I got my painting from my dad, and I got my writing from my mom.

These are recent realizations.

My dad started painting little wooden blocks after he retired. When my daughter Heather saw them, she said “Now I see where you get it from.” His blocks looked very much like some of my abstract paintings.

“No!” I said. “I was doing it long before he was.”

But my dad had it inside him the whole time.

I worked hard at developing my writing style. I prefer to call it “finding my voice”.

Today I read a letter that was written by my mom in 2002.

I never knew my mom could write like that.

I got other things from her, too. My self deprecating tendency. My inability to believe that someone would read, let alone enjoy, let alone treasure what I had created.

I wish I had known.

I wish I had known that my father had it in him to appreciate art. I wish I had known the stories that my mother had to tell while she could still tell them.

These are two of the most important things to me. I know this because when I am all alone, and create a still, peaceful atmosphere to fish for the most important catches in my stream of consciousness, these are the things that come out.

Writing and painting are the ways my body records what I want to remain of me when I am gone.

I recently wrote about my family that “they don’t value what is important to me.”

Now I don’t know if that is true.

The months of June and July have brought upheaval to my life.

In my sci-fi autobiography, my alter ego, Flash Meridian, watched the surface of the planet Olo explode into clouds of dust, and settle again, transformed. The material was still the same, but rearranged in such a way as to be unrecognizable as its former self.

The facts we hold onto and repeat about our lives… about ourselves… do not tell the whole story. Our interpretation of facts can be very skewed.

It’s not all about me.

I am literally bits of my parents, incarnate. Physically, I look like them. Mentally, I think like them. Spiritually, I create like them.

I never knew my parents were real people. I didn’t realize that my mother was such a cripplingly shy girl with the kind of struggles, doubts and regrets that girls have. I only knew them as adults. I thought they were perfect. Not at all like ordinary people.

How could I have missed this?

And so my tectonic plates have been shifting, and my entire life is being transformed.

My house is populated with objects that they no longer need. I revisited the rooms where I was a child, secure in their care.

Now I have a new lens to help put my life into focus, and I am grateful.

The letter was not sent for 18 and a half years. I’m glad that my mom wrote it when she did, and that my brother investigated why a drawer didn’t work right, and found it in the back of an old cabinet. I’m glad he took the time to read it, and made the effort to copy it and mail it to its intended recipients.