movement, ripples, even waves of active fish swimming.

While in Sedona, I visited a gallery that was having a showing of the instructor’s work, and noticed that in a collage she did of koi, there was a distinct splash of ripples.

After some thought I decided to move away from a monochromatic background, and create the entire setting as a field of ripples, in blues and whites and ivories.

Not only that, but when I was working, the instructor told me that the koi did not have to be orange and black, that a more impressionistic view was fine, even desirable. She suggested several different pieces of paper that worked well, but weren’t orange or black.

In the end, I decided that the original placement of fish–orange on top and the shadowy gray on the bottom, was what worked best. The image isn’t complete, but this is where I am now:

It’s not the traditional koi, it’s the constant movement of koi, creating a push and pull of color and action. As artists, we interpret the world in our own way, and when we talk about it to others, we show them what we see through our eyes via artwork–collage, writing, idea presentation.

This evolution of koi is personal, my vision. Several members of the class didn’t like it,(which is fine with me). That’s the point of art–it’s not really meant to please, or to match the sofa or drapes. It’s meant to show a view of the world through the artist’s eyes, and satisfy the artist in some way. If it pleases others, well, then, that’s a great bonus. Had I decided to create a piece that pleased the majority of the class, I would have pleased no one fully. Least of all myself. In creating a piece that delighted me, I can explain a viewpoint clearly. For me, that’s art.

--Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach working on creative projects.

The Box of Stuff

Somewhere, out in the dark, is a box of materials I used in Cincinnati to make art. In theory, it is the most important of my art supplies. My studio, however, isn’t empty. I am lacking pens and watercolor pencils, but if I dig hard enough, I’d find something to draw with.

Or, I could do it the other way, and say that what is in the box is more important, and I need to get rid of things in the studio. All those “things” are not making me a better artist, but it is making it harder for me to find things I need. I’ve actually purchased things knowing that I had another one someplace, but couldn’t find it.

So maybe it’s time to pare away some of the stuff and keep what’s needed at the moment. Stop buying things unless I know exactly how much and what for. Yes, I may need some of it at some point in the future. But I also have a huge amount of items labeled “for class”–extra pairs of scissors and paints and inks and paper, rubber stamps and things I may or may not need for class. I actually don’t know how to sort those out, because I am still creating classes.

But there are things I must decide on, things that have to go somewhere else.

We’ve all played the game where we pretend the house is on fire and decide what we would save and what could burn to ashes. We consider books and photos, clothing and credit cards. I once had to make that decision. About 10 years ago, the roofers set our house on fire (it was a training issue), and when I called 911, the operator told me to get out of the house immediately, not to take anything.

I pulled the cat carriers out of the closet and the cats, knowing that I must surely be taking them to the vet, vanished into the burning house. I paused for a long 15 seconds, and watched smoke pouring down the stairs. I weighed the chance of finding the cats in a smoke filled house, and the cats figuring out that fresh air was outside. And then I realized that nothing would be saved if I stood in the house while it collapsed onto me. I picked up my purse and left the house.

And that was the answer–you will not gather up your clothing and your paintings, your child’s drawings and your first editions. You will pick up your purse and walk away.  In my case, the roof collapsed through my studio and the cats were found in the basement by the firefighters who know where to look for them. All of them survived with the help of oxygen, and all of them are living with us to this day.

So I’m going to do some sorting and thinking and reducing. I think it will be lead to something that needs space.

–Quinn McDonald is an artist making room for something wonderful to take place.