Cindy, on the TAW Book Club I’m registered on, put up a couple of exercises which forced my hand in thinking about these things (and working through the resistance of why I didn’t want to do so). From last week, but I’ve just done them -

 Ten imaginary lives -

(hard-pushed to find ten)

1. Writer - published and productive novelist
2. Adoptive parent (working on it)
3. Rich enough to have my dream house by the sea (see No. 1)
4. More world travel whenever I please (not at someone else’s deadlines)
5. Proper cafe owner which does proper coffee and brunches (not particularly well done in England)
6. Luxury Dog and Cat Holiday Camp owner with a big English country house (and staff to clean up the dog poo)
7. School teacher
8. Fantasy artist (pencils, not oils or watercolours)
9. Lyricist for a brilliant songwriter / musician
10. Respected politician (okay, not so sure about that one)

 Ten Tiny Changes

I can’t recall this being in Week 2 of The Artist’s Way, but it makes sense to include these to get to each of the above imaginery lives, I guess. This will truly test whether the above is actually really something I want to work towards.  

1. On Writing - I am writing, in fact I have just enrolled in a writing course which promises to make my fees back in published articles or return them if I’m unsuccessful. I am doing quite a bit over this.
2. On Adopting - Working on that as best as possible. Obviously.
   
3. On Rich Enough - I wrote about my dream house in my morning pages today. It was out of not having much else to write about. I see myself getting to that rich state personally - enough for a seaside home - via my writing. But I told myself off for not centreing on that manifestation constantly also, as a separate entity. So I’ve promised to print out a picture board I did a couple of years ago, and sticking it onto my wall today - where I can see this dream every day. I think it’s even got writing on it.
   
4. World travel - this again manifests itself with richness. I am reasonably well travelled anyway, but would like the choice to just up and go on a family holiday to an African safari or something - whenever I please. I think this one remains a subset of the rich enough dream.
   
5. Cafe Owner - There is a new town to be built in this county, with a guided bus route into Cambridge and St Ives. I have long bemoaned the fact that England doesn’t do proper brunch cafes, and have the fondest memories of some which peppered Wellington, New Zealand (and Auckland) which did a roaring trade on weekend mornings, with the best brewed coffees, cups of tea, hot chocolates with real cream, the best cakes and the best Eggs Benedict and healthy cooked breakfast options. The cafes always had an outdoor large area, where you could order your brunch, meet up with friends and read the big Sunday papers in the weekend sunshine. The new town would be the best place to set this up, but realistically - we have no money to do this. And I have no experience in catering anyway. But I can look into trying out some of those recipes here at home for some nice summertime brunches.
   
6. Pet Luxury Camp Owner - there’s a huge market in the U.K. for luxury pet hotels - there are even celebrities who hire limosenes to take their pets hundreds of miles up to the Yorkshire dales for a week at such a hotel. I have a dream of owning a large country home, with plenty of fields and lakes as surrounds, and this seems to be a nice side business, plus employing local staff to maintain, and providing locals with a discounted way to holiday their own pets with the pampered pooches being shipped in from elsewhere.  It’s not a dream I want to pursue, though - unless I happen to win the lottery to be able to buy that mansion in the first place.
   
7. School teacher - again, not a huge biggie for me. I am about to have a job interview for a position at the school’s after school kid’s club though. Wish me luck.
   
8. Fantasy artist - maybe I’ll start messing around with pencils again. I’m a good drawer, but I don’t currently want to focus on that right now - it would be to the detriment of No. 1. Until that is stable and working, I don’t want to deviate much from it. I have a habit of getting into something, and spending hours doing that instead of what I should be doing.
   
9. Lyricist / songwriter - I think this one might be lived vicariously through my daughter, lol. She seems to have inherited my musical ability, and spends most of her time entertaining us with made-up dances accompanied by songs. Before she was speaking entire sentences, she was already making up songs to well-known tunes. I need to get her piano lessons once she’s old enough, although she will never be a singer as she’s also inherited my vocal abilities.
   
10. Politician - full of opinions, that’s me. But I’m not a natural Brit, so am not entitled to run for local elections, and am unsure as to my own vocal abilities there. I’m better at writing at the speed of my thoughts, not talking. But I am making waves in my behind-the-scenes support of my husband, who is currently running for school governor. So my opinions will be somehow worked through in that respect, if he’s successful. Perhaps personally, I can combine the writing with letters to the editor to hear my voice out there more often. That would be a good combination.
    

 So, I have some homework tasks. Better get busy.

In the meantime there appears a tie-in with some thoughts from elsewhere. Susan White asks us on her blog, to consider what legacy we might want to leave behind us - what should we be remembered for. She’s even good enough to suggest that we might already be working on it.

I hummed and hahhed over this for a couple of minutes.  Logically, it should surely be from something mentioned above - afterall, those are my ultimate dreams. But in those, I had not mentioned my present life much at all - digital scrapbooking, altered arts, creating for others and for my family, even blogging here right now. They should not be denyed, even as I move onto filling my life with some other facets.

To make this easier on me, I thought about what might more simply be put on my gravestone, by my family perhaps. That thought derives something much more defined. Whereas success in writing might mean a large epitaph in the local paper (maybe even internationally) the bare bones of a person sits in a few expensive letters on a tombstone. 

My legacy then, I might like something like this -

“Author, Artist, Loving wife of ………………… and proud Mother of ……………..

“She helped people think, and was very kind” 

Perhaps I’m kidding myself with the kind part, but there’s always hope.  

I’ve had a disastrous weekend, full of tears and arguments. And interestingly, I had forgotten to do my morning pages on both days. Plain forgot, just like last weekend. My morning pages of late last week were reasonably negative anyway - brief and questioning of the need to write down all the same thoughts going through my head, and dreams - over and over again. And after such a good start on the Wednesday…

I didn’t want to dwell over the same stuff again, so used that to make me forget the pages on the weekend. Weekends are really awkward anyway. My whole morning is about sharing getting up with the family, and rushing to do something together. To confine myself away from that for half an hour or over just seemed too selfish, and hopelessly un-necessary also. What would I learn that I wasn’t already writing about anyway?

Justification aside over why I didn’t spend time on writing some morning pages, the emotions came out anyway. Resentment over my husband wanting to once again leave the house and drive away - this time to attend a football match on Saturday afternoon. Resentment in being left alone to entertain both my daughter and the dog - just like every single other afternoon in the week. Resentment that this one remaining facet of my life - motherhood - was becoming so resented as it means I never have time alone to myself to just think. Resentment which makes me realise I need to find more nature time.

I haven’t done  most of the exercises in Week 2 of The Artist’s Way. I did them in my head, and realised I didn’t want to put onto paper what I already knew. Because my life pie would be the worst one of the lot. Where you have to mark each of the following - Friends, Romance, Adventure, Work, Exercise, Spiritually, and Play - well can you do zeros on some of those, and ones on the rest? Not really a pie really, more like something that never rose in the oven.  I’m certain the exercise wasn’t intended to make us all feel a total failure in life, but to offer hope in recognising those areas we need to concentrate our attention upon.

To excuse my big fat zeros and skinny ones on that one, it seems a rating of the current state of play with my life. With leaving my full-time career last September, I also lost my friends, and still struggle to find people I fully get on with around the school playground. Other friends sit at great distances. And the financial predicament with me leaving work has also caused much suffering in many of the other pie pieces - romance is basically zero, and adventure and play are pretty much difficult to do without money. I have no excuses for exercise, as my legathy is emotional rather than physical. And spiritual - well, that’s why I joined up with TAW isn’t it - although in doing so I recall baulking against the spiritual nature of it all. Irony always impresses me, however, and it is this draw card which will keep me going.  

I therefore have only hope now that moving into Week 3, that the author will give me a get out of jail card, and something which picks up my spirit a little better, and not allow the strong skeptic centred inside of me to get away with what is currently going on internally.

TAW and this adoption thing are wringing me dry emotionally, and quite literally. It’s affecting my digital scrapbooking and crafting work at the moment, but ironically is forming an oomph behind my writing work. I picked up a couple of national writing magazines on Saturday, and have just borrowed from the mortgage money to purchase an expensive creative writing course. I’ve joined a couple of online communities on this also, although only for reading and informational purposes. And more mortgage money has just gone on an amazon order for the best writing books out there. Friday I spent tootering around learning a free relational database system which will allow me to grow my research notes for the novel. I also managed to list down some scenes for the first chapter.

And having read in some writing magazines, that writers must also read lots also, then this is exactly the excuse I might need for the claimed artists dates I’ve been taking lately - to just snuggle down and read something. In a lot of ways, I believe in actually just getting on and writing, though. I need to protect myself from the critiques offered over my creative writing attempts - just for the moment while I centre myself in this new facet of myself that I am creating.  I am making progress in this side of my creativity, and with that sits the hope that this journey of vast emotions will be worth it in the long-run. So I shall continue on with Week 3 and see where it takes me.  

On Sunday in a fog of automaton I did what I normally did. I did it by rote. My daughter had arrived home after staying over with her grandparents. They all stayed for a Sunday roast lunch. And our daughter wanted to tell them of her new ballet classes.

I grabbed hold of the opportunity, one which I’d been looking for for several days since purchasing her new ballet costume. I asked her to put it on to show Grandma, which she quickly did. And once she was in her leotard and skirt and little ballet slippers, I then did what every scrapbooker out there will do - the many thousands of us. Perhaps at this exact point in time in the world, perhaps one hundred of us were doing the same thing. Perhaps the world turns and nods knowing that in Texas, England, Holland, Australia, Singapore and South Africa, scrapbookers are turning to their children at exactly the same time and saying -

“Just stay there and I’ll get the camera”

And perhaps the world also knows that for 90% of the time our long-suffering children will return the request with an outright groan.  

My daughter has been brought up under this torture. I have attempted many different methods in getting that precious photograph. I’ve bribed, cajoled, threatened, pleaded, shouted (especially when a dog is involved), sighed, asked for help from an unwilling partner, pretended I wasn’t doing it, run into the room hoping for the power of surprise, tried different positions, tried commands, tried ignoring the bad faces, tried taking hundreds of photos until even I was bored, and on some occasions given up.

Over the past few months my new photographing tactic has been to tell her to be a “model”. You have to say the word, “model” with a certain accent on the ..del to get it. It’s a British thing where there is an undercurrent against the many blank-eyed reasonably pretty teenagers who announce to the world that they are going to be a model and make a lot of money.

Our daughter doesn’t know what a model is, mind you. I like to take credit for this niavity from a parenting perspective. Despite the page 3 girls and copious Model searches on T.V., I have somehow so far sheltered her from this side of the world. Good on me, until I needed her to pose for those photographs that is.

To be a model, she was adviced of several poses which might work to bring the highlights of her face out, or the length of her body. Don’t ask me where I got these particular positions from - I have no modelling background myself, and my body can’t get in those contortions very easily anyway. But being a five year old, hers can.

She has a hands on hips pose, with one hip out. She has a sitting down, with hands clasped around knees and head up at an angle to the camera pose. She has a running pose. She has several heads cocked poses (helpful in getting her wispy hair out of her eyes). If I could wing it, she’d have a cartwheel at a standstill pose too.

Getting her to do these photographs and modelling sessions was quite henious until the other day. Obviously, I wanted to take many shots, because the majority of mine come out blurry somewhere. And she always utters the children’s sigh of, “Have you finished yet?” by only the second shot.

Smiling has always been a problem too. Her forced smiles always looked like that of a gargoyle contemplating eating something rancid, and for a few years I was convinced she was doing it on purpose. Last year I took a series of shots where she was legitimately thinking she was smiling, and on looking back at the photographs now, she asks me why she was so grumpy. Um, I responded, somewhat guiltily - You were grumpy. You never like having your photo taken.

Sunday the world changed for both of us. I asked Ms Ballerina to wait there while I went and got the camera, and returned to find her posing gracefully in Model Pose No. 1. Hands on hips, she was cheekily grinning with head cocked up at the camera. Pose No. 2, No. 3 and many more came in quick succession. She even added in some ballet moves. And after the session, she rushed me into the study to load the jpegs up onto the computer.

I’ve created a diva.

Which might make me sadly, a digital scrapbooking mother-come-papparazi.  

I went and blogged yesterday. A big spiel on my adoption issues of Saturday. Then I went and walked the dog, and sat on a bench around the local lake, watching ducks and seagulls, and listening to the breeze over the water.

Call it an artist’s date, although I had a dog who wouldn’t stick around too long to allow me to ponder. Fifteen minutes was his limit, but that’s better than if I had my daughter with me.

I returned home, to pick up my daughter from school, and the noise and attention and playing and reading and everything else of importance kicked in, and so did my paranoia.

By the time my hubbie got home (late) from work, I was desperately thinking I should delete that blog entry. What if they googled me? What if they found what I wrote? What if they rang me up and said I was no longer on the adoption programme because of making public something I should not have?

It’s not an unfamiliar paranoia. I witnessed something similar from many of the people on that adoption course. Through those social welfare worker’s fingers scatter our very deepest hopes and dreams. With one decision they can shatter something we’ve all been working towards for many many months, if not years. Adoption is not something that many people come to without first going through some heart-wrending years attempting other ways to have a family. And often of convincing one or other of the partners that this is an acceptable and workable idea, also of getting your other family members including children who can’t quite grasp the concept, ready for this event. Not only are our own adult hearts and hopes on the line, but for many years, our families. There are a lot of people contained within the hands of those social welfare workers, including that of those children awaiting placement. Lots of eggs to juggle.

And if this egg were a little critical of something?  

Other people kept asking - what if we are declined at the adoption panel? How do you ask for a review? So I’m not the only one feeling this particular paranoia, but perhaps I am the only one who is at risk of being found out for not totally playing the game. But I prefer honesty, and have some faith that our own assigned social worker might look at this and approve.

So I’m not taking the blog down, not as yet until my hubbie has read it later this week, and confirms whether he is prepared to accept that risk. In the meantime I’m going to bury it in other blogs, and bury my thoughts in other thoughts. 

This blog is changing though, have you noticed? Or I am changing perhaps. I have barely been and read any community forums lately, as I begin work on my writing dream. I do certainly do digital scrapbooking and have been minorly successful in growing my design for others business. But I’m not particularly putting that information up here. I’m moving (in my mind) back into some altered and mixed media work, although often realise that most of my projects like that end up as dust-collectors on the shelves. And most are an awkward shape to store too, *giggle*.

I am about to volunteer to work at the school’s after school kids club on one afternoon a week, plus oncall work. It’s an absolute riot in there, but they do crafts, and I’d like to share some of my skills with those children - including my own daughter. I hope they don’t accept somebody else.

The blog is becoming less digital scrapbooking, and more a personal column of my life. I don’t know (or care) if that might be a good thing or bad. It might well find me less subscribers or readers, but I don’t blog for that reason either (else I’d have all sorts of advertisements to try to make some money on this).  I feel myself pulling away from all the controversy of the digital and scrapbooking world, and cocooning my own focus to somewhere closer to home, and with specific digital and other arts and writing contacts.  

From an The Artist’s Way perspective, this appears a vast time of personal changes, added to by an nth degree with the whole adoption assessment thing. Whether I’m turning into a butterfly after this cocooning is beyond me - I quite fancy that I’ll actually turn into another type of caterpillar, perhaps with some colourful protubances. Not as dynamic as a big colourful but brief butterfly, but much less flittery - more grounded.

Interesting journey then. Come along if you really want the ride.  

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