A few years ago, ok about 13 years ago, my mother called me on the phone to say that she thought we should become citizens. I said, “why?” She said, “what if something weird happens around immigration?”. I said – “what could happen?” The reality was that I knew that something was already afoot. In 1997 I went to the Cayman Islands and when I tried to come back to the States with my lifetime Greencard, I was asked to come back behind the curtain and asked why I hadn’t become a citizen yet. I said, truthfully, that my understanding was that I had a lifetime Greencard. At that time, they told me that the photo was out of date (probably true) and that the Greencard wasn’t intended to be lifelong (despite everything I knew). Fast forward to a few years later, I think it was 2013 or 2014 when I was coming back from Panama. The guy at immigration said, “you have been a naturalized citizen since 1986?”. I said yes. He said, “why have you not become a citizen yet?” I didn’t answer truthfully then, which was that I knew I could file for all my Social Security tax if I ever left the States and that would probably help me get an apartment in England. I said, “I don’t know”. He said, “you need to do that. These aren’t intended for long term”. Despite their definition.
In 2013 or 2014, my mom decided we needed to become citizens. She paid for it, so I said ok. It took almost two years. We went to Portland, and when I moved back to Texas in 2015, my application transferred to San Antonio. I really only remember a few things. I went to an immigration appointment in San Antonio sometime in 2015 and I met my officer, who had tons of documents about me all over her desk, fanned out, like so many decks of cards. In the pile was the security badge of me that I had gotten at Austin Independent School District the week before. She said when I expressed shock and disbelief that “we have everything about you”. She told me a series of bizarre stories about what was going on with her life, including how she had had to move out of her apartment really quickly due to a bad boyfriend (haven’t we all had those?). A few days later, she called me when I was on a bus on a field trip with students to tell me that my application had been fast tracked and approved. It was at the end of the Obama administration, and it turned out to be dramatic. I was part of all those people who (some of whom) apparently maybe shouldn’t have been fasttracked, but I digress.
In the fall of 2015, I went to San Antonio to a large auditorium somewhere and participated in my citizenship ceremony. There were hundreds of people, all dressed nicely, with their families, as if it was a special church service. They asked us to stand up when they said our country’s name. Mexico by far had the most people. They gave us cheap American flags and took our greencards and gave us instead a Citizenship Document that we later had to take to the Social Security Administration. Everyone was well behaved, and happy. There were a few monks from Tibet who became citizens that day, and all of their monk friends sat in the back in their saffron robes playing on their smartphones and laughing. At one point, I looked back and noticed most of them were sleeping. It was one of the nicest and best days of my life: everyone in that room had done the right thing and wanted to be a part of the United States.
Here we are, 10 years later. It seems that things have changed, but I think the writing was on the wall even then. Immigrants have become progressively less welcome over the last ten years. Let me ask you, though: in all these current immigration raids, how many are happening on farms where people are picking fruit and vegetables? None. They are all happening to people in cities, who can be spotted and singled out, easily, and taken to jail. You know that the government folks don’t want anything happen to their food supply. It is all so dark, so cynical. So gross and terrible.
I have always been conflicted about being a citizen of this country, but I did it because I thought maybe my mom was right. Turns out, she was. There would be little to no chance of us becoming citizens now. But does it justify it all? Right now I want to do something drastic, a la Josephine Baker. I now understand two things: the first, what Mr. Moore, a retired school principal and Baptist minister, used to say to me every time I got upset about the state of things: “What a World!” . And why people left the United States never to return. I understand the sense of dread and disgust, because I feel it today and have for the last little while. Dread, disgust, sadness, anger, resignation, confusion; I feel all of them at the same time.
I sincerely hope that what is happening in LA is not about to happen across our country. What a world.
Recently, I learned that my father lied for my entire life (longer, actually) about being a father of twins who were born in 1967. One of them is coming to visit my brother and I in August, and I literally could not be happier about a thing happening; all I want to do is hug him and look at his face and take a photo with his tall self (during our first chat, I asked them both how tall they are as my brother and I are very tall, too).
Since discovering the existence of my brothers, I have been meditating on lying and why we do it. Why did my dad do it? Why have I done it (not very much, but I have been guilty of hiding myself and parts of my selves). All of the artwork I have done since December has been of eyes; iteration after iteration of eyes. I make them even when I don’t intend to make them. Eyes, eyes, eyes. Paths. Eyes surrounded by paths. The path of the past to the present. Yesterday I was in my amazing quilt class and we had a guest speaker, Zak Foster, and he said the most interesting snippet “There is no history, not really. There is only the present, and many, many presents.”
I loved that and it made me think. Right now I am going through perimenopause which is this insane journey of weird physical symptoms, overwhelming rage, quick tempered emotions that spin out of nowhere, pain, decisions that are hard for me to make, a sense of perspective, a sense of looking backward to look forward, and a sense that there isn’t as much time in front of me as there is behind. It’s a bit of a mindfuck.
Today I was getting an ultrasound to check that the Mirena IUD I had placed last week to provide me with progesterone is in the right place in my uterus. I had it placed last Wednesday and it has been very painful and exhausting: surprisingly so. It has reminded me that I am older now, and it reminded me of my past presents. When I was getting the IUD inserted, my cervix kept “running away” (the words of my midwife as I have no idea what this means but it sounds weird and sad) from her. She finally had to dose me with some extra Lidocaine and hold on to it with forceps. As I lay there waiting for the inevitable, this wonderful nurse Caroline was holding my hand and telling me that I was a wild horse running free on a beach, like the horses of Chincoteague from those old books. I felt my body tensing up over and over. They kept telling me to relax. I kept apologizing. I remembered something.
When I was about 20, I had this seemingly wonderful boyfriend named Ryan, who was so cute with long hair and who liked to go camping. He was from Midland and we went out to west Texas and camped alot on forestry land and cooked rice for dinner in the dark. We went on an ill-fated road trip out west one summer and discovered we didn’t travel well together, but in retrospect, my part of that was that I was/is/always will be desperately afraid of intimacy as I don’t trust it. The model I was shown was irregular and broken and weirdly sad and incomplete. Now I know that at its center was a big lie, which must have contributed, but isn’t the entire explanation. Either way, I discovered that I was pregnant with Ryan’s baby later that year and we both decided we didn’t want to have a baby then (I haven’t investigated how I feel about this just yet but think it is mostly ok with me). Ryan came in with me when I was having the procedure – the doctor must have been very open-minded? – and he told me later that I tensed up and looked like I was in the most pain of anyone he had ever seen. I remembered this vividly in that moment last week when I was getting the IUD. I couldn’t stop tensing up, I was very quiet, and I kept squeezing Caroline’s hand. At one point I asked if I was hurting her, and she said no, to keep squeezing, so I did.
Today I went and got the ultrasound to check its placement and everything looks good according to the tech. She was very nice and her name is Jane and she has been doing ultrasound for 35 years which I find amazing. While she was ultrasounding, she kept asking me if I was ok and I kept telling her that I was, but I was tensing up and was trying to get myself to relax. She took about 30 photos of my uterus from on top of my belly and inside my body, showed me the IUD (it looked good!) and off I went. I apologized to her and told her I had a lot of medical trauma associated with my childbirthing body parts, and she said she was sorry, and I told her it was ok as it wasn’t her fault.
After Ryan and I had the abortion, everything was hard and I think we started fighting about everything everywhere for months and the fights got worse and worse and worse until his neighbors didn’t want us to live at the co-op anymore. He moved into a little house with a friend and we kept trying but it was done, somehow. The fights got worse, and then 9/11 happened and I remember noticing there weren’t any planes in the sky when we sat on his porch. I was supposed to go give a presentation at UT about something and he was threatened and we fought and he pushed me into a wall. Later that day he broke up with me.
Last year, last May, a friend of mine was killed by her partner. He killed her, set fire to the family house she was living in, and then killed himself. He did make sure her horses were safe, which is some blessing in all of this. When she was killed, no one described the incident as domestic violence, only murder-suicide. She worked with my husband, and his boss never spoke about it again. It was as if they weren’t allowed to speak about it, but I don’t think that was what is was. I think he didn’t know how to talk about it, deal with it, wrap his heart around it, and so passively coerced his coworkers to do the same. It was horrible: it festered. Just before her death, Cody’s other coworker lost his father, and his wife thinks that because of the lack of space for discussion, that her husband felt that losing his friend and coworker was more painful, was worse, made more of an impact, than the death of his own father.
This week I went to Willowind, a therapeutic horse farm that teaches people how to ride horses peacefully and provides horse-based therapy to people who need it. A friend who teaches there had saved some horsehair for me, some special ashy blonde hair from a huge dappled draught horse named Abel. His fur looks like stone and he is a giant. I am planning on taking the horsehair and combining it with a design of a horse, making my friend’s mother and sister a necklace each. I want to do something with the loss of this person that is beautiful and special just as she was.
It has been a hard time of loss and of change. Growing older is not for the faint of heart, let me tell you. I have a hormone patch on my tummy that I switch left to right twice a week and it is helping me sleep better. I hope the IUD helps other things. My skin on my face looks better, my boobs are droopier and I want to make a corset for them and be a little radical. When I walk around my garden I am amazed everyday at my plants’ abilities to grow a little bit more. I wonder what it would be like if our only stimuli were light and water?
Circling back to eyes and lies, I have made (almost done with the third anyway) three quilts about it. They are all the same size, baby sized, and have various iterations of eyes and repeated patterns that are a little spiky. One is spooky, one is sweet, one looks like a flag somehow. I wish I could ask my dad why. I wish I could call my brothers ask them over now, but I have to live up to my name. I plan to make a quilt about us, but it is a bit of a dive into a deep well, and I am not sure exactly where to start. Zak told me to talk to my fabric, and that seems like a good idea. He also said to write, so here I am.
One of the things my therapist shared with me is that she thinks I don’t exactly know how to have a real partner, as the example given my brother and I was so fraught. I agree, but it makes me sad as, for the most part, Cody is so great and I wish I was better at being a partner. I am trying very much to integrate with him, to think about him, to not be afraid to share stories with him. It is amazing to me that we have been together for 10 years and there are still stories we haven’t shared with each other. I am lucky to have him and he me but there are lots of things that I have yet to learn to be a whole person and the best version of myself. I have always been so good with kids, but adults scare me quite a bit. The brothers, though, don’t scare me at all. Why is that?
How can so many worlds exist within our minds and our hearts at the same time? How can there be so many both/ands? It is a great mystery this life of ours. Nature gives me some rhythm which is comforting, but I want to be more honest about how I feel and what I am thinking about. I am too scared I think to voice these things out loud, but I think I can write them down. Maybe I can get to a place where they come out in a more formal way, but for now, making stuff and writing stuff will have to do.
I had baby chickens in my studio for a month or two and it got all dusty, so I am off to go and dust it and get it ready to start making things again. I have about 8 power rings and an amazing pendant that are asking to be finished. When will I move on from eyes? Who knows? They are beautiful and it is interesting how many types of eyes there are and how many colors. Right now the world and my place in it feel very mysterious and spinny, but I saw this poster in the hospital today that said “Bloom Where You Are Planted” and I thought I could start there.
I miss my friends who have left the planet before me; I wish I could talk with them. Their loss shows me how precious it all is, how fast it goes by, and how important it is to notice the weird little plants and how they grow in the sunshine and the rain. It is all interconnected, everything. All of my feelings of fear and inadequacy that came from early days somehow connect to the lie my dad told that he kept so well hidden. How different things can be when we are just honest, even if it hurts in the moment. Right?
Camping in Lamoine State Park and being close enough to home to come work on projects
Planting huge amounts of squash plants and expanding the garden
The stars!!!
Time and thinking about things differently in terms of the past and of self
The birds that fly around our house and land all the time and eat all the birdseed
Life is harder than I had expected as a younger person. People are complex and all these things happen to us, and they are almost all unpredictable. It is all about how we respond: that is what matters. It is also really hard sometimes to be my best self. My mom’s neighbor, Mrs. Meryweather, is almost 91 and has taught me so much about all of this. She has taught me to garden and been an open book and a listening ear. She makes me laugh and I honestly want to be alot like her when I am that old, and even before. Her husband was equally wonderful; they are quite a pair to shine this experience of life upon, having done so much good for everyone around them, in small ways. That’s all I have to say tonight. The garden is gorgeous and I am happy to be busy with that and everything else. ❤
Paciencia, Paciencia 