Falling Apart

It's been over a year since I wrote a post.  A lot has happened.  We lost both of Shawn's paternal grandparents within six months of each other.  Shawn quit his job to go to filmmaking school in San Francisco.  I lost my job trying to figure out how to be the wife that Shawn wanted me to be - supportive of his dream even though it shattered all of mine.  And our marriage fell apart.  We finally acknowledged that his dreams have done a complete 180 from what OUR dreams were together. 

So I have been a somewhat emotional train wreck that just kept gathering momentum.   We talk, but it is more like friends calling to see what the other one is up to.  No words of love.  Not allowed. 

Tonight I came home from a cook off that I took part in.  I was feeling pretty good.  Shawn's avoidance of talking to me in anything other than platonic terms is helping me to realize that he really doesn't see me in his life anymore.  I woke up this morning for the first time in a while and it didn't hurt so much not to wake up without him.  Because through all of the fighting and resentment and hurt I still found solace just having his arms around me and laying my head on his chest at night.  And it is all I have wanted for weeks now.  But I have to let it go.  Anyway.  Back to coming home.  I walked in the door and the very first thing I see is one of my very favorite coffee cups shattered on the floor.  I had left it next to the sink this morning and Bella had pulled it off of the counter.  This cup was special - one of a kind, irreplaceable.  Shawn's mom bought it for me in Caltagirone, Italy on a trip and I have loved it ever since.  I should have put it away a long time ago, but there was something about drinking coffee out of this mug that brought back so many good memories that I just kept drinking out of it.  And now it lay shattered on my kitchen floor.  I just knelt down to pick up the pieces and began sobbing.  And I sobbed, and screamed even, angry that I had been so stupid as to leave it within her reach if she misbehaved.  Angry that it had to be THIS cup, not one of the more generic ones that didn't matter as much.  Angry that this happened when it seems like so much is going wrong.  The dogs were so alarmed that they went and hid.  Bella went outside and lingered at the fringes of the light, knowing that SHE was the reason for my grief.  Normally she is so attuned to my moods that if I am even the tiniest bit sad she comes and licks me and tried to put her paw on me.  But not this time.  This time she knew it was because of her that I was curled up in a ball on the floor crying my eyes out, holding a silly piece of pottery and crying over it as if it were a living thing.  But I realized that it was the culmination of all of the grief from the last few weeks, months and even years that was releasing itself over broker shards of pottery.

As if on cue, Shawn called at that moment.  I don't know why I even answered the phone in the state I was in.  He sounded alarmed until he heard the reason for my sobs, then he said he was sorry but it didn't sound sincere.  Shawn has always been so sympathetic to my hurts and when he says he is sorry you can tell in his voice that he is sincere.  This wasn't the same.  So when we got off the phone I cried some more.  Poor Ryker, he came and stayed by me for the longest time.  Then I dried my eyes, got up and went to find Bella and hug her.  And that is how I will look at things - dry my eyes, pick my ass up and do what needs to be done.  The hurt will lessen over time and I will work to achieve MY dreams without feeling like I didn't have the right to dream for myself anymore.  I will pick up the shattered pieces of pottery and drink out of a different cup.

Moving On...

I have told the story of my grandmother's death and the time up until we found out the truth of what my mother did with her body.  My mother was sentenced to time in prison, with time served and the chance at early parole.  

By the mid-nineties my marriage was coming apart.  There had been a couple of abusive incidents and my answer to this was to go out with my girlfriends on the weekends.  I still didn't think that I was one of those "abused wives" that you see covered in bruises - these incidents only happened every six months or so.  Then there was the afternoon that I came home on a Saturday from work, exhausted.  I just wanted to sit back on the couch and relax for a few minutes.  My husband was roughhousing with my oldest son and I asked them if they could please stop for a while so I could get some peace and quiet.  It kept on.  I asked again, and again - until finally I just stood up and said, "I'm going for a drive to relax."  I walked back out towards the Jeep and heard him come out the door.  Before I turned around all of the way he had slammed into me, and that was all I remember.  I just climbed in the Jeep.  Then, he pushed my son out the door, called him a 'pussy' and told him to go with me.  Without a word we just pulled out.  Within a few blocks his teeth were chattering - it gets cold really quick in Washington when the sun goes down. - and I knew I had to swallow my pride and ask to get a jacket for my son so that he could be warm.  So I stopped at a phone booth and told Ron that we needed to come back for jackets.  He said that I needed to come back because base security was there.  The neighbors had seen his freight train rush at me and called the police.  So we went back and they took him away, and asked me a few questions.  They said that the neighbors saw him hit me.  I didn't recall being hit.  They asked me if I felt sore anywhere and I realized my upper arm was hurting.  I pulled up my sleeve and my whole bicep was dark purple.  So he wasn't allowed to come home for three days...(wow) and was instructed to attend anger management classes.  

As he deployed my friends and I spent more and more time hanging out with the Explosive Ordnance Disposal guys from the base.  They were a lot of fun to hang out with and they didn't seem too concerned with what other people thought of them.  I made a few good friends out of that group, although they were chauvinistic assholes at times.  They had a lot of groupies.  Then came the night that I saw Shawn.  My friend Brenda and I were having a couple of beers and saw our buddies with a new guy.  He was VERY drunk and had already been cut off.  He could barely walk a crooked line, much less a straight one and we had quite a laugh at his expense....

Next time we met was in October.  Shawn's best buddy Kevin called Brenda and asked us if we would take him out for his 25th birthday because most of his friends were on various jobs away from the island.  So we met him and had a few drinks with him and some other friends, then we realized that our friend Tracy had wandered out.  Somehow she had climbed in the back of my Jeep and passed out.  We had no idea how we were going to get her home and get her out of the back.  So a bunch of us went to Taco Bell and the friendship began.  I always felt comfortable around Shawn, even when I barely knew him, like I wasn't expected to talk and make conversation just to make noise.

Then came the point when Brenda told Kevin and Shawn about my marriage.  All of a sudden I had a lot of very protective 'big brothers' worrying about me.  And Kevin and Shawn gave me a key to their condo and told me to 'use it if I needed it'.  Not much was said about why.

I was beginning to realize that I had more feelings for Shawn than I should.  And it scared me.  We had a great time together, but he was younger, single and enjoying it.  And he would be leaving when his tour was up.   He and his buddies taught my oldest son how to snowboard, and bought him blue hair dye when he complained I wouldn't let him dye his hair.  After all, it wasn't their kid right?  And yes, that is the excuse I got.

Then everything came apart at home.  I was so uncomfortable with my husband (and falling in love with a man that I thought would be leaving in another year) that we hadn't been together for a long time. We slept in the same bed, but I always found myself at the edge of it, and always fully clothed.  One day, we were having a disagreement, not a fight.  There wasn't any yelling going on.  I said something and next thing I knew he was on top of me, choking me.  Then nothing.  Then I came to realizing that my oldest son, who was 14 at the time, had come in and pulled him off of me and was trying to keep him away from me.  And my two little ones were in their room crying and screaming "You're killing momma!  You're killing momma!".  That was it.  I didn't say a word, just went to the kids and sat in their room hugging them.  He hung around and kept saying he knew he had to leave, as if waiting for me to say no, and finally left.  Then Shawn showed up.  Joel had called him.  He didn't stay, just looked at us all and asked if we were alright, shaking his head.

That was my wake up call.  My oldest son had literally saved my life.  My kids were terrified.  I couldn't let them grow up thinking this was normal.  So I began the divorce proceedings.  The retired judge who helped me told me that only 5% of abusers learn to quit.  And that abuse always escalates, usually ending in death if the victim takes no action.  (As it could have for me.)  I found a place to live.  And dealt with Ron stalking me through town on my lunch break.  Kind of hard to do when you drive a bright red IROC-Z, by the way.  So my bosses started letting me use cars off of the car lot and I would sometimes drive right past Ron as he was out looking for me.  I was thankful when he took orders to California.  I felt bad the day he left, but I knew I had made the right decision.  I was on my own, a single mom with my kids and a dog.  Scared, but free.

Like a Freight Train...

Sometimes the memories flood in - things you haven't thought much about for years.  Today, a song came on that I hadn't heard in years. It was "Everything I Own" by Bread, from 1972.  It was also the last song I used for a ballet solo, since I quit ballet when I was 15 because I was more interested in a boy.  My mom was so disappointed in me - I had been taking ballet since I was a little girl.

So, this song comes on.  I turn it up and next thing I know I am that young teenage girl again - performing my solo in my den in front of my two dogs, who don't quite know what to think.  Not as thin and not as graceful, but in my mind I can see the dark royal blue leotard with silver sequins and a matching ballet skirt and I am there again.

Then comes the freight train of  memories with the following verse:

"Is there someone you know
You're loving them so
But taking them all for granted
You may lose them one day
Someone takes them away
And they don't hear the words you long to say"

and I become a sobbing heap on the floor - huge, gasping, grieving sobs for so much that has been lost in the forty years since I last danced.  And the realization that I am also grieving what is happening in my life - the widening gap between the man that I love more than I thought possible and myself.  Because we both love each other, but we are both taking for granted that somehow this huge mess is going to work out - he is convinced that somehow I will come to love living in the confined spaces of a boat in places where I can find no privacy or peace or quiet, and I am convinced that somehow, as he continues to follow his dream with or without me, that he will be ready to settle down when it is done in one place and want me there beside him.  Deep down I know I will lose him to his dreams, and the words we don't say to each other are becoming an ever deeper abyss. 

This was in 1972 - I was nine in this one.

It Is Time...Part I

I started this blog over two years ago planning to use it as a form of catharsis - to tell some of the stories of my life, but ultimately to tell the story of my mother and grandmother.  But I kept shying away from it.   So now, after finding myself wide awake shortly after 3 a.m. I am going to truly begin.  So here goes...

On Friday, December 8, 1989 there was a knock on my door.  (We had moved to our first duty station at Whidbey Island, Washington the previous May, and Erika had been born a month later.  We lived in a very tiny two bedroom unit in military housing, and we hadn't had the money to get phone service, so our neighbors let us use theirs when we needed to. ) It was my neighbor, Ellen, and she told me that my mother was on the phone and needed to talk to me. 

My mother told me that my grandmother had died.  If you have read my blog before this post, you know that my grandmother had Alzheimer's, and that she lived with my mother.  She was in the advanced stages of the disease when I last saw her before our move.  But she had died three days earlier, on Tuesday, December 5.  My mother told me that she hadn't called me right away because she "knew I wouldn't have had the money to come home for the funeral" and thought that if she waited it would save me from having to agonize over it.  I was heartbroken, but it made some sense.  I didn't know at the time that the Red Cross helps family members get home for funerals of immediate family.  I had had no experience with death before.

Fast forward to December of 1991.  My son Brandon had been born on December 13th, and it was the week before Christmas.  My ex-husband called and told me that he thought he should call me before I heard it on the news - my mother had been arrested for social security and pension fraud related to the suspected murder of my grandmother.  Even now, over twenty years later, writing it down hurts almost as badly as it did that day.  I don't remember very much of the next few minutes, just the shattering shock that I felt.  

The following months were a nightmare.  There were calls from prosecutors and defenders alike who tried to lead me into speculative answers about what had been going on in the time leading up to my grandmother's death.  I was truthful, but when they tried to get me to cross that line I just refused.  They asked if my mother ever displayed abusive actions.  So I told them about the night that she tried to push me down the stairs, and how on that same night my grandmother tried to come out of her room in my defense and of my mother slamming her arm repeatedly in the door until she withdrew it and stayed inside.  How that was the night I left, sneaking downstairs to say goodbye to my brother and tell him that I loved him.  (That night my grandmother came into my room and told me to go, hugging me and stroking my hair as she had done when I was little).  

During all of this my then-husband had an affair because he felt he wasn't getting enough attention.  I remember how dumb-founded I felt at his reason - I had had a baby in the middle of a move to larger housing , found out my grandmother was possibly murdered, my mother had been arrested - and I was supposed to make him the center of attention somehow.  Somehow we worked through it, and for a while it actually seemed to make our marriage better.  

The events leading up to my mother's arrest began to come out.  The phone call to me three days after my grandmother's death was part of her cover up.  She did something similar with my sister, telling her that there would be no service and that my grandmother's ashes were sent to Texas for scattering.  And my brother, who actually lived in the house at the time?  The day before Grandma died, Mom told him that she thought Grandma might die soon and she didn't want him there to see it, and sent him to my father's house in northern Alabama.  

At this point you may be asking what seems to be a pretty obvious question:  Why didn't the siblings discuss this and figure out that something was wrong?  Because we weren't close enough, that's why.  Even then, I had already had a falling out with my sister and we weren't on speaking terms.   As for my brother, I always heard about him from my mother.  He lived in the same house, so if I called Mom always answered the phone and if I asked about him I got his news from her - he was usually out doing something and even if he was home she always said he was 'busy' and so I rarely got to talk to him.  It didn't strike us as odd - that was just the way it was.  My mother had built up these walls for years - as it turns out she had done it with a purpose every time.  More on that later.

We had relatives in Texas, whom we hadn't spoken with since we had moved away (remember the walls).  One of them was my grandmother's nephew, Johnny.  Since both of my parents were only children, we had called him Uncle when we were little.  Uncle Johnny was very close to my grandmother, and unbeknownst to me, had been staying in touch with my mother as a means of learning about Grandma's health.  As her Alzheimer's had progressed and after her death, my mother continued to respond to his letters with news of my grandmother's decline.  I have never seen them, but in the fall of 1991 he had begun to grow suspicious of what was actually going on and hired a private investigator, John Dear, to go to Alabama and find out what was happening.  This investigator discovered that my grandmother's church had a notation of her death in their books - my grandmother was an avid churchgoer before she could no longer do it, and members had been trying to come by and see her for some time.  (They had always been politely turned away at the door.)  Somehow my mother had slipped, or perhaps out of some sense of guilt, had notified Grandma's church of her death.   Mr. Dear then began watching what was going on at my mother's house.  A few days before her arrest he began to become alarmed when he found that she was getting rid of lots of papers, and he contacted the authorities.  Her arrest followed shortly after.

My mother was the news headline in the area for quite some time.  She had been a pillar of the community in so many ways - always involved in school activities, a formative part of the soccer community when it was still a new sport in the United States, eventual president of the school board, etc. etc.  She was so intelligent, and it is so sad that she used that intelligence in the wrong way.  The authorities dug up parts of the yard looking for evidence - and of course my grandmother's body.  You see, none of the stories she told the various relatives were true.  There had been no cremation, no burial.  No ashes spread in Texas, or Alabama.  The story she told the authorities was that she had had a man named "Johnny" take my grandmother and asked him to bury her under a pretty tree somewhere.  "Johnny" had no last name at the time, and when she did give him one finally, he was dead.

To add to this, my brother was arrested briefly as well.  As he tried to leave the house a day or two after my mother's arrest, he was accosted by a horde of reporters shoving cameras and microphones into his face, trying to get a reaction.  Well, his reaction was to shove one of the cameramen out of his path, and charges were filed.  It was let go, thankfully, when the private investigator kindly stepped into the situation and talked to them about what my brother was enduring.

So the months leading up to her trial passed.  I had been asked by both sides to testify, but ultimately her defense lawyer felt that nothing I would say would help her, so I would be questioned first by the prosecutors.  The trial had already begun by the time I got to Alabama.  My sister and brother had already been questioned.  I went to the courthouse the day before I was to take the stand and arrived in the outer foyer right before her trial let out for the day.  One of my mother's dearest and most steadfast friends came out first, and she saw me and came to me, hugging me.  Other people began to file out, then my sister came out with her husband, Rick, Uncle Johnny, Aunt Charlene,  and a couple of others.  She came straight at me, loudly accusing me of telling lies about her to people, about her doing drugs, stealing, being a liar.  She attracted a lot of attention, as I believe she meant to.  Then my childhood aunt and uncle intervened, telling her that maybe we should get together later at their hotel and talk about all of it.

Tanya and Rick left, and I was reunited with these two kind people who I remembered so well from my childhood.  Before we left Texas we had visited with them and their children often, and I did not know why we had not seen them since.  So we went back to their hotel, and their side of the story began to come out.  They had stayed in contact with my mother all of those years, and she had dutifully filled them in on all of our news...but never told us about it.  If we asked about them as children she always told us that they didn't want to come visit, and we never went back to see anyone.  My mother had carefully, almost surgically, cut our ties to what little family we had in Texas and we never knew it.  

They asked me questions and told me things about my childhood that began opening my eyes to the things that had shaped my mother and led to the tragedy of my grandmother.  They carefully and kindly asked me if I remembered my mother holding a gun to my head and threatening to kill me.  They told me that my mother, at the young age of sixteen, had hit my grandmother if she wasn't allowed to do something she wanted to do.  They told me how my mother had tried to ensnare my sister's father, her boss, into marriage by seducing him and getting pregnant.   It didn't work.  My father was next - another boss, and this time she succeeded.  He married her.  So our lives had moved on, until we moved to Alabama.  Then she began cutting our ties.   Then my parents divorced.  Whatever my grandmother knew about my mother, she was alarmed enough when she learned that my father would no longer be around to protect us that she left everything dear to her in Texas - her sisters, her home, everything familiar - and moved to Alabama to be closer and try to protect us from our mother.  We didn't know any of this at the time of course.  I just know that I loved spending every bit of time that I could at my grandmother's house.  Then, at some point, to make things easier financially she moved in with us.

Then it was time to try to fix things between my sister and I before she got back.  My sister, who I now believe to suffer from the same depression that my mother did, had already moved in with her silver tongue and told her story.  Somehow she had transitioned her actions to me and convinced them before I arrived that I had been the drug addict and the runaway who had stolen the car at 13 and driven it to Oklahoma, but that I needed sympathy, not judgment.  How kind of her.  I still remember how flabbergasted I was by all of this.  Thank God my brother was there and was able to collaborate my version of events.  I did not "slam" her, but I did set the story straight.   Very kindly they said that they did not know or understand her motives, but that we should try to work through our differences and help each other.  When Tanya and Rick arrived it was hugs and tears all around.  

The next morning we arrived at the courthouse. It was my turn.  I would have to face my mother in court and talk about her slamming my grandmother's arm in a door, about how scared of her I was as a child.  The attorney came in and said that apparently my mother didn't want me to testify and had asked to plea bargain that morning.  Everyone was stunned.  And why me?  Maybe because I was the only one of her three children who had refused to step beyond only those events that I had actually witnessed was she concerned about what I might have to say.  That is what the private investigator and the defense attorneys later told me was what they believed.  

Her deal?  She would cooperate with the authorities in the efforts to locate my grandmother in return for a lesser charge of the check fraud and 'abuse and neglect of an elderly person' rather than outright murder.  The prosecutor was rather eager to pursue the more serious charges and I really believe he was disappointed that we agreed to this.  But of course we agreed.  All we wanted was to know where our grandmother was and to be able to give her a proper resting place.   One other part of the deal is that she was not to contact any of her children unless we requested it.  We were all so very angry at her.  How do you continue to talk to your mother when she is not who you thought she was, but a sad, greedy monster who had done something so awful to one of the most wonderful people in the world?

I haven't explained the financial side of it, but of course she had taken control of my grandmother's social security checks as well as her pension checks from her years as a teacher in Texas.  Over the two years after Grandma's death she had received about $24,000.  Before that she wrote herself rent checks from my grandmother's accounts in the amount of $800.00 - a pretty exorbitant amount of money for a smallish three bedroom home in the late 1980's. 

Her plea bargain made headlines throughout the state.  (Her case was the basis for stricter laws related to care of the elderly and handling of their financial affairs, so it did have a positive side to it for others).  We expected to hear news of where we could find our grandmother at any time, but a couple of months went by and all we learned was that she would insist that "Johnny" had buried my grandmother under a pretty magnolia tree in Mississippi - but every time she failed the lie detector tests, so they kept after her.

Then came the phone call from my father.  It was a Saturday morning, and we were getting ready to go to a mall because my husband wanted to go to a pet store there that handled reptiles.  I sat at the kitchen table while my father told me that my mother had been questioned again and this time she told a different story - one that passed the machines they hooked her up to to see if she was telling the truth.

After sending my brother away she sat and waited and watched my grandmother.  She insisted that Grandma died on her own, which may very well have been true.  Then she says that she panicked, thinking about how she would get by without the extra income from my grandmother's checks.  About 3:30 in the morning she had wrapped my beloved grandmother, her own mother, in black garbage bags, put her body in the back of the car and driven out to the Causeway, the old highway over Mobile Bay that connected Mobile to the Eastern Shore.  There, she took my grandmother out of the car and dumped her body over the side of the barrier and into the dark, black water below.  She stood there, smoking, then got in her car, stopped for a six pack and went home and drank it.

When I heard this I felt a nausea overcome me unlike anything I had experienced before.  those words hurt so bad, so deep, that I couldn't even cry at first.  Then I couldn't stop.  All day, in the car, at the mall (yes, my husband still insisted on going - he said it would help keep me from thinking about it - as if I could.)  

So of course we still never did find our grandmother.  Somewhere in the swampy, alligator infested waterways of Mobile Bay and its waterways she sunk below the surface.  She may have been swept out into the Gulf of Mexico for all that we know, but of course we never will. 

I will stop here for now.  Re-telling this exhausts me - it brings back all of the emotions and the hurt.  It took me many years to be able to think of my grandmother without crying, and now I find myself reliving it all again and it hurts as if it was just last week.  I had vowed I would tell this story and now I have begun.  I will move to the next chapter another time.

Feeling Overwhelmed...

Today I am feeling overwhelmed with everything taking place in my life.  There is so much uncertainty, especially in my relationship with Shawn.  I know that he does not need me in his life to continue with his dream.  All that is holding us together at this point is that we do still love each other, deeply.  We don't have meaningful conversations anymore - hell, we hardly have conversations at all.  I am scared to speak, not knowing what words will blow up in my face.  So I stay silent, and he spends all of his spare time looking at anything related to sailing.  At night we still hold each other and know that this touching is truly meant, not just another action that we do out of habit.  I NEED him.  His touch saves me, he is still sexy to me, and his kiss still melts me.  The thought of not being with him breaks my heart.  But his first love is now pursuing his dream to sail the world, and although he wants me there with him he will do it with or without me.  We were talking about his decisions to buy things, to move our finances and other things, without telling me or talking to me about it.  I told him that I feel that I am just HERE.  Not part of a partnership.  He feels that if he offers me a choice in our financial decisions I will "shoot him down".   I realized that we are not in a partnership, nor even a good marriage and I told him so.  We ended our night in silence, except to still tell each other we do love each other.  But it is not enough to sustain us.  

So what do we do - what do I do?  Send him away with my blessing and hope that one day he will understand that I did not want to hold him back, just that my dream and his weren't the same?  Hope that one day he will want to return to me?  Or send him out to do this thing and go to him occasionally?  All I know is that we cannot continue as we are.  Counseling has been suggested, but does not seem to be received with enthusiasm.  And just as we reached a point where we could arrange it, his work schedule has gone topsy turvy and we do not even know where we will be in a month.  But I can't live like this much longer - feeling like I am alone even when he is by my side.

Packing Away My Dreams...

The last year or so has led up to facing today...packing our belongings and choosing what we will keep and what will go away.  Shawn, who has been working in California for over two years, has rediscovered his love for being near the ocean and the home that we bought together in the desert is no longer where he wants to be.  I have fought it - literally and figuratively - since it came up over a year ago, but I cannot afford to pay for our home myself, and I cannot ask Shawn to put his money into a place he has no love for and forego living his own dreams.  And because I love him I am trying to adjust to a new lifestyle away from everything else that I have held dear - my own home, being close to two of our three kids, having SPACE and privacy when I need it.  And someday I still want to have weekends when my grandkids will come over and spend the night, when the family will have dinners at each others' houses on weekends.  I feel suffocated in California - closed in by neighbor's houses and trees, people and traffic everywhere always.  No place where my dogs can run to their hearts' content because they have to be on a leash everywhere.  I have found one spot where I can let them loose and have some privacy, but they aren't really supposed to be there.  

Today is my beautiful daughter's 25th birthday.  Instead of putting the wine rack we bought in Spain into storage I am going to take it to her house so that she can make use of it.  Shawn has agreed to hold onto these mementos of our time overseas, but I don't know that I will ever have a place where I will be able to use them again.  As I began to remove the glasses and bottles, the marble shelves I started crying and had to stop. This has happened before when I have half-heartedly begun this inevitable task, but this was worse.  It is becoming too real, too fast - but it will always be too fast because I never wanted it in the first place.

Am I sad? Yes.  Depressed?  Hell yes.  Resentful?  You bet.  When one person's dreams change and the others don't you just pray that your love is enough to get you both through it.

A New Year

My grandmother painted.  She never made money from it or took the time to create many of her own works, but it was apparently something she longed to do and probably sacrificed the dream for family.  I have one of the three paintings that she did, that we know of - my sister and brother each have the others.  It is a quaint farmhouse scene - one where a little road meanders its way through a field to the farmhouse in the distance.  I am sure that she would have been happy if that could have been her real  life and not the one that she lived.  After the death of my grandfather in a vehicle accident in the late forties she did what she had to do and became a teacher to support herself and my mother, who was 16 at the time.  Then of course, she moved away from her beloved Texas when my parents divorced so that she could be closer to her grandchildren and protect us if needed from what my mother was capable of.  

My sister also took painting lessons and I believe she could have been very good if she had stayed with it.  Unfortunately, drugs became a priority at that time in her life and as far as I know she never painted again.

My mother sang.  That was her talent and her art, but I never heard her sing solo myself.  She won a lot of talent shows with her voice, but I suppose everyday life - school, a job, pursuit of marriage - marked the end of following it any further.  The only time I saw my mother put her name to a piece of art was when she forged her name onto a small painting that she was giving to someone as a birthday present.  I am still ashamed of seeing that to this day.

So this year I will start to paint.  I have wanted to paint in watercolors for many, many years and dabbled with it, but never taking the time to really learn techniques or the proper way to go about it.  I began a couple of days ago, picking out a book to get me started, getting the basic supplies I need and sketching out the first project.  Then, yesterday I did it!  I completed my first project - a monocolor (burnt umber) painting of a brick farmhouse with trees behind it.  While in my minds' eye I had hoped it would come out better than it did, I can't say that I am unhappy with my first attempt.  I see what I need to improve on and will practice on them before moving to the next project.  So we will see.  And maybe I will also try oils one day and use my grandmother's painting as my first project.