Happy Summer! (lots of this was written over the past 10 days)

Today’s longest day antics: A screening of flying lessons, the film by Sarah Waldron that Julia is in, late lunch with a friend, and horror movies tonight.

Yesterday, June 20, was our really longest day—up at 5 am to begin our ride to Jersey City for the Golden Door Film Festival, a stop at The Cloisters when we realized we were way too early to check into our hotel.  Loved The Cloisters. Hadn’t been there since before Cheshire was born. Finished the ride, found our hotel and some parking —Jersey City has not changed as much as I had imagined in the century since I was there —took naps, went to the opening night party for the festival, saw a bunch of very short and short films and fell into bed somewhere just before midnight.

So interesting to “network” at the opening night of the festival party with absolutely no skin in that game. I the endless Soho loft parties that David and I went to in the early 80’s. Those were intense and intimidating. We imagined having too much skin in those games—grants for productions, spaces for performances of the next piece, agents, actors, producers, etc. I was never, ever good at small talk, at presenting myself and way too nervous to be interested in anyone else—a weird and awful combination. Last night, I could ask people what they did and how they started doing it and why they enjoyed it.  I found people willing to share. When asked about my presence at the festival I only needed to say that ‘I’m the mom of an actor.’  No one asked much after that. I didn’t need to impress anyone. My focus was outward. Very pleasant! Incredibly liberating!  Why didn’t I think of something like that response 40 years ago?

A bit of an aside from where my mind is going, this worm hole of introspection. Navel gazing. Anyway, Julia had a good time doing a bit of socializing, enjoying some of the attention. What has always been true about those sorts of parties is that no one is really interested in anyone who can’t be of some use to them, and so, no one demanded much beyond pleasantries from Julia. And she is okay with those interactions, at least she was last night.

Back to my navel: One of the reasons that David and I stopped making theater was our reality that in the avant guard, we did theater for our friends and we couldn’t make the leap into the commercial world. What we wanted was to climb into the middle class, buy a house, send our kid to a good school. Be like our parents except making theater. What impossible goals, at least the way we were going about it.  We could not see or refused to see what we needed to do to make that work. And we knew what those things were.  

David kept making art when he started writing mysteries. He dove into that genre as soon as he could after law school. It was a pragmatic decision. And he wrote plays, taught writing as an adjunct, sat on the board of a film society in Indy and found a theater home in Forward Theater in Madison during his last two years. All of that was strung out over almost 15 years. I supported his in all those endeavors but I did not believe that he was engaging in his heart’s work. Now, I admire much how he maintained his first vocation.  I could not do what David did. I made a home, raised a child, dug a garden, worked a job. I allowed the impulse to make art to be buried but in truth, it could not be snuffed out.   

Art is addictive.  It grabs people early and hangs on for whole lives. Finding a community at HILR where I can publish in the literary magazine and act in the Black Box productions and putting together blog entries to make a book of memoirs has come late for me but it is my right now. 

Have I admitted that I’ve recently returned to fiction writing? A piece that I was working on before Covid shut down. Now, four years after shut down, I am re-claiming it. I still find myself saying to myself David was the fiction writer, my ideas are derivative and not very good, there is no adequate time to sit for days with a few pages, and more. But I have no choice. All of the above is what I naturally gravitate towards.  It draws me in and I allow it to.  I feel awful when I am not writing, feel awful when I find I cannot articulate my ideas after a long time away from writing, and feel good, fulfilled, complete when I do it every day, through all of the shit that has to be written first and come to a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, a thought that pleases me. 

I submitted a few thousand words of this new, old fiction work to my writing group over the past few months. I got some complaints in the critiques—missing my heart felt memoirs, missing the mark as a storyteller, not a genre they are interested in. After the second time set of critiques, I limped along for a few days. I had to face the impulse to just put it back in the drawer where all failed literary attempts are kept. That mythic drawer was, back in the old analogue days, real drawers in studies and file boxes in the basement. Oh my, we had xerox boxes fully of mostly dead drafts and manuscripts in the basements of our younger lives.  Now, I can just close the file on the laptop. 

Or stop running away with the first whiff of rejection, keep the file open and work.

The creation of some kind of art is like planting a garden in a house that I am renting. My new metaphor! I don’t plant gardens because of some easy gain like increasing the value of this property or even enjoying the look of the garden. I do it because I am passionately in love with the process—planning shapes, choosing and searching for plants, playing in the dirt, planting, watering and caring for. Yes, the result is gratifying, the compliments nice, but it is the process that I crave and it is what satisfies me. 

Same with every art process that I have engaged in throughout my life. Same with writing, same with writing.

So, back to Julia and the festival.

It was good for her.  She spent time with Sarah who she loves and who takes her as she is. Julia got to see her co-star, Shayvawn, and the sound person from the movie crew, CC, who is just fabulous.  Julia was nominated but did not win a best actress award. She was a good sport although winning has never been very exciting for her. When her co-star won Best Supporting Actress, Julia went up with Sarah to accept the award. She managed to say the few words we had worked on in case she won in her category. She thanked Sarah, the cast and crew and the festival. I was proud she tried so hard.

More Julia—Yesterday, after Julia got home from her program and needed a nap. Before she fell asleep, she cried about missing her father and curiously, yesterday was the anniversary of the day David went back into the hospital with his very infected gall bladder which was the beginning of the last week of his life.  Yesterday, my thought was a memory of how children unconsciously mourn when their grownups have finished mourning.  To a large extent our family is safe and whole right now. There are some crippling challenges right now, but it may be safe to crying about losing her Daddy. 

I don’t know any of that to be true. Am I projecting and rationalizing? But for sure, life is move ahead for Julia in ways that make her sad enough to cry.

She is changing.  It is all in very small ways that would never be noticed with a typical young adult—watching for The Ride that will come to get her, being a bit bored with doing little in her program, being a bit more responsible with her chores. I’ve noticed and it is something that I feel. Not all the time, not without slip backs, but it feels like growing.

Julia still has no motivation that drives her.  It is expected at her day center that she choose from the activities provided. She does not always do that.  What she does I have no idea.  Possibly on her phone although she swears that is not what is going on. When we talk, I link what she does or doesn’t do with her big picture goal of living in Japan.  When we talk, I think she understands how activities and volunteer possibilities that she is presented with at Bay Cove increase her all over independence. But when she is at Bay Cove without any outside encouragement, I don’t think she sees much.  

And then there are her peers. Julia has no personal connections with peers but every so often she sees my Facebook page.  She sees peers, the children of my friends, doing what typical people do—going to and graduating college, first jobs, new businesses, partners, weddings, babies. All those things that indicate adults making decisions. She wants to do all that and she is completely overwhelmed with the prospect. It break my heart to see her understand what she is not doing, and for all my talk of ‘her own path in her own time’ I too mourne what she is not/ may ever do, and feel completely overwhelmed with the task of moving her towards independence.

We talk endlessly about what “they” are doing and how she might one day do some of that. And of what she needs to learn and practice to get to where “they” are. Sometimes our talking brings her back to some calm. Back to deciding to work on what she needs to do to be as independent as she can be. Moving towards independence is in such small steps that she misses them. At least, I think so.

She has a new app for her tablet that lets her “trace” pictures and for the last few days, she has taken time—long amounts of time—tracing what she once drew. She is tracing the anime characters that she used to draw. Tracing in this way is a novel experience and for now she is taking the time it takes.  I have to bite my tongue and not say that she has the ability to copy free hand any of the drawings she is tracing.  That she used to do that kind of drawing all the time! But she stopped doing that 18 months ago. It is hard to believe that Julia has not willingly picked up pencil and paper to draw by herself for so long.

I try to look on what she is doing in a neutral way.  I don’t want to put too much hope in tracing but watching her return to the kitchen table after supper is put away and she has finished the dishes to trace, to spend a long hour making some figure come alive puts my hope in gear. Is this some slow return? I don’t want to be patient!  

Like gardening, like my writing, I believe that somewhere deep inside Julia is still the artist.  Maybe, just maybe, it is time to let that out again.