To Fairyland and Back Again

I haven't written in a bit because I've been away.

For a whole wonder-filled week I was on a grandparenting adventure. I'd wake every morning to a vista view of skyscraper pines and distant snowcapped mountains, and spend long morning hours rocking my newest grandbug and enjoying girl talk with her mama. We 'grown-ups' enjoyed huge cupfuls of fancy coffee, and breakfasts of hot bagels and homemade pancakes, and sweet moments spent listening to the wind in the trees and little Abigail sighing in her sleep.

Abigail is a fairy child if ever there was one in my family. Little and long, with laser eyes that look right into my soul. Every time we walked past a window together she'd arch her back and look out at the forest, as though remembering that that's where she came from. And if she was fretful, all that seemed necessary was to lay her down by a view of the trees. (Changing table right next to a window = best idea ever.) 

Three days into my visit and we were already on an adventure together as her parents drove us high into the mountains for a picnic. I closed my eyes to avoid seeing the narrow switchbacks and plummeting ravines, but Abigail rode peacefully in her carseat, staring out at the world with wise eyes. This was her turf. Such a nature sprite couldn't have found herself in a better situation, and I suddenly suspected that she'd be leading her daredevil parents on even bigger adventures than they were already used to. (And they're used to big adventures.) 

My daughter and her husband live in a sweet little California town full of quaint shops and cute cottages, and every drive down the hill towards it brought new discoveries: Clouds of roses billowing over a cheery picket fence, or chickens pecking in a cottage garden. The place was right up my alley and I couldn't help but ponder a move there, until I thought of my other grandbugs back at home, and then all plans went out the window. I'd just have to be that grandma. The one that travels and likes it. It'd mean buying some rugged shoes for the constant stepping out of my comfort zone.

Before my arrival I'd imagined that sitting in a chair and staring at that beautiful baby would last forever, but Time fast-forwarded through my week there. As was predicted, I didn't want to leave. The tears began days before my flight home again. Leaving my baby and her baby was enough to send me into a tailspin. I said goodbye and rode the tram to the airport terminal sobbing my heart out, surrounded by businessmen who openly stared at my tears. How could they not know what was going on inside me? My daughter, the one I suspected was too daredevilish to tie herself down with a child, has embarked on The Adventure of All Adventures.

And now both my Girlz have children of their own, families to raise, lives to live. My work here is ending.... Suddenly I realized that Time had fired a starter pistol and begun a mad dash with me roped to it unwillingly. And dragging my feet was not slowing us down....

I've been home for over a week now, and sometimes I wonder if my trip to California even happened at all or if I just dreamed it. My days are full once more playing catch-up with all I've got on my plate for the summer. There are drawings to do and gardens to weed and thoughts to think. And another trip to plan for.

Because I will see that fairy baby again while she's still tiny enough to hold in my hands. :)

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Best Easter Ever

Happy birth day to my sweet new Easter grandbunny, Miss Abigail, whose birth this morning reminds me of just how much I love this stage of my life.

Not that I didn't enjoy being a mother (or, in my case, an oddmother). It's just that being a granny oddmother is completely different. It's like motherhood with fairy wings, I swear.

I've been hearing for years about just how special this stage of life is and I have to admit I was a little afraid of it. I'm not a kid person. I thought I'd made an exception for my own offspring when they appeared way back when, but perhaps they could even tell. I was probably only fooling myself into thinking I was capable of being someone's mom....

Giving birth is hard enough. But mothering is the hardest thing any woman could ever do, I'm pretty dang sure. There are the small victories and the larger-than-life doubts, the ups and downs and joys and sadnesses. The comparisons -- gawd! Mothers everywhere with their my-way-is-the-only-way opinions. I thought for sure I was wrecking my Girlz more than I was raising them. And I wondered if the Universe knew what It was doing when It put them in my life.

But sometimes I half suspect that all those difficult paths led to HERE. Right here. Right now.

Because being a granny oddmother suddenly defines me to a T. I like this role. It has character! And magick! And scene-stealing dialogue one can sink their teeth into. And I can play it until I'm a hundred and ten and not have to worry about fitting into the ingenue costume or losing my part to someone younger or better suited for the role. Because there's no one better suited for the role! At least not on this stage.

And, bless us, grandmothers everywhere are like a big sisterhood. We can do what we do without worrying about other grandmas getting in our faces and saying, "it's wrong to serve dessert for lunch," or "rocking a baby to sleep does more harm than good," or "letting a child stay home from school just because it's snowing outside for the first time this winter just leads to more bad habits." We know that Life is all about the little things that are really big things in disguise.

And maybe we suspected as much back when we were mothers ourselves. But all the other things on our plates blinded us then. Supervisors and doctors and peers and even perhaps our own mothers urged us to toe the line and conform. Act like responsible adults. Use tough love.

But no one tells grannies what to do. We've got wisdom and experience on our side!

And cookies. :)
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Moving Through the Doldrums

Ahoy! There be a light at the end of this tunnel!

I've been trying to sleep my life away, apparently. That's what I do when I'm dealing with The Downs. Depression just paints everything nap-colored. So it's doubly difficult to accomplish anything when the down-and-dirty Downs are running amok. But I tried. And since this blog is technically a 'studio blog' about art and stuff, I thought I'd share with you what I've managed to create in spite of The Downs.

My eldest daughter is expecting her first child in April, and I found myself recently trying to decide on a shower gift for her. I, of course, wanted to give her the moon! But I can't, so I turned to art instead. (Please know that in my head, art is rarely if ever an appropriate gift. When a customer tells me that the art they've just purchased from me will be a gift, my stomach ties itself in knots. Art is terribly personal. It's not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. It has to fit the giftee's style.)

Creating something by hand is the only way I can afford to give a gift of quality. There are those in my Girlz' extended families who can not only buy the moon itself but also the one-of-a-kind crackers to spread it on, and I can't compete with that. But I can give my he'art.' My mom reminds me that what I've created will be an heirloom, that my grandkids will one day as adults look at my work and think, "My grandmother MADE this. For ME." And I try to imagine it, but I can't. I've made what I've made because it's all I can give. I like to hope it's enough, but in my head it's no moon....

So I thought long and hard about what I'd create for my Eldest -- a fierce go-getter who has run a triathalon, climbed a mountain, and gone to hell and back again via Iraq. Her nursery plans are all about Adventure and Travel, and the room will be in hues taken from antique maps. I liked the limitations; it'd narrow down my choices and rein in my imagination. 

Scrapbooking pages with the Equator all lined up.

Keeping her theme in mind, I began to collect my ideas. My first step was to find a frame that I could afford, and the Universe kindly led me to a gilded triptych with a parchment-colored mat. And then I found scrapbooking paper designed like old map pages. Things were coming together. When I got home, the first thing I did was to line up the equator of my three map pages so that they flowed from left to right in a grand arc, just like a globe. Then I secured them to the frame's mat with art tape.

Cute and sweet meets mischievous and adventuresome.

All the while I was doing this I toyed with characters. Since my daughter and her husband have decided not to know the sex of their baby prior to birth, I chose to use an animal character in the picture I'd design for them. I wanted something that would seem cute and androgynous, something that could appear in an adventure theme and still look sweet even while it's climbing a mountain or wrestling a bear, something that would be appropriate in the nursery of either a boy or a girl. So I chose a mouse. And because of the theme, the mouse would have to be doing something over-the-top. And because of the triptych frame, it'd have to be doing it in threes.

Tinting the drawing with pencil.

My first idea was a mouse in an old-fashioned hot-air balloon (in keeping with the old-fashioned-ness of the gilded frame and the tea-stained map pages). I sketched an idea directly onto stiff watercolor paper and made everything larger than the 5x7 mat opening because I wanted the final work to sit on top of the mat and look 3-dimensional. Then I outlined the sketch in waterproof marker and delicately tinted it in colored pencil.

Background bits are removed so the map can show through.

My next idea was to put the same mouse in a boat. Again I sketched my idea onto watercolor paper (this time using a lightbox to illuminate my original mouse-in-a-balloon drawing under a blank sheet of paper to ensure that both drawings would be similarly sized). Then I inked it and tinted it in the same shades as the balloon drawing. Nothing too girly-girly, nothing too testosterone-y. Mostly everything was in gold parchment shades with the occasional salmon pink and seafoam for some color relief.

So now I had travel by air and travel by water. The third scene in the triptych would be travel by land. I began to sketch out a mouse on a camel, only I changed it immediately to a giraffe for the bright yellows and interesting pattern shapes. But it didn't take me long, however, to dump the idea of the third sketch altogether in favor of a verse, something in the middle that the other two drawings could point to and frame. I figured I'd search for a cool quotation on the Internet and so I left the verse for last....

I <3 the 3-D effect.

When the drawings were colored, I trimmed them from the watercolor paper with cuticle scissors and then cut the interior background bits out with an X-Acto knife so that the map would appear behind the designs proper. Then I stuck little foam scrapbooking stickers to the backsides of the drawings to make them 3-dimensional and secured them to the map pages on the triptych frame.

My attempt at writing verse. :)

Then there was the problem of the verse.... I looked all over the Internet and couldn't find just exactly what I wanted, so I decided at the last moment to write something my own self. I printed the words onto parchment-colored linen paper, then trimmed the verse to look as though it had a deckle edge. I gave it the same 3-D treatment by elevating it above the map page with scrapbooking stickers. Then all was framed.

Voila.

So that's that. A bit of sunshine managed to part the clouds of my Doldrums and help me create a little something for my future Grandbug that I hope will make a mark on his or her heart. Or at least remind them once in a while that they can do anything. Because they can.

Of that I have no doubt. :)
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5 Special Things About My Day (5/9/11)

1. Resident housefinch 'Rose Finch-Feather' (last name emphasis on the 2nd syllable, she tells me) sitting on her windownest like a Peeps chick in an Easter basket.

2. Checking out a nearby church rummage sale and finding Treasure: just-right clip-on sunglasses, a Jell-O jellybean mold perfect for some future jewelrymaking, a pair of big fat knitting needles, and BOOKS (of course).

3. Adding color to today's wardrobe selections and feeling almost OK with it. (Granted, we're talking brown here, so I should just settle the heck down already....)

4. Surviving the emotional thoughtfest that is Mother's Day and determining that I've got two amazingly well-adjusted Girlz, who grew up into gorgeous greatness in spite of me feeding them a steady diet of crazy....

5. The island of healthy tranquility that is my yard, all dandeliony in a neighborhood sea of toxic weedkiller.
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Meet My Newest Muse

My mom'll agree, I'm sure, that I've always been an odd daughter. And my own girlz will pipe up that I am definitely an odd mother. And now with this new addition -- my dear grandbug -- I'm literally a granny oddmother.

I've got a lot of hats now, all of them odd in one way or another....

I was just a 20-something kid when I gave birth to my girlz. And during their vulnerable, growing-up years I spoonfed them nothing but Drama-with-a-BIG-D. (Sorry, Girlz; a day doesn't go by that I don't wish I'd handled things differently....)

But in spite of all my selfish wailings and chewings of scenery they quickly outdistanced me in the Functioning Adult department and have since grown into beautiful, amazing women living fabulous lives, both of them now happily married, and the Youngest a mother to a daughter of her own.

James was sure I'd have a major meltdown about becoming a grandmother, and I admit now that I was a little afraid that I would, too. Magically, I was asked to be in the delivery room for the baby's birth, and that might've made all the difference, as the event probably ranks highest on my list of I-Can-Die-Happy-Now moments.

I confess that I didn't watch my own babies come into the world. My eyes were closed, for one thing, because I was pushing my insides out through the eye of a dang needle! (Were epidurals even available then? and if so, why wasn't I aware??) Plus, I have to admit that I was more than a little afraid of what my own lady parts must look like in their trauma of stretching to hell and back! Yet, my daughters' births were still indescribable... And totally monumental... And crazy-ass breathtaking miraculous in an only-another-mom-can-know-what-this-is-like kinda way.

I just wish I'd watched now.

Because I did watch the grandbug. And there are no words to describe what I witnessed.

I felt afterwards as though a veil had been wafted aside and I'd accidentally seen The Big Secret. I was afraid that if I dared to blink it would all be erased from my memory. Truthfully? I didn't sleep for days. I kept replaying it all over and over again. I wrote it down. I tucked it in my heart....

My dear grandbug arrived with sparkles and spells and awesome special powers. She transformed my James from a kid-hatin' bachelor into a guy who turns into a sweet blithering idiot whenever she takes his hand. She's turned quiet Tumbledown into a home where Sesame Street blares and mac & cheese boxes line the pantry shelves. She's given me a new lease on life.

And now she's almost two years old. I am her biggest fan! My heart breaks a bit every time our eyes meet or she pulls my face down for a kiss. I feel my age.... And I pray to live forever because of her.
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