Art is My Sword

My life has shaken the very line where reality teases the mind into questioning how to push through emotions and releasing the burden of holding pain. Some days I question everything and feel so little value in my being here and other days I relish in the amazement of life and all the little moments of happiness. I grew up in Northeast Wisconsin. My family was a tough hard-working driven group of dedicated dreamers. My world began in nature and only continues to be because of my connection to nature and art.

I began drawing and creating art from a very early age. My art has grown and shaped my ability to cope with and value life. As art comes from people's inner selves and is tied to the events in their worlds, I can't share with people what art means to me without telling my story.

My early childhood was full of family, laughter, playing outside after dark, catching frogs, and splashing in mud puddles. I think of warmth and happiness, sunshine, and yellows. My mother was a stay-at-home mom. She raised horses and we had lots of animals. My dad started a lumber company, raced cars, and grew a pumpkin patch with epically huge pumpkins. Every year he would carve out a pumpkin and my sister and I had to climb in to have our pictures taken inside the pumpkin. My sister was two years older than me. We had very different personalities. She wanted to be wild and live on the edge. I wanted to spend my days dreaming about Care Bears and My Little Pony. She wanted to have spiked hair and impress others with her dangerous side. We played non-stop with our two boy cousins and lip-synced to “I Wear my Sunglasses at Night” while bouncing on our beds at night.

My parents divorced/separated in fourth grade. That would make me around ten years old. I remember fights and yelling and screaming at times but it is a very faint memory. My mom took us at night to my grandparent’s cabin on Lake Michigan. It was a quaint, dark, and old-fashioned little cabin surrounded by pine trees and moss. The waves of Lake Michigan crashed against the shore filled with a variety of different-sized rocks. We stayed there for some time where I would spend my days creating designs and symbols with rocks on the shoreline while occasionally daring to go into the cold wavey waters for a swim.

We eventually moved into a mobile home located on my grandparent’s property. Everything in the trailer was green. The refrigerator, the stove, the toilets, and the sinks. There was even a green shag carpet in the living room with a trail worn through it from use. The walls were paneling and the kitchen floors were linoleum. I loved it there. I had my own room and I was happy. It was where I grew from a kid to a young person. It was where I had dogs, cats, and horses. It was where I would spend days in the forest exploring and sharing the world with my friends and animals.

This time reads in my mind like a mish-mash of events. None of them are too deep but they are all still there. Eventually, my mom remarried and had another child, a little boy named Jordan. I really didn’t have much contact with my biological father. My older sister at some point decided to live with him. In fifth grade, my maternal grandmother passed away from breast cancer. She was a strong woman who was the heart and center of my family. I have brief images in my memory of the wake and I remember my mom being distraught. Time marched on.

It wasn’t until my fourteenth birthday that the first real wave of life-altering change occurred. My mom passed away from breast cancer. She was diagnosed the year before. I mean what can you say about a thirteen-year-old grasping the situation. For me, it was my mom, and she had this thing happen to her but all was still well and fine, right? The reality of the situation didn’t hit me until close to the very end. After the first year of treatment, a mastectomy, and hopeful remission, it all happened so quickly. She was changing my little brother's clothes and he kicked her in the stomach with his foot as he was three years old. My mom was shocked by the pain and went straight to the doctor. I had no idea what was going on. I was just told to stay home and watch my little brother. My mom was immediately checked into the hospital.

The cancer had spread to her liver and was growing at a rapid pace. It was growing so fast it was said you could almost see it growing if you were to look at it under a microscope. She had gone from a normal abdomen to looking pregnant in a matter of weeks. I refused to see reality. I was laser-focused on school and just being oblivious to the situation. Denial is a powerful shield. My older sister would try to talk me into reality and get me to see what was going on but I persisted with no success. I remember the moment it did finally hit me. I remember when I realized my mom was going to die.

I was riding the school bus to school. I sat in the bus seat and I kept looking up at the metal rivets lining the ceiling every few feet. There was noise and conversation all around me but I was isolated in my own world. I sat there and stared at them trying not to cry. I just waved anyone away that would talk to me. I swallowed it down and walked into the school. I saw my friends around my locker and just let go. I couldn’t talk. I sat on the floor and just sobbed. My friends asked me what was wrong and I just said, “My mom is going to die.” I didn’t hear the bell ring, I didn’t hear everyone go off to class, I just sobbed with my head down. After some time, I remember a teacher coming to get me and bringing me to a little room so I could tell them what was wrong. I just said my mom is dying, her tumor is growing so fast they can’t stop it. I could see in their faces a need to try to comfort me and try to tell me “I am sure it isn’t that bad” but at some point, you could see them not know what to say anymore. They called my sister in from the high school to try to comfort me. She was ready and knew I had finally gotten it.

The last time I saw my mom, it was not the last goodbye you would hope for your child. She was fighting for every chance to live and decided to try an experimental last option treatment. The doctors were going to inject a large dosage of chemotherapy drugs directly into the tumor in her liver to try and stop the growth. When this happened things went poorly. She mostly lost consciousness at that point. She knew she was leaving but her will kept fighting. From that point forward, she was in a bed with an oxygen mask on with large amounts of pain drugs in her system. I was told she would hold up two fingers over and over again trying to signal them to get her two daughters. We came to the hospital but my mom was mostly gone. She was in a bed with an oxygen mask, her abdomen was swollen large and her hair was still mostly gone from the previous rounds of chemotherapy. Her body was dying but it knew she was supposed to keep fighting. Her mind couldn’t come back to speak anymore. She would grab the mask off over and over again and pull at cords and blankets. I didn’t recognize her as my mom anymore. Sometimes the point where the people we love the most become unrecognizable or unfamiliar is the most terrifying part of life. Whether it is sickness, mental situations, or drugs/alcohol, visually seeing some part of one's foundation become lost is jarring. She looked almost animalistic fighting the world for survival. She never spoke again or came out of the coma. That was my goodbye. My mom was thirty-seven years old. It had only been a couple of weeks since the day my brother had kicked her in the stomach while she was changing him.

Sometimes when traumatic events happen in children’s lives they are surrounded with support and security to ground them. This was not my path. My teenage years continued to check boxes on the trauma scale. These days were filled with shades of blue and black. My dad’s house was a screaming match of stress and anger. My brother and I were separated as we had different dads. My sister had submersed herself into this world, my dad’s house, before my arrival. She had already been drinking and smoking at a very young age. My dad’s girlfriend was significantly younger than him and introduced my sister to an adult world of partying and drugs. The fights and violence were extreme. I came from a different world. I didn’t want any part of it. When things would get really bad and when violence came after me, I ran and I hid in the woods. I tried to wrap myself in nature and I tried to find the beauty in the world.

There were social workers and I lived in several different households throughout my teenage years. My sister dropped out of high school and lived with a twenty-six-year-old man. She fought depression, body image problems, and eating disorders. I stayed focused on school and tried to better myself with art while living in one friend's house or another. This is where my art journey started. I began drawing and creating beauty in a world with so little of it.

I was accepted into a well-known university in Wisconsin. I used my college life to continue to look to art but had to focus on a degree. I didn’t correlate art with a future career or job at the time and therefore I was only able to take one drawing class. My ultimate goal was to be able to take a painting class. It had always been my dream but it did not come to fruition. Painting is expensive and I was on my own. After all, my parent didn’t even know what school I went to and my mental state was not in a good place after my childhood. College was full of ups and downs but in the end, I graduated. I also met my future husband and life began anew.

My painting life also began here. As my now-husband and I worked and had an apartment later in college, I was able to purchase some paint supplies and canvas. I could only afford the bare minimum but I was able to start living in color. My creative mind had outweighed my painting skills by a mile at first. I had so much emotion and pain to put in color. My first painting experiences were challenging. I could not even construct solid lines or shapes well. I could move the colors but they often would not go where I wanted them to. After some dabbling with abstract art, I focused on flowers. These were my first subjects as gardening had always drawn me in. I looked to the masters for inspiration and tried to imitate some of their movements. Because I was self-taught, every step I improved was hard-fought. The images I had in my head were very difficult to achieve. I had to let the image go on its own journey sometimes and hope for the best. Over the next years, I painted here and there but life continued as it does.

After college, we got jobs and bought a house. Soon, two little boys entered our world and a place of happiness and color once again emerged. My painting life took a back seat to my children and the joy of raising them. Days were long and exhausting as we had to work opposite shifts with our lack of money for daycare. Neither of us had a family to rely on for support. These were some of the same days of laughter and happiness I remembered from my childhood. We created a life and world where stability and security seemed reachable again. I didn’t need to create beauty because it was all around me.

As in all things in life, there are ups and there are downs. This is when my art is almost as important to me as breathing. When my two little boys were one and two years old, I felt the call of death knocking on my door. After my mom and grandmother died, I had felt like death would be chasing me always. I panicked and talked to my doctors about it. I was around twenty-seven years old and didn’t want to leave my little boys without a mother. My doctor then referred me to a genetic counselor.

Her name was Cecilia and she was a wonderful and knowledgeable lady. She went through my family history and we talked about breast cancer and its risks. Even though my grandmother and my mother had both passed from breast cancer, she was unsure if the history was strong enough to warrant a genetic test for the breast cancer gene mutation. She decided to go ahead and do it anyway just to be sure.

I was called back to her office for an appointment a couple of weeks later. I sat in the waiting room with several cancer patients and their families. The offices of the genetic counselor were located in the cancer care clinic. I listened to families carry on with mundane conversation trying to distract from the stress and pain of treatment and realities. I impatiently was looking toward the counselor's room and saw her moving about in her office. She moved a couple of things around and then placed a box of tissues on the table. I knew then the news was not going to be good. My blood work came back positive for the BRCA2 gene mutation. I cried and sat through the presentation on what this means for me. I was immediately given a range of options varying from less severe to more severe to deal with the impending outcome of breast cancer. I was intelligent and pragmatic. When I was told my chances were up to 90% that I would get breast cancer by the time I died, I had already made up my mind. I wanted the most conclusive treatment I could have to avoid going through what my mom did. I left the office deciding to have a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy at twenty-seven years old.

What did this mean for my sister? What did this mean for the rest of my family?

I called my sister and had the conversation that day. We ended up arguing as we did most of the time. She was mad I was being too impulsive with my immediate choice and I was mad she was not trusting my judgment based on the data I heard. We were sisters and we fought like sisters. In the end, I went through with the procedure with immediate breast reconstruction. My sister decided she didn't want to do the testing. She said, “I don’t want to know if I am going to die.”

My painting moved into deeper places. I spent my time painting flowers, grapevines, and fall leaves. I gained a lot more control over my skills with color and depth. Acrylic painting is very challenging in that the paint dries so fast. The approach is very different from oil paint. When you make a choice, for good or bad, it can crush your success or make your painting what you want it to be. You have to constantly choose whether you lose what you have by attempting to change it or settle with less than your perfect vision.

As I went through my surgeries, my sister was diagnosed with stage three cancer at thirty. The fight was fought and fought hard, in the end, another mother said goodbye to her two children a year later. She died on September 13th, 2008, exactly three months from her thirty-second birthday. That February my dad was diagnosed with stage four cancer. He too fought as hard as any person facing the end could. He died two years and three months later on my sister's birthday, December 13th, 2010.

Who could live through this? Who could handle this life? It isn’t really a choice I guess. You either face life or lose life. We all need something to keep us moving through the hard times.

Art was and is my sword. It was my fight and continues to be my fight. It was what I fought everything horrible in this world with. When my dad’s health crashed for the last time before he passed, I could feel the paint creating the beauty in my rose that day. From that time forward, I turned my painting toward wildlife and color. The style of my work has transformed in the past ten years. I now know what my color and my art mean to me. I can feel every happy childhood day in my colors and I can feel every deep pain and meaning in my blues. The paintings have become something alive now. At some point in the work, I feel it becomes its own thing. There is no changing or moving something that is. I often paint with a combination base of blues and highlight areas with color. It is my life. It was filled with blue but there were moments of color. I have filled my walls with beauty. I am surrounded by paintings I both criticize and love.