I never thought of myself as an artist.  I guess I still don’t.  Labels are not a paradigm I live in, but I will use them out of convenience.  However, the one thing I was sure of before I lost my beloved son to murder was I was NOT an artist.

No mother needs to be told words fail to describe the bond between her and a child.  This is a choice you have made, to do your upmost to protect, guide, and love a being with all its nuances and choices.  You make this decision sight unseen.  It seems it is a matter of faith to do something which really goes against all logical reasoning, to bring someone into a world which is as frightening, amazing and as confusing as ours at times. 

When my Jessie was taken from me in a flash of horrific violence my world turned to black and white; it was as if I went color blind.

Years went by.  I was a businesswoman.  In fact, I was a very successful businesswoman by corporate standards.  I was pursued.  I was considered somewhat of an “it” girl (what an embarrassing thing to write about yourself).  I was wealthy.  I bought my first house at twenty-three years old on my own.  I was successful.  I had it “all”, what “they” tell you to “get” to live the American dream.  I was miserable.  I was going through the motions; actions I took to put it all together on the outside so I never had to look very closely at the inside, a common story.  I was busy.  At one point, I just became too exhausted to go any further, my grief found me before I could find it.

I broke. 

I was asked to do art.  I looked at the new “them” like they were the ones who should be classified as nuts.  My old/new, rebellious, teenage self of course refused.  I watched though.  I watched as others who had been running from their pain, like me, tried to have fun.  I was disgusted with them.  What did they think this was going to get them?  What did this “accomplish”?  They simply looked like kooky kids and I wanted no part of it. 

One day, when I saw the Crayola® crayon box out on the round table in the middle of the sterile cafeteria, the little sticks of color practically danced out of the box into my hand.  The magic of my grade school days overtook me.  I began to play (in secret of course).  The swirls, the names of the colors, even the irritation of trying to sharpen the colors in the miserable contraption provided inside the box.  It was delightful. 

A little bit of hue began to seep back into my world and I had a new focus shaping.  I saw things I had never really seen before.  What was I feeling?  Gratitude? 

Not too much later, I created my first painting (shown here), with nothing more than a set of Crayola® watercolors you purchase at the beginning of the school year.  I figured if it was good enough for them, it was good enough for me.  Much of my pretense about how I previously existed in the world was falling away quicker than I was learning how to paint.

I learned by doing.  The only mechanics, if you can call it that, was that I painted all the numbers into the painting.  I still have no idea why…okay; I was just about to lie to you.  How dishonest of me.  It is hard to talk about but here it goes.  I did this because when I first broke, I lost my eyesight for over six months.  What I could see during this time was out of the bottom half of my right eye when there wasn’t too much stimulation in the room (meaning noise, light, etc.)  Occasionally, I would actually see numbers in objects.  Weird, huh?  I began to have my husband read things about the Fibonacci sequence to me and we learned about visual fields.  For me, all I can say is, for the little while I got to see the numbers, they were beautiful.

As my sight returned, I began to create art of various mediums.  I was hungry for it.  I began to play in ways I never allowed myself before.  I had always played sports, but always to compete, to “win”. This piece of my character disintegrated without anything more than putting one foot in front of the other and feeling the pain I hadn’t allowed myself to for all those years.  I had labored under the notion that is what I needed to survive; how wrong I had been.  I began to do things in my life for the sheer joy of it.

A brightness returned to my world, one piece of art at a time.

Today, I am a full-spectrum woman.  I barely recognize the girl I began talking about at the beginning of this piece, but I love her, too.  I tend to find beauty where others see ugliness.  Art taught me about the edges of things as well, how to have boundaries, to say "No" when I meant it.  While I still tend to paint outside the lines, I always revisit the piece for the lesson.  I do not find my paintings spectacular, I am no Monet, but I enjoy it.

Most of all, I adore the fact Jessie is with me every day.  I no longer feel it as a loss, which took an incredible amount of work.  My spiritual outlook is very bright and it encompasses the seen and the unseen.  I still see he was taken from me senselessly and one way I deal with this tangibly is to advocate around issues for the empowerment of women and children, as well as healing on all sides of the equation of abuse (including rehabilitation of men and women).  That is the action I take in this world to have it make a little more sense for me. 

It is a beautiful planet, a playground of color where Jessie and I meet in the ether to tell one another how much our love will never fade.