Small Time

I am a small-time artist.  I don’t say that to insult myself.  Actually, it has only been in the last year or so that I’ve been able to own up to calling myself an “artist.”  I used to call myself a painter or just say I was artsy.  I say that because it is an honest assessment of where I am.  I will never be a Banksy, Jean-Michel Basquiat, or Yayoi Kusama.  I'm not tearing up the art scene in SoHo or London.  I'm a suburban housewife who can't seem to not create stuff.  I think that stuff is pretty good.  However, I really struggle with how much to expect from myself.  Am I good enough to put myself out there?  If I think I am, I risk a certain level of delusion and possibly alienating a future resource.  If I don’t believe in myself enough, I risk losing an opportunity. 

I’m proud of where I am.  Please don’t get me wrong.  I am absolutely thrilled with the progression of this art life.  In several years, I have moved from being a mom of young kids who occasionally hacked out a couple of paintings in the lawnmower storage area (one lightbulb hanging from the ceiling) to being able to paint nearly every day in a “real” studio space, complete with doors, windows, and many (many!) light sources.  I sell through friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, and complete strangers.  I'm in cute shops.  I'm in galleries.  I am no longer losing money (yay?) and though I couldn’t pay our mortgage, I might have been able to pay for our utilities this year, maybe our groceries.  Groceries are a big deal.  I do have a 14-yr-old boy, you know. 

And although I can acknowledge I’m small-time, small-time is bigger than amateur – or non-existent.  For the first time, I have expectations for myself.  When I didn’t have any expectations, every tiny success was a wonderful surprise.  Since I’ve started this path, each year I sell more, participate in more shows, buy more materials.  What happens when I have that inevitable down year?  I invite this trouble because I had a down December for the first time ever.  A great year!  A miserable December.  If you didn’t know, 4^th quarter for artists is pretty much go-time.  Usually.  It’s like Prime Day, for a month.  I make small pieces, create ornaments, and print cards.  I have open houses and take new work to galleries.  And this year?  Crickets.  It’s tough. 

It’s tough – and it is discouraging.  I don’t do well with discouraging.  On top of that, I didn’t get into a show that I really wanted to join.  I’ve been working on this big series of mixed media pieces that I love and really have enjoyed making.  I was hoping they’d get to debut together at this show.  Now, I’m looking for a new place for them to go.  It’s a blow.

It’s a blow that I will absorb.  Why?  Because my kids were in the car when I got the email about not getting in the show.  They heard me talk about how disappointing it is, how much I was counting on it.  I want them to see me deal with it.  To pick up and go on and find the new path.  If this blog is about parenting, about me, about art, then this moment is also about those things.  I’ve been turned down for shows before.  I’ve not made the sale.  I’ve had commissions walk away.  Somehow this feels bigger. 

I think it feels bigger because I am at this turning point.  I’m invested.  Literally.  I’ve upgraded my studio.  I’ve created a little gallery space in the basement.  I’ve bought inventory software.  I’ve bought some IG ads.  I’m going all in. 

It’s scary.

What if I’m not good enough?  What if all this time and effort has brought me to a place where everyone is rolling their eyes behind my back: There she goes again: talking about her “art”?  She calls herself an artist.  Crazy Shelley.

I am crazy.  No question.  I’m not technically diagnosed with anything; I am mostly weird.  I wonder too much.  That makes me crazy, I think.  At least it makes me crazy in the world I live in. 

It also is part of what makes me a small-time artist.  I’m not examining a crazy world; I’m not living in NYC or some exotic location.  My art is not terribly outrageous.  I'm not making sense of a genocide that I witnessed first-hand or illustrating an obscure culture that I'm reviving.  My world is very, very uncrazy -- like Leave It To Beaver uncrazy.  I’m examining my uncrazy world and still seeing it as crazy. 

I need another word.  Unusual.  Jarring.  Beautiful.  Puzzling. 

I’m an observer and have spent my life trying to reconcile the discordance I feel between light and interest and growth vs. human self-destruction.  Everyday beauty constantly reminds me that life is bigger than we make it.  The contradictions and connections don't depend on glamour or grittiness. I write about it.  I paint about it. 

So this translation of how I see the world is what I make.  It is for sale.  And rejection of what I make sometimes feels like a rejection of me. This is why I had such a hard time sending my writing to literary magazines.  It is why I usually make safe choices.  It is why I “became an artist” later in life.  It is why I am quiet. 

I’m small-time because I am just now getting it together, just now being gentle enough with myself to introduce myself to others as an artist.  I'm small-time because my art might be saying things that people have already said – maybe they even said it better --but I'm saying it in my voice.  I’m small-time because I’m OK with just getting my foot in a few doors, because it is a business when I’m not quite a businessperson.  I’m small-time because it’s the bravest thing I’ve done for myself. 

So far.

Without Reservations

Pretty sure I’ve said this before on here, but being a parent is hard.  You either have to be a naturally good and wise person (I’m not) or you have to work like hell to become a more self-realized adult to prevent your own crap from bleeding over into your children.  I’m working on option two. 

I mean, I know there are people who really don’t care too much.  They pop out kids without really thinking about much above what the monogram is going to look like on the Christmas sweater.  And they seem fine.  Their kids seem fine.  And they float through life living pretty much the life their parents lived, but with more technology.  I’m not sure how that works because I’m seeing it from the outside (and simplifying it a ton.)  From the outside, I just don’t see how this happens.  Don’t they question?

And I guess that’s it.  I lead an examined life.  And by “examined” I mean, full of doubt and learning and change.  It’s uncomfortable.  I question religion.  I question family ties.  I question what I read and hear.  I question my own thought processes and inspirations.  I question the love I receive and the love I give.  I question my place in this world and my contributions to others.  I question everything.  It’s exhausting.  No wonder I look so old.

I like that I don’t take the status quo and run, but this way of looking at the world also breeds a kind of bone-deep sadness that I don’t want to pass on to my children.  I want a few pieces of absolute joy to shine through – find them where they will – otherwise they work too hard for too little happiness.  Jack finds his joy in his coding world right now and I worry that he will someday find that he is not the best programmer in the world and that “just” being ONE of the best coders in the world won’t be enough.  See how ridiculous I am?  And Lila, emotionally intelligent and logical and indomitable, sees too much of the pettiness of others.  She watches like a hawk.  And thinks that’s the way it is and the way it always will be. 

In a way, I think I want ignorance for my children.  Which is so bad.  Or is it?!  Part of me wishes I had those children who are a little dumb and don’t see the nuances of this world, don’t see what can’t be unseen.  Jack has a little of that, in that he doesn’t always get that people are being intentionally horrible to him.  What a gift!  And my children are given the gift of having come from a privileged background.  They are not threatened with poverty or having to wonder if their lives matter to others or being placed in horrible schools. 

They are, however, part of the epidemic of young people wondering if their lives matter enough to themselves to continue living.  As a mom, I wonder how much I contribute to that voice in their head that says they don’t do anything right, that no one sees them, that there’s nothing better in the future.  Because if that’s what they hear, part of that is ME. 

Trying to get them to see the world as I want to see it – full of opportunities to help others, full of the wonders of the glories of nature, full of a collection of humans with amazing variety of knowledge and experiences – also means there is a world infested with problems to fix and people unlike us who just don’t want to see it.  And that’s sad.

And it was sadness that started it all this morning because it is Monday and it is early and Lila is the new kid at school.  It’s big school and she’s a social animal and it’s hard to be on the outs.  There were tears and lots of moments where I had to hold back my own impatience with her emotions and understand how truly difficult it is for her.  Hugs, hugs, and more hugs, sprinkled with a little bit of perspective. 

My issue is why I felt like she needed those sprinkles of perspective.  I’m trying to help her see that bogging herself down with negative thought over negative thought is a dangerous place to be; you stop seeing the positive.  But I also want her to be ok with just feeling bad sometime.  She doesn’t have to always look for the sunshine behind the clouds.  She doesn’t have to fake feeling good.  She doesn’t always have to pay meanness back with kindness.  I’m looking for the balance.

That’s how I deal.   But is it how I want my kids to deal?  Not really.  I don’t want them to have reservations about where they are and how they feel.   I want them to have a little more confidence that their desires, feelings, worth, and abilities are wholly justified.  My struggle is that I can’t justify things without questioning them.  I always have reservations.

When they were babies, I felt like my job was only to show them how much I loved them so that they would leave our home always knowing that they were loved.  Then, they could function in the imperfect world with a solid base, have a place to come home to emotionally.  They could deal with whatever came their way.

They are no longer babies.  And I feel that parenting has gotten way more complicated.  Pitfalls abound.  The good news is that they are mostly their own person now.  My role has become a bit of a nattering voice in the driver’s seat who annoys them with questions about their life and commentary about current events and the occasional embarrassing singing episode.  

But maybe I need to return to how I parented my babies a bit more.  Maybe my only real purpose is to love them as hard and as often as I can.  Because everything else is unstable.  The questions will always there – in them and in me.  Honestly, I need to do this unbalanced thing because it is the only damn thing I can do without reservations.  Love them.  Love them always.  No holding back.

What I Want to Tell Your Kid

Well, first off, I’m hurt.  Your intention was to hurt someone, I guess, with your nasty Instagram poll and meme.  You did.  You hurt Jack.  He obsessed all day about the kid who he thought was his friend who publicly humiliated him on social media.  So, well done.  You hurt his dad, and his sister (maybe), and his mom.  But I’m trying to put that aside and be a parent.  I think this is a learning moment.

What I’m not sure you know is that there is a suicide epidemic in this country.  Kids like you and Jack are killing themselves at higher rates than ever before.  Experts indicate that social media is a factor.  Kids on the spectrum, like Jack, have even higher rates of suicide.  I think it is because although social interactions don’t come naturally to him, he’s smart enough to observe what other kids do and try to do the same thing – and he’s constantly failing.  Do you know how it feels to know you are constantly failing at being normal? 

So, what you have done is shown him that everyone else knows he is failing, too.  In posting your poll about how happy everyone is that he’s leaving, you’ve just reemphasized how disliked he is.  For the rest of his life – because you know he has the memory of an elephant – he will remember how his classmates were happy to see him go.

And it will fester.  It will be added to all the other mean things kids have said to him that he can’t forget.  But it will mean more because it came from someone who had him over to spend the night, who went to QuikTrip with him and bought him doughnuts at DD, who worked on school projects with him.  It came from a “friend.”

It is as a friend that I want to say this next part.  Jack is not the only kid who will remember.  I’m old, almost 46.  Middle school and high school were a long, long time ago.  But I still weigh those men and women by some of the choices they made back then.  Were they a total jerk to their boyfriend?  Did they lie to the teachers?  Did they pick on the little weirdos in the class?  These are the building blocks of their character.  While allowances are made for what they were going through as kids and what they learn as adults, their actions when I knew them as young people are still part of how I see them today.  I don’t know your plans for yourself, but you might want to consider that these kind of digs might get you a few snickers now, but it will cost you in trust.

Trust.  I think that’s why this hurts so much.  We trusted you.  I say ‘we’ because my experience with Jack is that only a certain type of kid is brave enough to be his friend. I feel safe letting Jack hang out with those kids.  It’s usually someone who is smart enough not to be irritated by Jack’s incessant need to be right.  It’s usually someone who understands how valuable Jack’s unwavering loyalty is.  It’s usually someone who appreciates his sense of humor.  But it is always someone who is brave.  Because we know Jack is one of the little weirdos.  Jack knows too.  And his friends know.  Everyone knows.  That’s not really the point. 

The point is what you do with that knowledge.  Jack carries on.  He stays, for the most part, pretty happy.  So I’m hoping he doesn’t turn into one of those sad, sad statistics.  But the teenage years are crazy, so I’m scared.  The people who don’t want to deal with his weirdness, well, they turn away.  Some people are kind.  Some people aren’t. 

You had a chance here, a choice.  It was – to you – maybe a small thing on a day you were bored.  You had this little thought on how to dig on someone.  You followed through.  In that moment, you chose being unkind over kind.  You chose not to stand up for the little guy.  You chose to kick him instead.

My hope is that maybe you realize that your little dig can have big consequences, to him and to you.  And maybe next time you’ll think twice -- or not do it at all. 

Oh.  And you can go fuck yourself.

Solo

If you’re not an artist, you probably don’t really know why I’d be so excited to have a solo show.  It’s kind of a thing, a landmark moment, a big deal.  It’s something to put on your resume or CV; it’s an honor and an achievement.  It means a gallery owner saw your work as valuable enough to put on their wall for weeks at a time.  And yeah, I’m super excited about all that, but I’m more excited that I get to make a sort of visual journal for anyone who might come see it.  It’s my greatest hits. 

A solo show will mean having 60-75 pieces of my art in one place.  It’s never happened before, even in my basement.  It’s hours and weeks and months of my life.  More, it’s a roadmap to how I think, a chance to connect the dots in what I’ve made.

If you’ve seen the kind of work that I make, you know I’m “diverse.”  In the art world, that’s not necessarily a good thing.   However, if you see enough of my work up on the wall, you can begin to see how they share themes, colors, and movement, even if the materials are different.  An encaustic piece shares the same kind of strokes as an oil on canvas.  A resin construction has the same floral style of an ink on yupo.  Fascination with construction of layers is everywhere.  But I’m starting to sound too artsy.  Let me break it down.

(drum solo)

I’m what you’d call a self-taught artist, although that’s far from what actually happened.  What it really means is I didn’t go to art school.  I was taught by artists in the town where I grew up.  I was in walking distance a pretty good museum.  Summer was longer then (8 lousy weeks for my kids) and I spent quite a bit of it in art class.  I took art in high school.  My awesome neighbor down the street (a professional artist) gave me lessons.  I volunteered teaching art at a half-way house when I was in college.  I painted in my dorm room, in my first apartment, when I rented a room in a stranger’s house.  I created things: a lamp from a vase my cat broke, a shower curtain from laminated poetry, a bed skirt from triangular fabric scraps.  I wrote.  I worked.  I moved.  I read.  I got my MFA.

Wait.  What?  Here’s the bridge. 

Yes, I have an MFA.  It’s a studio art degree, but it is in poetry.  Most people don’t even know it exists, but it is a degree that certifies (?!) that I have spent several years studying the writing of poetry.  We studied structure and history and other famous poets, but we also spent required hours in workshop, listening, critiquing, editing, and putting it all out there.  It was a wonderful time in the company of other people who really think about the world we inhabit.  They sit with it.  Then it comes out in these beautiful, gut-poking, sneaky ways. 

So that’s where I’m coming from when I’m putting this show together.  It’s me, untrained by a system of art.  So, sometimes I use mediums in ways they maybe shouldn’t be used or make shadows the wrong color.  However, it also means I have a way of looking at things as a poet.  I see the underlying structure and how missing a supporting column makes you go back and look at what’s shaky.  I think in building ways, putting unrelated things together to make a metaphor that rings.  I understand juxtaposition, alliteration, and allusion and I paint with them. 

When you look at my encaustics next to my resins, a little piece next to a huge piece, paint next to ink, try to think of them like lines of a poem, or poems in a collection.  Because that’s what they are.  I wrote them into being.  They are how I see things: in pieces, separated, coming back together, everything loosely connected by beauty. 

(That’s my big finish.)

Wings

Sometimes I wonder what I am doing.  You know, with parenthood, with trying to be a fully realized person, with art.  There are SO MANY artists out there, so many wonderful, talented, driven artists with really great hair and darling babies and so much more energy than I have.  I scroll through Instagram and depress myself with all the people I follow who A) make a new painting every day --or like 3 new paintings--or B) just have talent oozing from their golden fingertips like they’ve eaten Midas. 

Then I make something that I think is really cool.  Like today.

Actually this isn’t something I made today, it is something that became fully realized today.  Or almost.  I still have a little “finishing” to do.  But, people!  It happened.  I brought some things together that didn’t go together before.  I had a problem inside an idea and I solved it.  It looks pretty.  It means something.  It WORKED.

If I were in better shape I’d be jumping up and down.

Can I tell you about it?

It’s called Flight Pattern.  Or Flight Path.  Still thinking. 

It started a year ago as a coaster – or really a remnant of resin from another project.  I had a little square silicon mold and I poured the leftover resin in it, then added some thematic elements: a wing, an owl face, some feathery ruffles, the word “flight”, a little gold.  It was cool.  No idea what I was going to do with it. 

The next time I had some resin leftover, I made another.  They developed in theme.  They were all girl power.  They had feathers and wings and metals and words about the future and flying and… girls.  Every one different. 

They weren’t even my colors.  I didn’t have a plan.  Every now and then I’d take them out and think about what they could do. 

Turns out they were lousy coasters – too uneven.  They became “tiles.”

But a funny thing happened.  They started to mean something.  I realized I was putting together little snapshots of girlhood and feminism. 

It is not new for me to struggle with how being a woman looks for me and what that means for my daughter.  I still have all the hang-ups of wanting my child to be polite and sweet, but I have seen the TED talk and the articles about how that parenting approach only ensures that she will be left behind after elementary school and trained to only follow the rules, never to push them.  She’ll be well-behaved, but never fly above expectations.  I don’t want that.  That’s what happened to me.  I want something different for her.  She’s funny and so very, very people smart in a way that I never was.  I want to praise her crazy-strong body and her loud voice, her chance-taking and her questions.  And even in wanting those things, I hold her back in little ways.  That’s on me.  It doesn’t mean I don’t see and appreciate the fierce joy and possibilities that her self holds.  I do, but I'm not always the best at fostering them.  I’m learning that I’m not going to be the one that is able to teach her how to go beyond.  I only have to get out of her way so she can rise.  All that.  Tile by tile.  A little gold.  A butterfly we found on the front porch.  Some darkness, some places clear. 

Still, these thoughts were a stack of tiles, connected in color and theme, but going nowhere. 

Then my mother-in-law brought me some ceramic pieces from a totem she made for her garden.  And I started thinking structurally, how I could connect her pieces into a hanging sculpture, or a resin piece that would echo the circle and line abstract work I’ve been doing.  And in thinking about how I could make a piece for her ceramics, I thought maybe I could make a piece for the girl tiles.

I turned a deep panel over and painted it and poured clear resin, then added a path in copper and white and blacks.  It sunk and moved as it took two days to harden, but turned out pretty cool.  Now, how to attach the tiles?  I was initially thinking I would drill a hole in the resin and hammer in pegs, but I went to Home Depot to see if I could find something better than just pegs.  I did.  I have no idea what they do in real life, but they are these little copper tubes that flare a bit on one end – just enough to hold if I poured another layer of resin, which I did.  First I had to mark where I wanted the tiles and make sure the pegs would stay in the tiles.  Found the right drill bit to keep the tiles on the copper pegs, and… (angels singing.)

I mean.  I just love this stuff.  It’s a weird sort of problem solving, making something like this.  It has absolutely no purpose, other than depicting my own sort of feminism motherhood journey. (The path goes down, gets dark, then goes up.)  The tiles are even interchangeable; it doesn’t have to be MY journey.  But dang.  I just love it so much.  It’s like pulling out thoughts I didn’t even know I had and making them physical.  That has to mean something, right?  Being able to say something with things? 

Maybe someday, when my girl and I can’t stand even looking at each other and she doesn’t think I understand a single thing about her life, maybe something I make will have a voice she can hear.  Maybe she’ll see herself in the skateboarding silhouette or the “future interests” I have sharing space with music in this piece.

Maybe she’ll understand we both make our own paths, but I tried to let her fly. 

What Listening Looks Like

I don’t think I have ADHD.  I say this having a child who has been diagnosed with ADHD.  I see, outwardly, the manifestations of this thing in him: the constant movement, the need to be focused before he can hear, the inability to filter.

Hmmm.  Maybe I do have ADHD, without the H.  I have no problem sitting still for really long periods of time.  My head, though, my head is always moving.  When I “don’t hear” it just usually means that whoever is talking to me didn’t pull me out of my head before they started talking to me, so I just missed paying attention to the first things they said.  I caught the end.  I mean, my actual hearing is fine.  I’ve had it checked.  Twice.  You just need to call my name and pause until I’m with you.  I can hear you.  Really.

Strangely, this is not what I was going to write about.  I was going to talk about how I can’t seem to settle into one kind of art, one kind of career, one kind of… anything.  But that’s a decent illustration about how I get off on a tangent.  What I’d love to be able show you is that these tangents are all parts of the same thing.  I’m going to try to tell you.

My fascination with art supplies is only rivaled by… every other artist’s fascination with art supplies.  You see it on Instagram all the time – pics of mounds and mounds of new paint tubes or brushes or shipments of canvas.  We all love it.  How could we not?  It represents endless possibilities.  However, I can’t seem to stick to one thing.  I don’t abandon anything completely, but I don’t want to reexamine the examined.  When I say that I mean I don’t want to redo things.  There are lots and lots of artists out there whose work is instantly recognizable because they basically paint the same painting over and over again.  It’s sort of a variation of Monet’s haystacks.  He sat himself in the same spot and painted the same thing, painting it at different times of the day.  These artists are exploring some sort of expression or body or movement over and over. 

That is so hard for me. 

I have found that if I do a work and I feel it is successful, that when I try to do something like it again, it is usually worse than the first one.  I’m not passionate about it.  I’m not feeling it.  I’m not hearing. 

However, if I am saying something with a different material (aha!) then the work can be as interesting and challenging and the end result can be as “good.”

As you can imagine, in my work this looks like a hot mess.  In my studio, too.

When you start to look around, though, it begins to make sense.  I do a flower piece in resin that collects papers and metals and thoughts about selective beauty.  I do a flower piece on canvas with different papers about education and the arts with a really dark back ground.  I do a dark background in encaustic that shows light filtering down.   I do an abstract in oils that explores the light changing from dark to light and the prismatic effect in between.  I do another mixed media piece that has the prismatic effect with elements of flowered papers in different colors that viewed from far away look very neutral. 

Of course, then I make a coffee table and it throws the whole thing off.  But I’m ignoring that right now.  You should too. 

My point is, it’s not different.  Not really.

If you look at my resume, you won’t find this at all surprising.  I went to school for English/Psych and got an Econ minor.  I went to grad school for gerontology/social work.  I got a job in IT, worked help desk, did some network admin work, some coding.  I went back to school for poetry.  I taught at the college level, worked in reading centers.  I had a kid or two.  I taught fitness classes, did some writing on the side.  I started my own business. 

Where’s art?  Art was always there.  It is in the background, in the art supplies I brought to my teeny weeny college dorm and used to make gifts.  It is in the painted television I made for myself in grad school (the first time.)  It’s in the classes I taught at the half-way house where I did coursework.  It’s in the design I built for the website.  It is in the light fixture I made for myself, the painting I made for a friend, the class that I took at the community center.  It is the market that I entered at the gym. 

I forced (or I allowed) art to be a side.  Until now.  Now it is the focus.  I heard it call my name and pause. 

And you know what is great about art?  It doesn’t require that I do the same thing every day.  Clearly, that is not for me.  I have too many interests and too many fairies in my head for me to sit down and explore the same answers to the same projects every day.  Art welcomes my ADHD – or whatever it is – with open arms.  Ultimately, my art exploration has a path.  If you pay attention, that path is a path of learning.  It is learning how materials work, how colors work, how to build, take away, or change. It is exploring. It is paying attention to the world around me and putting it down in another form. 

I think, all along, that’s what I’ve been doing.  Paying attention.  Even if it doesn’t seem like it. 

Wake Up, Becky

I want to talk about Becky. 

Becky is a work of art.  She’s beautiful, graceful, confident, maybe even smart and well-meaning.  Becky is white.  Becky is safe.

Becky is a mixed media piece I made last year and she is a product of some things I’ve been learning about myself and where I fit into the world. 

I know.  I’m too old to be having an adolescent, coming-of-age story.  I’m 45, a little overweight, going gray, can’t see or hear, and smile too much.  But I’m still figuring out where I fit in things.  I don’t think that’s bad.  In fact, that’s one of the things I like most about myself: that I’m still thinking about things, that I’m still looking around and reassessing what I “know.”  Despite how I present myself sometimes, I’m not infallible.  I don’t know everything.  I am wrong.

Josh says I never say it.  But there it is in black and white.  I FEEL it a lot, but I don’t always let it in – I don’t always explore what makes my blood pressure and voice rise in a discussion.  Usually, that means I’m defensive about something.  Granted, I think there is a possibility that those things happen when someone isn’t listening to the points I’m making; however, they can also happen when the points the other person is making are hitting some soft spots. 

Becky is about some seriously soft spots.  It’s really the first time I’ve explored something so directly in my artwork, which I why she gets a feature here. 

Here is your warning.  I’m going to talk about race here.  I’m going to talk about sexism.  I’m going to talk about white women and their role in white supremacy.  If that alone makes your blood pressure rise, well… you might need to stop reading and think about why that is.  You might have some soft spots.  If you’re still with me, great.  Please understand that I made Becky because I have those soft spots.  Not because I’m spot-free.

So, I’m struggling with my spotted self in this spotted world.  My brother and I share this self-examination gene and it often gets us in trouble, because we become mired in blame and disappointment because our expectations are not met in reality.  We analyze how we should be moving through this life pretty harshly.  I don’t think that’s what this is.  I think this is a reflection of what I see going around me and what I want my contributions to be.  It’s about learning.

And nothing’s wrong with learning.  Can’t think of a single thing.  OK.  Except maybe learning too early how horrible people can be.  Clearly that’s not the case here.  I’m way too old to be just getting around to this. 

Really, that’s part of what Becky is.  She is me learning about me.  And she’s me learning about how horrible people can be.  She’s me learning I’m part of how horrible people can be. 

Maybe that’s given you pause.  (And isn’t pausing a wonderful thing?!  That’s another essay.)

Am I saying I’m horrible?  I hope not.  But I’m not independent of all the things that happened before me.  I am dependent on all the things that have happened.  I am where I am because they happened. 

When I say that I mean:

My parents had the right to go to good schools in Alabama in the 50s.

My dad got to go to college and dental school because his parents benefitted from the sharecropper system that allowed them to own and farm land.    

My parents don’t really remember what Birmingham was like in the 60s.

I grew up in small town in Georgia.

I lived in a mostly white neighborhood surrounded by black neighborhoods.

My schools were not segregated, but the social groups were.

I was a debutante.

My family mostly attended Baptist and Southern Baptist churches while I lived at home.

I fill a traditional role in our family, as a SAHM (mostly) and the one who shops, cooks, etc.

Etc., etc., etc.

You probably have the idea.

If you look, these are all facts.  None of them bad, per se.  It is what it is and I am grateful for all the opportunities I have had and have.  I have benefited by these things in my life.  I’ve gotten peace, protection, money, love, inclusion, and… everything. 

BUT

This kind of life ignores – and even encourages – the kind of systems that result in the ugliest things in our society.  Because I have benefited from these ways of doing things, I am a racist.  There, I said it.  It’s kind of freeing.  I am a racist.  I’m not wearing a hood.  I want the best for all kinds of people.  I have a pretty good heart.  However, I’m part of the problem if I am not actively trying to break down some of these systems; that makes me a white supremacist.  I’m figuring out what I’m doing with that.  I won’t go into what charities I give to or where I spend my volunteer hours, but I’m doing something.  It doesn’t change the world, but it changes something, and it changes me. 

And Becky?  Becky is made of album notes.  The artist has a big ol' country beehive with one of those scarves my grandma wore between visits to the salon.  Becky is made of the lyrics to those country song -- racist, sexist songs that I sung without realizing what I romanticizing.  Becky is made of wedding lace and maps of witch country (Salem) between her legs, because I was taught white women are some sort of mysterious vessel.  Becky is made of pictures of buses from the 60s because that is my past’s past.  Becky is made of little white girls who are princesses and little white boys who are cowboys, because those are lives we are taught to emulate.  Becky has a chicken at the pit of her belly because I am scared to be wrong.  Becky has the word “sad” caught in her throat. 

Becky is naked, asleep, blissful, against a dark background, a black garden growing behind her that she doesn’t see. 

I am Becky.  I think that much is clear.  The face even looks like me a little.  I never really intended her to be a self-portrait, but she is in the way that matters.  She is my acknowledgement that I am the product of some sick shit. 

So I met an artist this week, a young artist I found on Instagram (@negress.supreme) who makes beautiful woodcut work of women of color.  She has this way of doing portraits that are looking right at you, so direct.  I told her they make me feel beautifully indicted.  She has this one piece where the woman is made up of motherboards, currents, and code.  It made me think of how we are all influenced by our programming, but it doesn’t MAKE us.  She calls her piece The Architect. 

I made Becky.  She is my programming, my code.  She is my distant and recent past.  She is some of my darkest secrets and regrets.  But Becky doesn’t make me.  I am the architect.  I will make my own choices, my own mistakes.  I will own the ones I’m made in the past (so many) and I will try to do better in the future.  I will make Becky my past self.  I will build the new woman from new pieces, new books, new articles, new hope.  I made Becky.  Now I will unmake Becky.  Wish me luck.