It’s not too late to nurture the little boy I was.  He’s still inside me.  He’s still me.  I don’t need to grieve for him.  I’ve talked to my cousin and to my brother about wanting to go back and take care of him.  I can’t go back, and I don’t need to.  Actually, I took my son back to the house on West Drayton Ave. in Ferndale.  We looked at the house.  We walked around the block.  We saw children playing on the playground at my old school.  I told Raymond “that was me.  I was one of those kids.”  I didn’t realize that Timmy was there that day.  He was walking around the block, showing Raymond where he had been.  It was in that school that Ms. Feldsenfeld told my mother “Mrs. Young, I don’t believe Timmy has the ability to learn.”  Now, I have messages for the wounded child inside me.  In fact, all of the things I have written to encourage others… all the time I have spent mentoring young people… all that I have achieved in my life has been for him.  I dug through a big box of photographs and pulled out several pictures of myself as a child.  I didn’t see a problem child.  I saw a beautiful child.  I saw a creative child.  I saw a child who wanted to be loved, and to love.  I saw a child that I would be lucky to meet today.  My grandson reminds me of him.

The child inside me didn’t feel special.  No one told him how wonderful he was.  He believed he was stupid.

For my whole life, I thought I was a bad student.  I thought I got bad grades.  I thought I was a behavior problem at school and at home.  I’ve often told friends “if anyone was getting into trouble at our house, it was me.”  I thought my brothers were perfect.  They ate their vegetables and did their homework.  They practiced their instruments.

After my mother died, I got all of my report cards back.  I read them all.  I didn’t see bad grades.  I saw wonderful comments about my art, my socialization, my progress.  I didn’t see a perfect child, but I didn’t see a stupid child or a problem child.  

It is time for me to unlearn all of the misconceptions I had about myself.  It is time for me to celebrate Timmy.  To honor him.

Last night, I climbed into bed, and I felt just like my child… the child that I was, and still am.

Someone reprimanded me and said I was creating my own problems by talking about them.  He is a Christian who believes in the Law of Attraction.  I do believe that we can, within reason, draw certain outcomes into our lives.  I think that what we dwell on can lead us to action, even in subtle or unconscious ways, that will affect our course in life.  On the other hand, we all carry trauma and dysfunction with us, and these must be unpacked if we want to make positive changes for our future, and the future of our children.  Magical thinking doesn’t work.  Dogma is not kind.  Religion was made up by people to control other people.  Burying your head in the sand will not help you.  You have to feel it in order to heal it.  It’s not too late, as I once believed, to repair things from our past.  We can heal.  We can’t change the events, but we can choose not to accept it anymore.  We can give ourselves permission to set boundaries, and to give ourselves positive affirmations that we may not have received when we first needed them.  We can be kind to ourselves, and to the child within us that needed something different than what we got.  We need awareness in order to start.  Our parents and other caregivers didn’t have the answers. They had unfulfilled needs and traumas of their own.  Look deep inside.  Don’t be afraid of what you might find.  You’ve already been through it.  Anyone who knows me, knows my soapbox.  There is nothing wrong with you.  You are incredibly special.  You can say what you need.  What you want.  And you can have it.  You can say NO!  You don’t have to follow the suggestions of others if you don’t want to.  You can cut people out of your life without hatred. You can take care of yourself however you see fit.  THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU.

These little abstracts have been a part of my creative practice for about 17 years.  They are spontaneous, and carry no expectation or pressure.  They are just bursts of color, lines and shapes.  I usually do them before I go to bed.  I have stacks of them that I keep in baskets.  Sometimes I look through them they same way I look through my box of photographs. Sometimes I see something in them that I hadn’t noticed before.  A form or story… a theme or emotion…. They are a moment of my life documented on paper.  The way they come about is not contrived.  They just spill out in a technique that I don’t employ in more intentional paintings.  They teach me things not only about how mark making tools act or interact, but about the subconscious things inside me that want to be expressed.

My friend Cheralee Dillon gave me permission to use her lyrics in my painting titles. Here’s one.

This little painting is called “Katsoen länteen (Looking west)”, partly because it reminds me of the view looking west from Grand Marais. I lived in Grand Marais for 35 years, and moved away one year ago this month. A lot of people don’t realize that Highway 61 runs east/west through Grand Marais, because we think of Duluth being south and Thunder Bay being north. In looking west, I moved west to the Iron Range. As much as I loved Grand Marais, and as difficult as it was for me to leave, this was a great move for me, and I’m so glad I did it!