Thanks Everyone!!

Aleathia says:

Sometime when I wasn't paying attention this good old blog crossed the 10,000 hits mark!  Thank you to everyone who reads this blog still.  It is sporadic, but that isn't unlike my current state of being. I appreciate you immensely for sharing in my interests, my life, and my emotional roller coaster. It is always nice to know you aren't alone even if it is distant friends and strangers keeping tabs.

Today I sat down to write about waking up and cleaning up.  The last few years have been especially rough for me as you know and though I thought I was handling it well, I can see that I did not fair as well as I imagined.  Maybe that was my armor for the grief and pain?  The last few months have found me waking up to living again...to enjoying all the greatness in my life.  This is what it is all about right?  Being thankful for what you have worked for and for the good graces you've been given?  These notions slip away from me from time to time.

A few neat things happened this week.  It is the town's annual Glass Fest and usually the signal that tourist season is starting and that we won't be able to walk the glass museum in peace nor will be able to go to dinner without a huge wait.  It does the small business owners a favor, it makes the locals kinda grumpy.  It just means I save money in the summer.  We braved the festival Friday night and had plans to eat out (had some great BBQ) and then go to our favorite bar (Hand + Foot) but it was packed to the gills.  There was no place to sit and really no place to stand, so we decided to pick up a new bourbon and sit in the AC and watch The Leftovers.

On our walk to the local liquor store, Michael saw someone he knows from his job and they were chatting a bit.  The man was telling us about this book he read by a Japanese woman about keeping a tidy house, essentially about getting rid of all the things that do not bring you joy.  After he talked about this and moved on to something else, I was stuck with this thought of all the things I have that clutter up my life which gives me anxiety.  I move them from pile to pile but never get rid of anything.

Later that night, we both talked about how beneficial it would be to do this and about how much more space we would have in the house.  Mostly, how free we would feel.  In the last few weeks, we have been having these talks about being more self-sustaining and about how much waste we generate.  Like most others, we get caught up in the typical American dream which consists of mass consumption and over consumption.  Growing up we both had little and now we can afford to have a lot, but we don't really need it....maybe only psychologically.  So in between episodes he put that book on hold at the library so that we might get some first hand details about the process.

I am impatient.  Today, without the book, I started on my own section of the closet and the drawers.  I am not sure any of my clothes bring me "joy".  If I got rid of things on this basis, I would be naked all the time and let me tell you, you don't want that.  I thought about it awhile to decide how I would pick which clothes to keep and which to get rid of.  A few days prior Michael had told me that he feels like I never let myself rest and that I always have to be moving as if I were not comfortable in my own skin.

There was never a truer statement in my whole life.  I have never felt comfortable in this body...even when it looked good.  I have always felt like it was a sloppy house where I stored all the great things in my life: love, generosity, caring, laughter, sorrow, creativity, intelligence.  When I look in the mirror I often don't understand why the outside of me looks like it does, because my vision is different.  When I am home I don't care much about what the outside looks like, but when I go places, I have nothing but fear and anxiety about how I look.  That people will wrongly judge the great things about me, because I am overweight or don't wear popular clothes.  I could spend every day in yoga pants and a t-shirt and have joy.

So when I started to sort the clothes I asked myself "am I comfortable in public in this?"  There was a lot of emotions happening in this process.  There was truth, honesty, and letting go.  There were options for re-purposing now that I know how to sew.  There were upcycling clothes to my kid.  In my closet and drawers I now have space.  Things aren't crammed together and the drawers aren't overflowing.  I can find what I wear all the time without having to upturn everything.  Don't get me wrong.  The struggle was real.  The truth that I am not and probably never will be as thin as I hope to be.  I love food.  It loves me.  To take away cooking and baking would really destroy something beautiful and heart-felt in my life.  So from this day forward I have to make better choices and not be so damn hard on myself about everything.

As of this posting, we have half of my daughter's room dug out of clothes.  She had items from the 3rd grade still circulating.  She is going into 9th.  See what I have created?

Thanks again for reading.  Thanks for being wonderful people.  Happy Memorial Day.  Remember some folks who gave their lives so that we could live ours.  We owe them that at least.

Aleathia

Happy Nurses Day and Happy Mother's Day

Aleathia says:

This week in Nurse's week.  I usually don't fall into much ado about it, but maybe I should.  In July, it will mark my 12th year as a nurse.  Two years on the surgical floor and 10 years in the ER.  All of these years have been spent working the night shift.

Night nurses are a different breed.  They are headstrong, opinionated, insane, hard-working, bare bones-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, take action, tell it like it is nurses.  They are full of compassion too, but above all they want what is right for you whether it is what you want to hear or not.  Healthcare isn't the drive-up at McDonald's.  What you want isn't always good for you.  If you come in at night, be prepared for the truth without sugar coating.

I have a wonderful team of nurses that I work with.  Some of them I have known my whole career and some just a few years, but in this span of time they have taught me so much about my job, about people, about healthcare, and about myself.  There isn't another group of people I would rather work with.  We save lives together.  We cry together. We laugh together.  We are delirious together.  And somehow, we don't judge each other in these states.  The job is hard emotionally, physically, and mentally.  We spend long shifts away from our families.  We miss games and concerts and holidays. Our families always miss us, but we come to work each day hoping to make a difference.

In my career so far, I have helped thousands of people, most of which will never remember me. This is ok.  I didn't become a nurse to be famous or recognized.  In my career, I have seen three children die and helped deliver a baby in the parking lot.  These are the deepest scars and joys of my life. They can still make me cry just thinking about them, so I don't.  But these wounds were never suffered alone.  We suffered as a team.  We held each other silently as we toughened our exteriors a little more.

On this Nurse's Day, I wanted to thank all the wonderful men and women I work with.  We are a team.  We are a family.  I am not sure I thank you all enough for everything that you do, but know that I would have never made it this far without your love and support and knowledge.  My ER group are some of the most intelligent, hard-working people I have ever met.  They do me proud every day.

Happy Nurse's Day.  I love you all.

Now for Mother's Day.

This will be the 3rd year without my mother and it is the one that hurts the worst.  It took me several years to stop being angry over her death....to stop blaming her and hating her.  There was so much unfinished business between us, so many things I wanted to share.  I simply wasn't ready.  I am not sure anyone ever is, but it was poof and she was gone.

I miss hearing her voice and her laugh.  I miss her smile.  I miss hearing her call me "Sweet Pea".

Today, Chloe and I planted our first tomatoes.  Both my mother and my father loved to grow them and this year we honor them with their planting.  Chloe loved to garden with my mother.  It is by far her most favorite memories of her and for this, I am so glad.

To all my friends who are mothers:

Thank you for being brave every day.  Thank you for raising good, nice, honest, intelligent children. I honestly believe their future starts in our hands.  We have to be good examples and I see all the wonderful work you are doing and it makes me smile.

To myself:

Go easy on yourself.  You are doing a good job.  You aren't perfect and that is a great thing to show your daughter.  Keep loving her even if she seems like she doesn't want you too.  Keep being tough in all the right places and soft in all the right places.  Show her the world.  Keep telling her the truth. Pat yourself on the back for finally giving her the life you always dreamed you could have yourself. Remember to let her be herself.  Remember to let her fail and be there to tell her she will get it right next time.  Cherish all moments.

Happy Mother's Day.

PAD, April 2

Aleathia says:

This is my favorite smile.  I try to make it happen as often as I can.  

April 2 (prompt is he said/she said)

Tell Me Now

“That tickles,” he said, “why do you do that?”

And she does it again.

He protests and squirms, 

elbows tucked in, half bent over, 

laughing.

He looks at her with a playfulness 

that makes her feel light and small. 

She moves closer and he squints his eyes, 

smiling and waiting for her torture.

She loves this smile 

with everything she's got, 

pauses to watch its evolution, 

and then kisses him, 

pulling the whole of his body

                                     into hers.

“This is why”, she said.

Aleathia Drehmer 2016

April Poem a Day Challenge, April 1

Aleathia says:

For several years I have been participating in the April Poem a Day Challenge.  A prompt is given and people set out to write a poem somehow relating to the prompt. Many people do not enjoy this format and find it constricting or hard to write from a prompt, but I love it.  I find that it gives me an opportunity to explore an angle or an idea that I might now have considered.  These days when I hardly write anyway, prompts are a god send to actually make the pen move.

In another sense, they are a catharsis of the winter; an awakening to spring.  So for the next month I am going to post a poem.  Normally I would post them at the challenge site, but I don't much feel up to swimming in the pond with other people this year.  It can be somewhat unnerving and narcissistic to keep going back and hoping your poem is good enough to get selected for the final book.  This year I am just going to write.

Feel free to try writing with the prompt yourself.  It is fun!

April 1 (prompt is Foolish)

The Wars We Wage

For Sindee

I was foolish to think
I could push you from my heart by hating you,
                                                                           you the person who carried me
                                                                                                    and cared for me
in the best way you knew how.

You were a child
     raising a child
and neither of us could have known
how it would turn out…you chasing flames
and bright lights while I swaddled myself in shadows.

I was foolish to drown myself
                           in your misery
letting the bottle tell me stories
that were never true but believable
the more I emptied them at the bar.

You were my only mother,
                  my only direction on how to be a woman,
                  my yardstick to success.
Measuring up to each other
drove us apart
instead of making us run
to the finish a little faster.

I was foolish to wait so long to hurt,
                                                   to grieve,
                                                   to say goodbye.

So today,
I say I love you.

Today I say goodbye
sitting in my car
watching April showers
clean away the winter
and the salt.

Today,
I start again.

Aleathia Drehmer 2016

Happy Birthday Mom, I miss you.

Helen Frankenthaler, artist

Aleathia says:

I have been lucky enough in my travels to find an art museum to wander around and continue to be fascinated by the colors and movements swirling around in an artist's head.  I appreciate the depth and time it takes to create some of the master works in all of their glory and reality, but abstract art has always gripped me the most.  It is often the least understood and the hardest to explain. Most people like what is familiar and gravitate towards pieces that have a recognizable imagery. The wonderful thing about abstract art is each person gets to create their own interpreted story.  They can see what they want to see before understanding what the artist intended.

Helen Frankenthaler was born in New York City in 1928.  She was a notable American Abstract painter and helped to develop color field painting.  She exhibited work around the world starting in the 1950's until her death in 2011.  She continued to produce viable work her entire career.

Her main influences were Hans Hoffman, Jackson Pollock, and Clement Greenberg.  Frankenthaler's work is often identified "with the use of fluid shapes, abstract masses and lyrical gestures".  She has said "A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once."

The follow works of Helen Frankethaler are from the time span of 1952-1988. Her growth and color composition are most notable.

"It is an order familiar and new at the same time."--Helen Frankenthaler

1952 Mountains and Sea

This noted a big breakthrough in the style of painting with oils that looked like pastels and was then known as "stain painting".  Her work through the 1950's were similar in form containing evenly weighted compositions and stain painting.


1959 Mother Goose Melody

In this work the color palette is much darker and she invites the idea of a heavily, densely weighted side and an airy constructed side in the painting together.


1960-1962 Seascape with Dunes

This is a very centralized piece with a lot of raw canvas showing the stains of oil paints like ghost shadows.


1963-1968 Mauve District and Flood

These pieces were a large move towards acrylic paint which lent her to have a deeper sense of color within her chosen palette.  This move to acrylics saw less raw canvas and the paintings begin to feel more full and more abstract.


1970-1971  Sesame and Chairman of the Board

Frankenthaler continues the use of acrylics, but starts looking at her work with new formal consideration.

"Frankenthaler 'points to the four different compositional placements of the painting:its overall flatness, the play of the left side versus the right side, the interior of the white crossing passage--what she refers to as a cable or crevice'--and drawn lines, about whose space making she observes, 'I was very conscious of threading line through the cable/crevice'"


1972-1975 Hint from Bassano and Nature Abhors a Vacuum

Her work in this time is filled with wide swathes of color with the combination of levels both symmetrical and asymmetrical in context along with horizontal line movement.


1976-1977 Natural Answer and M.

After a trip to the Southwest, Frankenthaler came home with a new color palette which were mostly terra cotta shades. In this time period, the paintings were actually painted instead of stained.  With this there is a definite sense of structure and horizontal brush movement.


1978-1981  for E.M.

Paintings are becoming more rigid with themes and lines have a more interlocking look.  White starts to be a significant accent through them.


1981-1985 Reflections on a Blue Pool

Frankenthaler moves into a new period where the paint appears stained again with the addition of raised paint which adds texture and depth to the work.

1986-1988 Morpheus

She begins to move into implied grid like structures lending the work to have a more vertical movement and feeling.



I hope you enjoy these few selections from Helen Frankenthaler's collection.  Feel free to look her up as there is a vast amount of her work on the internet.

It's Ok to Be Weak

Aleathia says:

It has been a long time since I have posted.  There have been too many recent deaths, too many sicknesses in this house, and only so much energy for life to go around.  I have been pushing through and most everyone around me has not seen the deep and uncentered pain that runs my daily activity. Hanging around the theater department as a teenager afforded me great abilities at hiding behind a created character.

My father has been gone three months and I miss our phone calls every week.  I miss the sound of his impatience to get off the phone after 15 minutes which I always knew was an effort despite his love for me.  I miss his laugh.  Grieving his loss has been easier than my mother's.  He had a funeral and I got to spend some time with family who missed him just as much as me and who would remember all the wonderful things he taught them over their lives.  I got to say goodbye.  I was able to start that healing process in a positive way.

I woke up one day last month and realized that I had not allowed myself to grieve my mother's death. For two years I have been dragging my heart through the mud.  I have pretended to hate her and to be "relieved" she was gone.  I had such a hard time understanding her sudden death without a coroner's report or being able to say goodbye. There was so much about the ending that was disconnected, so much more I wanted to say to her.  Mostly, I wanted to tell her I loved her one more time.

I woke up knowing that I had to tell myself that I hated her to save my own life.  I could not let my heart feel that unsurmountable pain of loss.  I lost my mother at 40.  We had so much more history to make and wounds to heal and laughter to put out into the universe.  I can see now that I was protecting myself from her death.  It was the longest, darkest denial I have ever put myself through and I thank the heavens that I made it to the other side.

I am pulling down this wall brick by brick.  I wrote her the yearly letter I promised I would write.  I let myself cry for the loss of her when it comes over me without hatred or guilt.  I am not weak, but losing my mother nearly broke me.  No one really noticed I was dying inside, that I hated myself and life, that I didn't care too much if I woke up or not.  I'm glad that darkness is lifted.  I let myself be tired now.  I let my heart ache.  I let myself feel the love from my family and friends.

It has been a lonely two years and I did it to myself.  I am my toughest critic and have always been.

I am writing this post today for people who are going through a loss and a heavy grief.  Reach out to those people that love you.  They will love you through this ugly time; they will wipe your tears; they will hold your hand without judgment.  Don't go through it alone. Ask for help. No one is truly alone in the world.

Thank you to my love, Michael, for quietly waiting until I was ready to deal with life.  To my dear Chloe for being sensitive and for hugs when you just knew I needed them.  To my friends who listen and let me work things out at my own pace.  You are all dear to me.  This blog is going to be on an upswing from now on.  It has been hard to write them knowing my father wouldn't be reading them, but it is time to let that go too.

Stay tuned for a new blog on Helen Frankenthaler.  It is gonna be pretty.

Aleathia

Space, No Time

Aleathia says:

The other morning, after a long shift at work, I had a great conversation with my friend Tim as we waited for our time at work to be over.  I can't remember how we managed to slide onto the subject of concepts of time, but we did.

Tim talked about how on a daily basis, for just about all his life, he has had no concept of time.  He understands time counted, but its regimentation is lost to him.  He is one of those people that lives in space, not in time.  Further into the conversation he talked about how this made him feel like an outsider and how it challenged him to see things the way others see them.  Tim said he needed solid relationships to ground him to time.

My interjection to this conversation came from a Buddhist perspective.  In Buddhism, there is a base function of "form is emptiness; emptiness is form".  This is a simple sentence, but a drastically hard concept to swallow on a daily basis.  It requires one to let go of time and even sometimes space to live in a place that is built on the fluid idea that everything is connected, there is no beginning and no end.  Everything exists and does not exist simultaneously.

It seemed to me that those of us who try to live in some amount of awareness have a goal to live in a way that comes naturally to Tim.  He lives in the present with little worry of the past or the future.  I am one of those, for most of my life, who has been grounded too much in what was and what will be. When you live in such a place you have little time to be present with the life happening before you. You can miss the simplicity of clouds moving across the sky, bird song, laughter, small beauties and sorrows, and what other people are trying to tell or show you.

The American culture is one of having more....all the time.  We must go faster, get more, live harder. It is not difficult to get caught up in this or with people telling what you should achieve in your life. How many of us get bullied into living someone else's dream or expectation of us?

This idea of living in the present has been an achievement of mine. It has been an expectation that I want to live up to. Today I sat down to meditate and flipped to a page in the Dalai Lama's "The Art of Happiness" and came to this passage, aptly:

"Dealing with expectations is really a tricky issue. If you have excessive expectations without a proper foundation, then that usually leads to problems.  On the other hand, without expectation and hope, without aspiration, there can be no progress. Some hope is essential. So finding the proper balance is not easy. One needs to judge each situation on the spot."--Dalai Lama

To me, being able to have enough balance in which to achieve expectations comes from the balance and awareness of time and space.  Too much time leads to not being able to live in the present.  Too much space leads to lack of awareness.

This idea of time and space that Tim brought up has really struck a cord in me.  I was glad I was present in that moment and soaked in what he had to say. We all need more moments like that where we share the higher, spiritual knowledge that we house in our bodies.  It gives perspective and openness.

Aleathia