I’ve always been a loner. I feel comfortable on the hills, the trails, looking out my window at the blue sky. Listening to the hawks on a cold January day. It’s quiet, my dogs by my side. Or sitting writing or painting in my studio. Nowadays to fill most of my social needs I join conversations on Facebook about instapots and menopause. In my radio interview the other day I said that I don’t have friends coming to my house, I live an isolated life as a stay at home mom, an artist, and a writer. I said my friends who I know and don’t know, my readers, the people who interact with my paintings, the collectors, I must communicate with them, with the outside world. I don’t know why. I am. Everything seems like a possibility. The farther I go into my artistic self the more real I become. The Sycamore tree outside is still bare, the sky is greyish blue. There’s not much warm sun to sit under outside or I would be there now. I’m in the house writing. I’ve been working on my manuscript for my new book. It’s all about babies. It’s raw and uncensored. My fertile and unfertile self. A guy at my art talk last week said while I was talking, and he was holding and leafing through one of my gigantic painterly notebooks, that the notebook was like my baby too, another baby I cared for and gave birth too. I realized that all the art I did during my early thirties has been destroyed and was all about fertility and babies and birth and secrets. They were made from wool, and glue, and plaster, and string, and musty old things. Stockings, black sheer and fishnets. Pods, fertility goddess inspired, death and rebirth. But during this time, I didn’t write. I was scared my husband would read my journal and think I was unhappy, or crazy, or just take everything out of context. So, I squeezed and pounded and stitched fabrics and canvas and old garments. I ripped and tore and scratched. I remember once I was in my studio at my old house, the house Alan and I lived in before this one. It was just a room in the house. Alan and the landlord were outside my room, looking at something in the house. I was working on a painting. I was scratching and scraping the paint off with my nails. I knew I should stop but I couldn’t. My nails were getting ground down, soft and black with paint. I knew the land lord was probably worried about what I was doing and that I sounded insane.
Category: infertility
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“Will I ever have kids?” I sat and wondered under this same December sky I sit under today. Light yellow mustard leaves, lime green, purple sage, blue sky with a low almost winter sun. Shadows in the yard stay damp and cool until summer comes again. Trying to get my kids to spend more time in our yard playing instead of always taking them to parks. I couldn’t imagine that thought, what feels like ages ago, when I would come out here to listen to the bird’s chirp and watch hawks fly overhead. I felt lost, sad, depressed, and confused. Nothing like the way I felt this past weekend, the accomplishment I felt having my first Solo art show and my first beautiful book published. I’ve been through so much, on such a long, hard, journey to get to where I am today, with everything fulfilled, married with two kids and a satisfying creative life. I felt secure and confident at my opening reception on Saturday, like I knew things about myself I have never known before. Like I was open and receptive to everyone who came to my show. I didn’t hide outside or drink too much wine. I don’t know if this change is due to the unknown being known or the anti-depressants! But it feels good to be here.
I never felt that same accomplishment when Jack and Fiona were finally born. I feel accomplishment as a parent, I’m a good mom. I feel a lot of stress as a parent and sometimes I want to have kid free moments, which are hard to come by. But what would my life look like now with out kids? I will never know. My life the ten years it took trying to have kids was a time I would not want to go through again. It was very difficult, but I would like to share my experience with others, I would like to share my journey in a way that I wish had been available for me at the time, something to read, to feel connected and not so alone. I will write this book, I will go back through my experiences and write the story for others to read and hopefully find comfort and not feel alone or hopeless. It takes a lot of work to make things happen, things that are gambles, 50/50’s, expensive. Things that need a person to take a great leap of faith, to take a chance on something that the outcome may not be in their favor. There are no guarantees in life, only that we all die someday. I decided to gamble, take my chances and work harder than ever to make my dreams come true, having a supportive partner really helps! Things have paid off, so I will begin to write my story about how I got where I am today
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“Jack, are you O.K.? What did you put in your mouth?” I ask. We’re in Target, drool is trickling down the side of Jacks mouth, his eyes are starting to water. I think he’s choking; until his mouth opens wider and a grey liquid comes spilling out. I recognize chunks of bell pepper, mushrooms, and a greenish color, from the pizza and pesto pasta the night before. He throws up again, this time revealing lunch, pieces of seaweed land on the plastic dump truck, getting stuck inside the cardboard box edges, (We’ll have to buy this one I think) The liquid covers the red plastic cart, splatters on the floor. Fiona looks at Jack in shock. A woman looks at me in shock, as if I could have prevented this from happening. “Oh my god” I say. One lady with a baby offers to give me her baby wipes. “No thank you, I think I’m going to need more than baby wipes” I say. She says “O.K., I’ll stay clear” not wanting to infect her baby. I stand there for a minute, I ask someone in the cell phone sales area, “Do you work here?” They don’t really, but they call for help and get me a plastic bag I ask for to put the throw up clothes in. People pass with a wide berth looking at my situation. One lady says, “I’ve been there”. I stand with a smile on my face just waiting until I can move Jack and Fiona and start cleaning up. I don’t want to dislodge any throw up from where it sits right now. I don’t want throw up on me! A Target employee finally arrives with a large plastic bag, a bunch of paper towels, a spray bottle of blue cleaning solution. I get to work. When the woman first came out she had this look on her face like, “Oh this job really sucks!” But after she realized I was going to handle this, I wasn’t going to make her help me clean it, she softened her stance. I went into taking care of business mode, stripped the clothes off the babies, wiped, scooped, spayed, getting every last bit of throw up off the cart and the floor. “You might need to spray down the straps though” I say. “The throw up gets stuck in them and the stink never goes away” This happened to our high chairs, that smell never did go away even though I washed them many times. I put the babies back in the cart. “Jack are you going to throw up again?” I ask. He says he is O.K., so I decide to take my chances and finish shopping. I feel crazy doing this, but I’m already here and my carts half way full already. This morning I can still feel the moment, the “Oh shit, we all just shared the same water bottle”, wondering if Fiona and I are next.
On the way to Target I was listening to the news, the recent news of Trump and the woman he “Octopus armed” on the airplane. It reminded me of a similar situation I was in, but mine took place on a Greyhound Bus. I was on my way to Wyoming, I had the window seat. A guy sits next to me, (which always happened on the Greyhound). We talk during the day, he’s from Detroit, he tells me about the Car manufacturing business, how it’s all getting shut down. I listen in earnest, something I’ve always done. I like listening to what people have to say, hearing their stories. Sometimes men have misunderstood this quality and take it as me “Being interested”. I got tired of listening to this particular person though, he became boring. As the day turned into night I pretended I was asleep. The guy put a blanket over both of us, slid his hand under the blanket and up my t-shirt and started feeling my boobs. At first I continued to pretend I was sleeping, I figured he would lay off. I figured I could just let him get a feel and he’d leave me alone. He didn’t let up, he got more into it, he tried to kiss me, he had really bad breath. That’s when I finally said “leave me alone”. He was mad, I couldn’t wait till he got off the bus. I was eighteen when this happened. As a kid growing up I had several encounters similar to this, which would be classified more as molestation I guess, since they were grown men and I was a child. One time I was in the back of my dad’s pick-up truck, his friend was with me. We were laying down with a blanket over us because it was illegal for us to be riding in the back like that. The man reached his hand under my shirt and started feeling my under-developed ten-year-old boobs. I never told anyone. Another time my mom left me with one of her friends while she went to her class at Grossmont College. He was teaching me racquetball. I was twelve years old. He stood behind me spread my legs and stuck his hand up my little green terry cloth shorts my mom brought me back from Acapulco. I was paralyzed. Thank god my mom came back soon. I went to the bathroom and found a Band-Aid stuck to my butt, it fell off his finger when he was molesting me. I never told anyone. The stories go on and on for me, men feeling me up, grabbing me, pressuring me to have sex, one of my professors getting me to come over to his house to “help me with my paintings” then asking me to kiss him. He was old and this might be his last chance he told me. He asked if I would sleep with him. I was so disappointed. I looked up to him. Then I found out how many other women students he tried that with. I never told on him though.
My mom was a strong woman. She was a feminist. She didn’t raise me in princess outfits or to think I “needed a man” or that men had any power over me. But until I got married I still lived like men were above me, like they had power over me. Like the things they did were just natural, a natural human drive. I never thought they “crossed a boundary”. If anything it was my fault or I just erased these incidents out of my mind. I didn’t want to think of them. I went along with things I didn’t want to go along with. I wondered why. I wondered why I didn’t have more self-esteem, why I let myself get used.
This week I am seeing things in a different light. I am seeing that sexism is so engrained in our society. I wonder how we are raising our girls, the media, the toys they make for girls. The focus on being pretty for little girls, being sexy for women. It’s everywhere, it makes women powerless, even when our mothers are feminists. We need to change our collective consciousness as women, as mothers. As I turned 45 this year I felt a deep change come over me. I don’t know if it is because of all the shit I’ve been through, the soul searching and craziness I went through with infertility. I don’t know if it’s the experience of being a mother, but I finally don’t give a shit what people think of me. More specifically I don’t feel like I need to wear lipstick all the time or a bra. I don’t care if people think I’m old or ugly or un-feminine. I only wish I could have had this confidence when I was a young girl, when I was a woman in her twenties. I can only hope now to instill this self-confidence and self-esteem in Fiona and to raise Jack to be a feminist.
Dirty Laundry Blog by Jennifer Hynes 