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I was staring at a painting in my studio, hung with six push pins. I hung the paper up today, painted it and collaged it. It’s a large piece of thick water color paper, 50” x 48”. I started it and finished in one day, which is impractical. It’s delicate paper, it’s large, where will I store it? If only I had another show lined up or someone to buy it? I need to start working smaller. I love working big, but I need to work small. I went on a walk today, up the trail, past blue bells and hedge parsley. Past the decaying tree stumps, getting smaller than they were last year. So many kinds of little green plants, clovers, grasses, dead leaves on the ground in ruby red and dark brown. The air was cold, my hands freezing. The sun was out, the sky so clear, I thought it would be warmer. It was my last day of having three-year-old children. My last day I could get away with calling them babies. I love Jack and Fiona so much, they have turned out to be good kids. It’s hard to believe when I reminisce of the past, of Jack and Fiona as infants, of life before they were born, my mind is filled now with beautiful memories. The sad memories of my most difficult times have diffused, leaving a stain, but not a strong stab to my heart. I have healed in the past four years. I have a collection of paintings that document feelings I’ve gone through. Lines and color, paper and canvas, lots of the work framed. My studio needs to be cleaned, to make space for my new collection, my new work, from the new me. Or the same me? The original, more confident, less broken me? I don’t know. I just know that this year I have changed.
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Sitting outside, in the back yard, Jack and Fiona are at Costco with my husband. I have to take a break, reflect on what I wrote this morning. It’s almost spring and flowers are beginning to dominate bare branches, I love winter flowering trees. I love the moist ground, still wet from winter rains, the decaying leaves, the new bugs and spiders, old webs that didn’t get knocked down in the winter winds, and the sun feeling closer than it has in months. I think of fertility and my experience. I wonder why I clung to beauty and that it was the goal for so long. I have judged myself daily, comparing myself to an unrealistic idea of what is beautiful? Fertility is beautiful. Being born into a beautiful new thing. I am so far from that sweet smell newborn babies have. I am so far from that beauty because I was not fertile. The image of healthy, glowing, pregnant woman? Or that sweetness of just having given birth sweet smell of placenta, baby poop, an open vagina, all bloody, sweat, and the image of the beautiful woman and her beautiful baby lying on her chest? I wanted that. I wanted to be that woman, just like a flowering winter tree, bringing new, undamaged life into the world. Natural and unscathed, “it happened so quickly, we barely tried” I would say. After the birth I would be glowing, my picture would get 1000 likes on Facebook. I would have taken the naked pictures when I was pregnant, and I would be allowed to share them on Facebook because I covered just the right spots and a naked pregnant woman is a subliminal message that propels mankind. This post would get 2000 likes. I would be a Goddess. Why are we obsessed about this? About being this? Why was I? Why was I ashamed that I could never be that goddess, my uterus broken, I was up in age, I shouldn’t even be trying to have children, “It’s not fair to the children for women to have IVF at 39, they won’t live a long enough for the child.” I read this once on Face Book. I was so upset by it and it became my truth. I was disgusting.
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Dirty Laundry Blog by Jennifer Hynes 