Zilker park, public restrooms. Bad hair day. Blah. We’re all pretty tired.

SPT

This is my vice. I remember trying to stop biting my nails when I was about eight. There was a small vial of Stops-It or No-Bite or something, which tastes bitter. It worked for a while, but long enough. Look at this! I can’t believe people see me do this. Yet, whenever I have a dry cuticle, it has to GO, and the fastest way to remove it is to….bite at it?

I’ve just set a new goal for the year. I’m NOT going to walk around looking like this.

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One of those neverending, nagging summer days alone at home with the boys. I have a negative default response to stress that, over time, has begun to improve. It takes work for me to think positively. It’s important to be positive for your children. They learn to cope by example. I’m unlearning, rewiring my brain.

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When I was four.
I remember playing with my dad’s Koh-I-Noor Rapidographs until the points broke off, and pulling bit after sticky bit off his gum erasers. But I never came across his crow quill pens. Where did he hide them, as a medical illustrator?
Ford, also four, loves to dig through and (accidentally) destroy my art supplies, crow quills included. He uses them as wands. I’ve found sewing machine pressure feet discarded on the floor after being used as rocketships, bobbins (previously used as Ty-fighters) under sofas. I never manage to keep it all concealed.

Week 2 in Personal History series.
Is there a child that isn’t immediately enchanted with her first visit to the beach?
I have this fantasy that I will live another life that I can completely devote to the study of echinoderms.

More SPT bloggers here.

I have loved horses since I was four. Our vegetable garden backed up to a small pasture, and a paint named Skip Bug would stretch his neck over barbed wire to eat our corn. After school, there were days when I learned patience, by standing at the fence, waiting for the girl to finish riding practice; she would often let me ride atop Skip Bug as she walked him in circles, during his cool-down. My lofty perspective gave me certain power, and I felt great pride as I looked over the garden each time we passed, above the tall stalks of corn, with the sun setting behind our roof.

When I was in college, I took a job waiting tables so that I could buy a horse of my own. I learned what it means to own a horse. In the morning I’d drive in darkness to feed the horses, through patches of mist on the farm roads. The grain smelled like molasses and I would sit in the hay loft and finish homework, while listening to the soft munching below, interrupted occasionally by the hens, clucking about the stalls.

When we moved to California, Damon bought me my first dressage horse. From this horse I learned to fear injury and to prioritize my goals. He threw me one morning and I broke my pelvis, but I healed and I kept riding. Within a month, however, I was pregnant with Ford. So I went back to the basics of ownership, enjoying the simple things like sunny showers under the eucalyptus trees, and once again I practiced the art of letting go.

I have two saddles; one here at my parent’s house in Houston and the other in our garage. They wait with me for the opportunity to ride again, meanwhile enjoying piggyback rides with the kids and basking in the sunny hope that it might indeed again happen.

More self portraits here.

The Christmas buzz that had us sailing into hyper drive has slowed to a sobering halt, and the quietness in our house is chopped into pieces by the babble of children at play. Here I am, taking a picture of Chas, on the back porch, trying to open the back door. I stand here laughing from the dining room because he has smooching his nose up to the glass, making funny faces at me:

Unintentionally, I took a revealing self portrait today. It’s me, the me that I see, the reflection of my children. I see my creativity in the toys I make for them, I see my attitudes in the way I dress them, my discipline in the way I may sometimes remember, but not always, to cut and comb their hair and brush their teeth. I see my self-esteem in the way I keep my house (dirty windows and all).

Perhaps my perspective is just as distorted as the self portrait; in the act of mothering my mind is sometimes so absorbed in the middle of every minute that I lose point of reference, and my closest point of navigation is my limbic tunnel, that impulsive, instinctive maze of motherhood. My rational mind is often in left field. In content imbalance, I’m satisfied. When I put things into greater perspective, I feel so fortunate. Left to calmly breathe and think in quiet, as I am doing now beside that little boy you see above, now in deep slumber, I tend to call upon the more rational part of myself and remember that it’s all good, it’s all part of the process. Breathe in, breathe out.

Other self portraits can be seen here.

I keep forgetting about to the weekly Self Portrait group. Here’s my contribution. So what if it’s really Wednesday.

Some of the entries were amazing!
I don’t know why I love this type of self portrait so much.
Two weeks ago, for fun, I took this photo. It’s pretty half-assed, I know. And it’s late, too!
I could take another shot; alas, the camera is charging and in five minutes my five minute window of opportunity will be gone.
Look familiar? Same glass door, this time in winter:

I am his teacher.
From birth, I have helped translate the world to him.
And now, the world is not enough;
he wants me to explain the universe, and death, and subatomic particle behavior,
and my mind is getting tired and feeling ignorant.
I need someone to translate these things for me.

Everyday me. The silly cornerstone of the meal.
It’s all good. Sometimes, on the job, I dream.
Mostly about other things I could be doing,
not that I’d rather. Even when I really do feel like a pig on a spit.