Pieces of Love

“You’ve got to protect your goal!” my mother shouted at me. The young woman across from me, the one who had been thrown from a horse, had just scored again. It was her turn to stand up at the air hockey table and that seemed to be giving her an advantage. I sat awkwardly in my wheelchair trying to block the puck.

We were at recreational therapy in a rehabilitation center for people with traumatic brain injuries. After the stroke, I was put into many kinds of therapy and despite the name, recreational therapy was my least favorite. Not just because I was so bad at playing air hockey from a wheelchair. And not because doing wheelchair jumping jacks made me feel lame (pun intended). But because since the stroke, my fine motor skills were not what they once were. (Honestly, they probably weren’t that great before the stroke.) Bracelet-making day was my least favorite. What should have taken ten minutes to string together took me well over an hour. Each time I made progress, I would drop the string, the beads would fall off, and I’d have to start all over.

So once I learned to walk again and do math again, I set my sights on graduate school, leaving arts and crafts to those people I deemed more talented and creative than I would ever be. Even long after anyone could tell I’d had a stroke, long after graduating graduate school with a 4.0 GPA (to prove to myself I was “normal” again), I still struggled with my fine motor skills.

“Why don’t you let me do that for you?” my friend suggested. A bunch of us were sitting around a table making dreamcatchers. “You can read us a chapter from your book instead.” Relief and gratitude was all I felt as I handed her my barely started wooden hoop. Though the women around me were all finished. I’m just not artistic, I told myself. And that’s okay. It’s funny how much power we let our beliefs hold. The soul though, she bides her time and works her magic to get around that stubborn human thinking

It was 10 years after my stroke that my 17-year relationship with my husband ended. During this major upheaval, I couldn’t bury myself in a degree program. Instead, I began to write poetry again. It was something I hadn’t done since grade school. A part of me long forgotten. A piece I thought I had snipped off and let fall away. Writing became an integral part of figuring out who I was and healing the pain I had hidden from, pushed through, and pretended didn’t exist. It was a lifeline between the old Kerry and the new one that I didn’t quite know how to be.

With the poetry, my soul had pushed open a door of creativity in me. I didn’t know how to paint or draw but I craved another outlet beyond writing. So one day I went to the local thrift store. I came home with a couple of coffee table books and an old, wooden sign that said: LOVE. I remember that day, sitting on the deck in the sun, with my favorite scissors (“the good scissahs” my mother with her Boston accent would call the Fiskars).

The first delicious cut into the thick, glossy paper made me giddy. It felt so naughty to cut up a book. My childhood was filled with books and they were sacred. Not just because my mother was a teacher, but also because she was a single parent, so most of what we read came from the library. Books were not to be written in and they were certainly not to be cut up. That day on the deck, without thinking about what I was doing, or whether I was or wasn’t an artistic, or if my not-so-fine motor skills could cut in straight line, I sat cross-legged and let myself play.

Writing had become my therapy. But when another upheaval in the form of a pandemic hit, I just couldn’t focus long enough to write. There was so much to say but I had lost my words. It was all I could do to figure out how to teach my classes online, to keep my students calm, and to try to give them hope. After class, I would sit on the deck and happily, even childishly, cut out words and phrases that made me smile. Who knew there could be so much joy to be found in old books about wolves and the red rocks of Utah and the blue lagoons of Tahiti? From butter and travel, to time standing still while you sit feeling, each cut reminded me of all the things I love about this world. The act of finding words that someone else had written, allowed me to create poetry when I couldn’t find my own words—all I needed to do was to cut them out.

As I began to piece them together, these words of love, I began to piece myself back together. Just like I pieced myself back together after the stroke. And again after my divorce. Which parts of me were still true? Which parts did I need to let go of? We all do it, all the time, this editing of ourselves.

By cutting out the words that felt true and letting go of the ones that no longer did, I was reminded of who I am. A poet who puts together words. A rule-breaker who cuts up books. An earth-lover who is passionate about repurposing. An artist I didn’t know existed. With every word I cut, I remembered, discovered and created who I am. And in doing so, reminded myself why we’re here. To hope, to create, to LOVE.

When the art community in my city put out a call for submissions to show in their upcoming collection, “Creating During COVID,” I thought, why not? My work was selected to be hung in a tiny local museum for six months. Even now, I look at the other entrants’ pieces as “real art.” Even now, I still have a hard time calling myself an artist. But isn’t that what we all are really? Artists? Creators? More than ever before, this is what I think the world needs from us. Our imagination and a pair of scissors, to clip from the old world what is worth keeping and use it to build something new.