The Sock Monkey ETC Assessment

This is one of my bags of monkeys in progress. I have piles of monkeys in various stages of assembly which is a very odd way for me to work. At first, I thought I was working several monkeys at a time for etsy store convenience, but then I noticed I have been drawn to my least favorite part of monkey making: cutting, sewing, stuffing and assembling. Usually, I work one sock at a time and I keep my eye on getting to the final touches and figuring out the monkey's story. I'm like a sculptor looking for the monkey in the sock and giving it a voice. I approach sock monkey making on a cognitive level. I know that sounds ridiculous -- I'm talking about SOCKS here, but that's how it is.

This past week, however, I am just a monkey-making machine and not so into thinking. I'm all kinesthetic in the monkey making, just getting into a rhythm of stuffing and stitching and that's all I want to do. I think I have 8 or 9 monkeys sitting around waiting for me to do my favorite things to them, but I haven't had the desire. Instead I grab another empty monkey and stuff some more or reach into my sock stash and start another one. My last supervision teacher would say, "That's diagnostic." I heard her voice in my head today while I was hand stitching a monkey crotch and realized how extra weird it is that I don't know why I am doing this.

It's not narcissism that makes me need to examine myself. I just think it's bizarre that people like me who are trained to make sense of artistic behaviors and have insight into creative choices can have moments of not knowing the meaning of their own need to make a pile of faceless sock monkeys. I don't know if it's just me being a rookie or if it's a necessary part of a therapist's job, but I find myself a great practice patient, because I can't help you if I can't help me and also I get some of my best ideas from experimenting with what works to keep me on target, so to speak. So, this is why I questioned myself about the odd monkey-making behavior today.

So, I am working with repetition and not a lot of thought. This seems to be a self-soothing thing to do, but I don't feel especially anxious even though I am about to start a new job next week. On the same day I start training at my new job, I also volunteered to teach a yoga class for families staying in town while their children receive cancer treatment and somehow that scares me more than anything right now, but not enough to change a lifetime of creative habits. I pondered over myself quite a lot today and as I traced the passing thoughts and emotions that have been running through my mind this week, I think I got why I'm stuck on creative self-soothing.

I just experienced the first father's day without a father, eleven months after my father died. Triggering, but I feel at peace with my father's death somehow. However, in addition to the holiday and anniversary, this time of year has not been my emotional favorite since my mother died; June is a month of regret. The end of June was when my mom received the fatal dose of chemo that destroyed her digestive system and caused her to suffer a long torturous medically-induced death. That wasn't supposed to happen. Her cancer was treatable. Therefore, this is the time of year that things could have gone very differently if only we weren't a family that trusts authority and doctors so easily. If a time machine fell into my yard today I would go to Junes past and save my family. Regret is not one of the most enlightening emotions in grief and it would make sense that self-soothing would be in order. This might also make my fear of teaching yoga to families of kids getting chemo feel a whole lot more scary than it really is. But, I am a facer of fears and experience so far has proven performance nerves are really good liars but poor fortune tellers.

I don't know what good it does me to come to this conclusion about why my sock monkeys have no faces this week. But it does leave me wondering now what? I don't believe in avoiding negative emotions, but rather honoring them. So, Dear Regret, I don't know what to do with you, but I meet you at the door and welcome you with whatever you have to share. For now, Regret and I have some sock monkeys to stitch and stuff.

In the meantime, ETC stands for Expressive Therapies Continuum and if you want to know more, read this: Expressive Therapies Continuum: A Framework for Using Art in Therapy, by Lisa D. Hinz.

Pretty Dead Things

Things are starting to come up in my yard and it reminds me of a metaphor I discovered and photographed last year. I'll start from the beginning. Tulips have always been my favorites and they became even more favored once I had space to plant them and became aware of how easy they are. Even though I hate gardening, I always have a thing for photographing what comes up in the spring. No reason. I just do it, but then I feel sorta hmmm, matured I guess, because I know from printing experience, photographing floral shit in your yard for no reason is what many retired folks do.

One of the new things I learned about my mom was that she loved pink flowers. I'm pretty anti-most-things-traditionally-feminine, so I avoid pink for the most part, but planted pink and white stuff for my mom and my inner 80-year-old-hobbiest photographed them. Under most circumstances, I would never admit to photographing pink flowers, being more a fan of body parts, abstraction and digital weirdness, but...

I noticed things when the flowers started to whither and die. They became somewhat cool to photograph. In color, it isn't anything special, but in black and white, it starts to be all about light and texture and in photography, that's more delicious than hot macaroni and cheese on a rainy day.

So, you ask, what does that have to do with grief processing? Well, first of all this was what I did while hanging out in my grief garden last year.

Second of all, I thought a lot about how these flowers became much more rich, deep and fascinating to me while they were in this weak dying process. I thought about my mom in particular and how amazing she was while she was sick. It's easy to be happy and positive while we're healthy and all is well, but going through sickness and the tough times are when we really see what we're made of. My mom was always friendly, kind and positive and even when she was dying a torturous death due to medical error, there could be no doubt that her traits were authentic, because most of the time, she still was all of those things. She worried more about us and provided support and counseling to us in her greatest time of need for as long as she could. Like these flowers, her light and texture was more evident as she was leaving the world.

Also, my dad was alive this time last year, but I feel like I saw him differently after losing my mom as well. He had always been strong, rational and absolutely-no-nonsense, but without my mom, his shell fell off and for the next year and a half, he was fragile and sensitive. He too developed a deeper texture.

Also, I think for those of us who live, getting hit with losing half of our immediate family in a short period of time brought out a new texture in us. I think the relationship between my siblings and I have changed. I don't know about them, but the way I look at the world has become more wrinkled like these flowers, but also the wrinkles are what makes it richer in a sense. Life isn't as beautiful as it used to be, but now I can see the beauty where it is. I don't think I knew how well I had it, until I lost it, but losing it, makes me love what I have left even more. Like a good photograph, contrast brings out the best in things. Or, at least it makes it more interesting to examine.

Does this make sense? Looking at these photographs again now, I'm thinking this may be another photo project for this season. I see things I would like to do differently. I have a whole body of work in my mind. We'll see how that goes.

Grief Flags

I may have made up the title, "Grief Flags" just now. In reality, these are called "Prayer Flags" if you're sorta religious and "Peace Flags" if you are not. My flags are not about prayer or peace, but about loss, so I'm renaming them.

The original Tibetan concept of these things is that you hang the flags out at a certain time of the year (I think February, but I'm not really sure) and they blow around and fall apart for a year or so. The flags have prayers written on them and as they fall apart the words are released into the air where the gods can hear them. If you want to know more about Prayer Flags go here. It makes a lot of sense to apply this to writing to someone lost.

I made some of these to my mom, which is probably a really sacrilegious thing to do, but since I am sorta sacrilegious anyway, it worked out well. For my process, I did pay attention to the color symbolism and order, making something about the writing or design apply to space, wind, fire, water, earth, but otherwise was pretty liberal in how I made and used these.

I felt it was important to sew these a little, since my mom was a quilter, but also important that they be able to shred in the breeze, so there are no knots or hems. I used fabric paint and markers and transferred photographs in places. Everything was done by hand, so this project took awhile.

Fire Flag
This is a picture of my mom in high school.
The music is hand drawn and a copy of Friedrich Kuhlau's Sonatina in C, Op. 20 No.1
My mom used to play this.

(This is not my mom! But, the music sounds like this.)

Through doing this I felt like I was honoring my mother, but also realized two important things that were good for my grief process. The first was that I didn't have any unfinished business with my mother. Everything I wanted to write on these, were things we had already discussed before she died. Secondly, I became aware that even though my mother's death was unfair on many levels: most people don't lose parents at my age and the cause of her death was not supposed to happen and therefore extremely torturous for everyone, I wouldn't have traded my experiences of daughterhood for anyone else's. This helped me move into a place of greater acceptance. It is really difficult not to accept even the worst of circumstances when you realize you don't want to live in another person's shoes.

On a technical note. These flags are holding up AMAZING! There was some discolored dripping from the rain, but not a lot. Very little fading. And they're not falling apart all that much either.

Last Flag and a moment of awareness for me.

Memorial Garden

I stole this image from the interwebs.

 

This is the story of my own art therapy process at it's most real.

When I was around 12, I saw some made-for-television, women-in-peril movie about a deadbeat mom changing her ways or a journey through foster care or adoption or something. I remember almost nothing about it, but one line stuck with me way back then. It was, "Mother means God in the mouth of a child." That line came back to me after my mom died, because I felt like my soul had been removed and bashed against a wall a thousand times. When my mother died she took the whole world with her. My God was gone. That was how enormous grief felt.

I didn't know what to do with the grief. Some people visit the graveside of lost loved ones, but my brother and mother's graves were thousands of miles away and hundreds of miles from each other. Taking flowers and talking to the grass and sky at their places of rest wasn't possible. Instead of visiting their grave/mausoleum I paced a lot. I probably paced enough to reach those thousands of miles on foot. I paced around nature. I wandered cemeteries. I walked cities and my own neighborhood. When my brother died I sprinted myself a stress fracture. When my mother died I walked a hole in my foot, but no matter how far I walked or ran, there was no location to hold my grief with me. There was no church for my lost god.

During the course of my own grief therapy, my therapist said something like, "You're going to be an art therapist, you should do some art about this." And I said something like, "Everything I do is about this." And she said something like, "No really make something about this, just about this, not that self-soothing stuff." Okay, so that's not quite how the conversation went, but you get the gist.

So, I made a lot of things "about this" which I will get to overtime, but the first was the space.

I am no gardener. Digging is fun. Planting is cool. That's as far as I want to go. Watering, weeding, debugging... I don't even know what else... that stuff sucks. However, I decided to create a place to hang out with grief and I thought a tree would be nice. I could handle a tree. Digging, planting and mostly ignoring (aside from some pretty simple sapling needs) was within my range of commitment. I decided on a pink dogwood tree, because my mom requested pink flowers for her funeral. I selected the area of my backyard outside my kitchen window so I would see it daily.

This is how my yard looked when I started!!!

In my defense, it looks better than the dirt, broken asphalt and chain link backyard I had on moving day, but still bad. I know.

An interesting thing happened when I planted that tree (and this is a metaphor I try to keep in mind whenever I am starting anything new that sounds overwhelming), I thought this is a nice little tree, it deserves something more, so I planted some bulbs around the base to come up in the spring.

When those started coming up, I thought these are pretty flowers around a pretty tree, they should have a better space, so I did some mulching and got some rocks (remembering my poor gardening skills) and then I enclosed the rocks and the mulch with a little fence. I thought there should be a place to sit and be with this tree, so I got a bench. The view wasn't right, so I mulched along the fence and planted stuff. The daffodils, tulips, crocuses and whatever other bulbs I planted went out of season, so I planted other flowers for the summer and I watered them. I started working my way along the other fence. I planted a rose bush. And I made a bunch of art to go with all of this. I watered things! I pulled weeds! I processed stuff. My dad died. I gave him a space in my memorial garden with my mom and brother. My girlfriend added some of her own processing about her cat and best friend who died a year after my mom.

At the beginning of last summer, the space looked like this...

The grass was still a major work in progress. The tree and flowers were much tinier than they were at the end of the summer. I'm still no gardener or landscaper, but the point is it's progress. More importantly, I don't have to wander with my grief anymore and I feel like I can honor lost ones through honoring this space.

Other grief work sprouted from this and I'll get to that eventually.

As I was searching for a pink dogwood image to steal from the internet, I found this site on creating a memorial garden. Notice the image of the pink dogwood while you're there. I almost stole that one for the top of this post.

Grief Group Work

As mentioned previously, my graduate school journey has both professional and personal therapeutic components. Among the personal has been participating in a loss and bereavement workshop and group through a local Hospice. (It also happens to be led by an art therapist, so this is a double bonus.) Today was the last day of the holiday support group I was attending.

Each week we began the group by selecting colored glass stones and saying something about what it represented or acknowledging something about our process. I wanted to do something special with my glass to memorialize the experience and remember what I was thinking each week when I took a stone.

I spent Sunday night doing this...

The last three stones were added today: the green and the two larger stones. The large stones were made at the end of our last group. They are clear with images/words in the background. One was my own and another was from another group member. Interestingly, they both say "growth," which is what I have received from my whole loss ordeal, as terrible as it has been.

The banner across the chest (and title) is "It Only Hurts Because You Loved." That was my mantra after losing my mother, which has been the hardest for me, and reading Grieving Mindfully by Sameet M. Kumar, PH.D. Luckily, I'm a proud owner of this one, because I need to read it again now that I have a little more space. One of the things I learned from this book is that grief is only possible because we are capable of large amounts of love. The deeper the love, the more intense the sorrow. For me, this concept made grief pain more endurable, because it was a reflection of how much each of the family members I lost meant to me. I felt like I had a responsibility to carry and nurture where it hurt and acknowledge also the positive traits I want to foster from each person I loved and lost.

Currently, this 8x10 canvas sits above my desk and one of my inherited quilted pieces of my mother's. It needs some placement adjusting, but this works for now.