Mood:  not sure

There is a website called America Oh Yes that sells folk art on-line.  They buy collections, and I thought to maybe sell my entire collection of art I've made so far to them. 

 I don't think anyone on the America Oh Yes website is particularly better than me.  Only thing is that the people there all have their own style.  That is partly why the dealer is looking for a collection, it confirms that the artist is productive and mature.  People stumble along looking for their own vision but those with the strongest vision don't have to look far.  They are themselves right from the beginning.

I am looking hard for my own style.  Artistic "style" is just the end result of a unique process.  I am spending so much time in a process that I know in my heart isn't giving me an end product I am happy with.  My art is not yet free, like what I see with some other established folk artists whom I admire.  In my Risperdal Days when my life had a rhrythem to it, then, all my early work is clearly all of the same group and it all thrills me the same way.  Now I am here in Brattleboro to stay for a long time and I want to start having a new group of art.  I want to find a rhythem to life again.  Now it is going to be the Geodone Days.

For a while now I am going to stick to a 16" x 20" format of working in oil paint on canvas.  I know yesterday I said that I wanted to return to oil pastel drawing but I think that I have been spoiled by oil painting.  You don't put glass over an oil painting so the picture and colors are immediate and kind of reach out and grab the viewer.  I want to paint more than I want to draw because the final product of painting always makes me happier.  Except, that is, what I did in my Risperdal Days.

I spent the morning working on a plan for the painting I am going to start in my class tomorrow.  I did a lot of drawing.  It would be wonderful if I got a relationship going with America Oh Yes website and then whenever I finished a picture I could just send it off in the mail for them to sell it however they see fit.  I'm really scared though of contacting them.  I'm also really scared of sending away all my artwork, the whole load.  It would leave me with my hands empty, feeling that I had nothing to show for my talent.  Right now since everything is in storage all I have to do is look and immediately I see concrete evidence that yes indeed I am an artist.  It is like a pirate's hoard of treasure.  The pirate doesn't go buy a castle and horses and nice clothing with all his jewels, no, he buries the treasure chest.  Then the pirate sails about the world and thinks about his buried treasure.  The wealth gives him satisfaction in a strange way.  My artwork gives me satisfaction in the same strange way.

Selling my entire collection would help me to become more productive in the future because I wouldn't have past glories to rest upon.  I would have to produce constantly to prove my talent to myself.  But selling the entire collection would do something else.  I would be able to start having a reputation.  The work has to be out in the public eye for me to be noticed.  Dealers need to know about me and that all starts with one, the first dealer.  If I sold the entire collection I would be entering the real world where people communicate with each other, strangers move in and out of your life, and you are only as good as the last painting you made.

Posted by dignifyme at 1:36 PM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 21 September 2006 1:50 PM EDT

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Mood:  quizzical

Getting warmed up for my art class starting this Friday.  I've been painting in oil for over a year and this is a return to craypas drawing.  Don't really know where the Geodone is leading me.   Am I scared I'm going to start producing crap?  Yes.  I'm scared that I've lost a creative edge. 

I'm happy with the tree and the three creatures under it but the bicycling couple seems rather indistinct to me.  I don't know if that is o.k., or if everything in the picture needs to be sharply defined.  But I wanted the bicycling couple to look like they had a lot of light shining on them.  When the eye sees a lot of glare or reflection the sum total of the image is blurry and indistinct. 

"It Land" looks childish but a kid couldn't have drawn it.  They just do not have the ability to do something so dense.  Maybe one or two figures by themselves, but not the whole combined and a kid definately couldn't do the couple on the bicycle.  The couple is fantasy but it is an adult fantasy, not a child's.  Ultimately a child wants to make something "real".  Adults can look at what was done with entire childish seriousness and feel amused because all the child is only capable of is a version, or approximation, of what is real - but the child doesn't know that.  I guess this picture is dense too in terms of color changes and texture changes.  It started with a loose pencil sketch where I didn't commit myself to too much detail, hoping that once the craypas was in my hand the detail would come straight to the paper with the color.

If I saw this at a flea market I'd probably buy it for five dollars.  But it doesn't resemble any artwork that I'm currently aware of.  Maybe that is a bad thing.  Artists who draw like this get ignored.  Maybe someone who is locked up in a mental institution draws something like this in their art therapy class.  I can't shake the shameful feeling that my illness is somehow coming out on paper here. 

This piece took three days to make and shows the "direction" my art is going to go in the near future.  If I'm going to make more drawings like this one I'd better get my courage up today by looking at some outsider or primative artwork in books in my library.

Posted by dignifyme at 1:31 PM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 20 September 2006 1:32 PM EDT

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Mood:  mischievious

Yesterday Mom, Mike and I tried to climb the mountain again.  We saw several groups of kids going up and down along with a whole gaggle of other hikers.  Did we make it?  No.  We went up further than I'd ever been before but at one point we turned a corner and I saw a long, steep rocky climb ahead and I lost my nerve.  Said I didn't want to go any furthur.  On the way down my Mom said that I had held out for a long time and had done really well.  It felt like I was a kid again and being rewarded with kind words and milk and cookies.  This illness really makes me seem juvenile I guess.  Mike and Mom were twittering back and forth like two birds, one making a silly joke and the other laughing.  Good thing that they had each other because I was mostly stoney and silent.  Not that I was in a bad mood, it was just that it took all my mental effort to keep the physical effort going.  We had to turn back not because I was physically spent but because I had no more emotional endurance to push myself. 

Now Mike and I are wondering if London might leave us sometime soon.  She has a new boyfriend.  We are wondering if she is going to get an apartment with him.  I guess we both sense that freedom is a big thing for his daughter right now, but I think there is something darker here too.  At her age I was always moving around, so much so that I ended up in a homeless shelter twice.  And this morning I've thought about it, in ten years I've gone through three significant relationships that I was committed to and intended to last forever and moved through six different towns.  I've got a problem with perminence, and it has finally dawned on me that the running around and changing my life from top to bottom is now getting me ragged around the edges.  I have got to, absolutely, stay put for a number of years. 

What is the same about me and London?  Trauma.  I got really traumatized with the onset of my illness and the two years I spent locked up in an Institution.  London has her own history which I won't go into on this blog.  I've always felt like I was an adventurer, a risk taker and gambler who always came out winning on the bet I made, be it on a man or a career move.  Well, now I've finally got the right man and I've got a little bit of a career as an artist and writer.  But I also feel like a dog with gaping wounds that just wants to curl up and wait for healing to occur.  This energy and need for change must be directed into creative product.  In the arts it is restlessness that makes you paint the next painting.  I despise the feeling of any glory lying in past accomplishment - I'm always looking to do the next "big thing" that will top the rest.  My mind wants to go searching, and too often the daydreams of mine are of a different town with a different life. 

But if I think about what was the happiest time of my life, it is always these two narrow pockets of time in my twenties when I was deeply involved with and commited to either writing a book or producing art.  I would go on walks and think about my project, the days revolved around my project, and peak hours were always devoted to furthering it's accomplishment.  My happiest memories are of times when I was walking a lot and working a lot.  I felt free and alive.

Posted by dignifyme at 7:47 AM EDT

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Mood:  celebratory

This is the final part of the essay that will be published in Schizophrenia Bulletin.  The beginning of the essay is in the previous blog entry.  As part of the legal agreement I signed I can publish it in it's pre-print form on my personal website.  Eventually this essay will be published on my main website, schizophreniaandart.com.  Now that the publishing bug has bitten, I'm thinking of writing an essay for Schizophrenia Bulletin titled "Portrait of a Marriage" about what it is like to have a person with a mental illness married to a person who doesn't have a mental illness.

Ability and Disability, Part II

A small gallery owner and I once had a friendly acquaintance that lasted several years. He professionally framed several of my painted canvasses. When I visited him in his shop I was always at my most attractive. Showered, rested, and a paying customer. The new car I parked in his lot had been bought for me by my husband. This man couldn't "see" anything wrong with me.  My creeping rate of artistic production baffled him. And I think he was curious about my new marriage, why would a man willingly take an unemployed, sick woman as a wife?            

One day he said to me, "You have a nice personality. You would interview very well.  Why can't you get a job at the kennel down the road?" What the gallery owner hoped to do was to prove my status of being disabled wrong.  His theory that I was strong enough to become a contributing member of society, earning a wage, was intended as a compliment.  In an attempt to find a normal place in the world for me he had thought of a menial job that required no education and minimal intellect.  What I would be doing at the kennel was vague, but the implication was that I should clean up after caged animals.    The intent was to prove that my psychiatric disability could be overcome by simply finding the right task for me to do.  He imagined that a job that was purely physical, washing excrement off concrete floors, wouldn’t tax my brain or invoke the disability of schizophrenia.             

Perhaps for several hours every day I could use my best hours of clear thought and concentration working at a kennel.  Here my acquaintance was also challenging my resolve for recovery.   If I declined to apply for such a job then the fault must lie with me and my personal values and not my illness.  But the assumption that physical labor somehow bypasses my thought disorder is incorrect.  In my world of pennies and necessary cost, the act of directing my body in coordinated movement is just as mentally fatiguing as sitting in front of a computer and typing.  Bending language, as I have done in this essay, and bending my body are two very different tasks but they both involve my person as a whole.              

A good friend once said to me, “Karen, you become the book you read.”  It often seems that my mind is like a light switch that can only be turned on or off and it is seldom able to roam in-between.  Sometimes I wonder if the main feature of my illness isn’t just an abnormal intensity of experience.  I am too much in the world, concerned with the world, and consumed by the world.  In my household I am the slowest dishwasher and the slowest with the vacuum cleaner and the dust rag.  However, I am also the best dishwasher and the most thorough cleaner of every nook and cranny.  One might say that I take life, and everything in it, too seriously.  But to be more accurate, perhaps I burn out so fast because I am not splintered into parts, lacking the agile ability to project or withhold concentration.  My existence isn’t filtered out into more important or less important parts, and so, I am vulnerable to life’s abundance of stimuli. 

My choice is to use what limited mental power I have to the utmost.  I have chosen a career in making art because I find painting to be a joyous wedding between the concrete and tactile and the abstract and intellectual.  As if I were conducting a musical symphony, when I work all parts of my brain are engaged, connected, and coordinated.  There is nothing, ever, boring about making art.  Technical problems concerning color, shape and the painted surface are very real to me, and the adventure to solve them is exhilarating.  Some of the pictorial mysteries I’m involved in, by studying what other artists have done, will take years to unravel.  Don’t many people secretly dream that they could one day find work that they feel passionate about?  The balance of my life is fair and good because in the midst of disability I have found moments of ability that are sought after, cherished, and repeated from one day to the next.

Posted by dignifyme at 9:01 AM EDT

Updated: Saturday, 16 September 2006 9:05 AM EDT

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Mood:  celebratory

This is going to be published in Schizophrenia Bulletin, a medical journal published by Oxford University Press.  I have to chop it up into two entries on this blog because it is so long. 

Now in our household there is a competition; who is going to be first to have their book published?   Mike, London and I are all working on book manuscripts.

Ability and Disability

By Karen Blair            

It is difficult to explain to people how my schizophrenic illness makes me disabled.  I tell people that I am an artist, a nice thing to label myself because it implies a lifestyle of indeterminate work hours and an indeterminate income. In short, no one can tell just by looking how successful or unsuccessful an artist is. And since artists are stereotyped as being a bit odd or fey, the eccentricities of a schizophrenic personality are attributed to a creative, rather than diseased, mind.  If a stranger is kind hearted then they imagine the best and are comfortable in conversation, treating me as an equal.  Needling questions about my lifestyle are usually passed by for more exciting topics - the immediate favorite is always "What do you paint?"  Few try to ascertain my productivity or scale of talent.  Because of my illness I can only make 4 or 5 paintings a year.  And because of my reclusive nature promoting myself socially is a difficult and almost abhorrent task.  I do make a little money as an artist.  But most of the money needed to buy paint, brushes, canvass and frames is donated by family members.            

My commitment to making art is strong.  Naturally, like any artist I would like to be sought after and sell paintings.  But like most artists, all I can do is my quiet best and quietly hope for a better day.  Over time I discovered one hard fact about being an artist with a schizophrenic thought disorder.  My disease stunts creative growth.  A person can be born talented, but without hours of practice and hard work that talent most likely will not become significant. The artist will not stand apart and above the crowd.  If a mental disability limits the hours of peak mental concentration every day, then natural talent matures very slowly.  The production of complex, sophisticated artwork creeps along.  Without emotional discipline the alternative of making quick, simple artwork is very attractive.  It is my observation that non-disabled artists have better opportunity for creative experimentation, art education, and giving a gallery the number of paintings needed for a one man or group show.  Art dealers and collectors want to view talent that is mature, style that is cohesive, and work that has conceptual, or labor intensive, weightiness.            

While it is difficult for the disabled person to be commercially competitive with non-disabled artists it is not impossible.  I believe that the best hope for a schizophrenic artist to make money and gain recognition lies in the use of modern technology.  Art reproductions, on posters or cards, compensate for a slow production rate.  Also it helps if the schizophrenic is aware of their inherent limitations.  For instance, I compensate for my slow production rate with the general rule of painting every day.  Like the victorious tortoise might have said once to the defeated hare, “slow and steady wins the race”.  And since I am mostly self-taught, the library has become a favorite place of study.  In books and magazines I am introduced to artwork from around the world.            

 My husband is a gentle, average man who works full time and was for many years a single father.  He has no psychiatric troubles.  We are matched with so many gifts and abilities: creativity, intelligence and humor.  How then, to explain the differences that schizophrenia is responsible for?   For me, normalcy and mental illness has nothing to do with good people vs. bad people, or talented people vs. untalented people.  The first, most basic judgment that I would make about a person with a schizophrenic thought disorder has to do with raw brain power.  Between my husband and me it is not so much what we do with our time that is mismatched, but how much time we are each allotted to do with as we wish.  My productivity is always at risk from my illness while his is productivity is steady and strong.            

The two of us explain our differences in ability and disability with a metaphor about pennies.   We say that in the morning when we wake we are each given a different amount of pennies to spend throughout the day.  A single penny is a measure of mental clarity, a little burst of coordinated energy that will see you through the accomplishment of one small task.  People like my husband who are rich with mental health are blessed with 100 pennies, while I, having a thought disorder, only get 20 pennies.  During the day my husband can spend his pennies far and wide, enabling behavior that seems smooth and effortless because he has been gifted with a wealth of brain power.  From my point of view, when someone has been given the gift of 100 pennies to spend, they live life full of extravagant emotion and activity.  At the end of the day when we lay our heads on a pillow usually we have spent all our pennies and are tired because the mental bank is empty.  A good night’s sleep will magically restore all penny wealth for the next morning.              

 My disability is real because I don’t have the same abundance of clear, focused thought as a non-disabled person.  One of the simple differences between me before the onset of schizophrenia and after is just power, or, a number of pennies.  The consequence of having less mental endurance does eventually trickle down and cause changes in personality and identity.  But theoretically, since a penny is a penny, I have a lot of access to normal behavior.  The only question is, “can I afford to pay the price to get done all the activity that I desire?”            

In the morning I can take a shower and spend my penny.  Or I can skip the shower, have hair that is a little greasy, and save a penny.  If I cook a breakfast and read the newspaper than I will lose more pennies.  An alternative is to eat cold cereal and stay ignorant about world affairs.  Often there are small, ordinary chores that I do not do so that I will have more time to work and make art.  Before I commit myself to almost any sort of action I often silently calculate; how much will this activity drain me?  Every sundry task costs.  My endurance is quickly eroded as I pay the price for each distinct place I direct my concentration and will.  In one evening I can drive to the grocery store, listen to music, make a phone call, get angry at my husband, make love to my husband, watch a movie and walk the dog if there are enough pennies in my account.   Usually an extensive list like this is only possible if I have taken a several hour long nap beforehand.  When I show reluctance toward certain behavior and pull back or slow down the basic reason is almost always fear.  I am afraid to run out of pennies.              

So, what happens to a person when there are no more pennies left?  The answer is familiar to both the abled and disabled.  Exhaustion.  Vulnerability to stress.  Loss of control over emotions and logical thought processes.  A lot of my schizophrenic symptoms are just a magnification of what happens to a normal person when they are tired. You know that you are stressed and low on mental power when you get emotional over something that is small and silly, or if you lose the ability to count your change, forgetting basic arithmetic.   When we are mentally drained we turn into different people.  A weaker person.  Spend all of your pennies and different part of the self emerges, one that is not very much in harmony with the world.   When a person feels that they “just don‘t have much left in them”, that is when damaging things happen.  Bone weary people say things they don’t mean to loved ones, they misinterpret social signals, get mad, paranoid, inappropriately silly, overly critical, or simply want to give up and hide.             

If I’m not careful I can spend all my pennies by twelve noon.  Frequently I experience the shift of Karen who is capable, to a Karen who barely exists.  My identity goes from feeling real and solid to someone who is made of mist, a silent ghost.  When I am completely drained my physical movement slows and it becomes very difficult to talk or make eye contact with people.  At this low point my general outlook on life changes.  The world turns dark and threatening and all my earthly delights and good fortune are forgotten.  This type of irrationality, it is so foreign, strange and lonely that it hurts.  Subjectively, becoming overly symptomatic is very uncomfortable.  So I pace myself throughout the day, saying “no” to a lot of people and opportunities as a form of self protection.  This disease makes me reclusive by choice, and that is difficult for some people to understand.  They mistake my withdrawal from social and worldly activity as being anti-social, or worse, laziness.             

Posted by dignifyme at 8:45 AM EDT

Updated: Saturday, 16 September 2006 8:54 AM EDT

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Mood:  not sure

Sometimes I go really slow and careful through the day.  I have to do whatever I can to push myself forward and not give in to despair.

Yesterday I walked to the library and did some writing there.  Then I started to have anxiety and came home.  After Mike came home from work I asked him if we could go for a walk before it got dark.  We strolled through the town and Mike got a little money out at the bank for milk.  He intended to buy us coffee too at Mocca Joe's, a funky little coffee house.  But I didn't want us to spend the money on something so frivilous.  Mike said that we have to live like ordinary people and treat ourselves.  But I'm starting to remember more and more the days when I lived on disability, and remember how careful I was for many years.  For our family to live safe and sound we have to be very, very careful how we spend our money.  Mike said that he is going to work an extra half an hour every day and several hours on Saturday so that our monthly earning will be greater.  We have to do that because soon we are going to be paying for propaine heating gas and extra electricity to drive the fans on the heater.

I need a new pair of pants.  But I don't want to spend any money for a new pair of pants.  If I can lose weight then I have a bunch of clothing that I can fit into.  So I have to lose weight, and fast.  I've never lost weight because I was running out of clothing to wear before.  There are two pairs of jeans that both have big holes in them.  I'm going to cut up one pair to patch the other pair.

My show at the library starts in October.  It is a pain in my ass.  But, I guess it is something to focus on.  There is artwork that needs to be put into frames and I have to hand print a banner with the words, "Schizophrenia, Art & Recovery."  One thing Mike and I talked about on our walk yesterday was wether or not to frame my latest artwork, "The Lady and Jumper".  It requires a thick, sturdy frame, something Mike can't make himself with wood from Home Depot.  I hate to bring the painting to a professional framer, but the picture is really quite good and would look great in the show.  It becomes a point of pride to have it hang.  It was the decision to frame the piece that prompted Mike to offer to work over-time every day.  I made the commitment to this show back at the end of last summer when I was still not yet married and was still receiving alimoney.  Now that that money has stopped I am completely dependent on Mike.  The way I feel now, I wouldn't commit his money to putting on a show for myself.  But, who knows, maybe I can sell an artwork or two and get back the money spent on the show.

Part of my trouble is that I am in-between projects.  When I was 23 years old and trying to finish college my best friend said to me, "Karen, I hate it when school breaks for vacation.  You don't do well when you are on vacation."

On September 22nd I start an art class at River Gallery Art School.  I won a scholorship for the fall semester.  It will be 15 weeks of classes, and the class I picked meets for two hours on Friday.   Last time I asked for a scholorship I emailed them a letter and I think the request was lost or forgotten because after a short return email promising that a commitee would review my request "asap" I heard nothing.  So this time I wrote a letter and printed it out.  Then I printed out three pictures.  I showed them what I did last spring semester (The Orange Tree Grove), my latest piece, and the work "Cinderella" that I wrote in the margin I needed help with.  I hand delivered the packet and heard about my scholorship grant the next day.  Here is Cinderella but she is not yet finished, the flesh tones are too pale and some of the objects in the room are not properly subdued.  You can't have too many bright objects shouting in a picture, "here I am!".  But the fireplace looks great.  You only get a fireplace that that by painting thin layer after layer of color.

Posted by dignifyme at 10:00 AM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 13 September 2006 10:46 AM EDT

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Mood:  quizzical

Yes, the idea of having London cart the dog around with her has been bothering me too.  I'm new at being a parent and making up rules.

What went through my head today way, "What if London goes out to a club dancing in a city and someone steals her dog?"  Or, "What if the temperature in the car is freezing and the dog gets cold?"  What Mike and I want is for London to take responsiblity and keep her promises.  When she arrived to live with us she arrived with a puppy who she claimed was "her best friend" and who she would take everywhere with her and for whom we would never have to be responsible. (As I write this Cerberus is lying at my feet.  London is in school.  We take care of the dog a lot.) 

My husband has never had a dog, the dog he carted around when he was homeless was London's dog named Coco.  Eventually Coco found a new home with a recently divorced Dad who was missing both his kids and the dogs who now lived with his former wife.  When a child has a dog you can expect the parent to end up taking a lot of responsibility for the animal.  But London is 21 and she felt it necessary to get a dog at this time even though her life was very unstable.  Now that she has the dog, if Mike and I always end up taking care of it she basically ditches the consequences and responsibility of her decision in our lap. 

I am having a change of heart about the dog, though.  My mind really was shocked when I came home today from my Museum volunteer job and saw that London had done the dishes.  She didn't have to, I think it was my turn.  It was a very "family" sort of thing to do.  Taking care of the house without being asked.

From my view point London has been searching for safe, secure family her entire life.  It is like a core theme of her life, not of her own creation, but from the situations that have been imposed on her by the adults around her.  What Mike and I are offering her here now in Vermont is very stable, and growing more family orientated.  We three ARE growing into a family.  So then, doesn't family take care of the pets together?

Telling London that she needs to tote Cerberus around with her, I think, was a ploy to stop the integration of the family.  It was a sign saying "Don't take advantage of us!" and "Our lives are separate from yours!"  "Remember, your living here is only temporary!"  But the more I think about it, the more I want to encourage emotional reliance and bonding.  There is that old image of the mama bird pushing the baby bird out of the nest, forcing it to fly.  Mike and I have felt that that that was our job with London.  And yet, the lure of family life is strong.  Tomorrow night is "London night" where we cook what she wants for dinner and watch togther whatever movie she choses.  Tomorrow we will probably eat steak for dinner and watch the Walt Disney animated movie "Pocohantus".

One night recently l said to London, "Let me tell you a secret.  If I let myself care for you, and you reject me, I will be devistated.  It takes a long time for me to make a friend and I don't trust easily."

London had tears in her eyes and she said, "I don't trust easily either."

I've been thinking about the strengths of family, and I think that family always gives you a second chance.  They let you make mistakes.  That is where the permenence lies.  You don't have to be perfect, just as good as you can be at the time.  My family never, ever gave up on me.  Maybe Mike and I should focus more on giving London a family here instead of temporary shelter as she tries to get her college degree.

Posted by dignifyme at 6:27 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 11 September 2006 6:41 PM EDT

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Mood:  hug me

I think I messed up my medication this morning.  I think I took too much Geodone and not enough Prozac.  One of the two has double pills and I think that I doubled the wrong one.  Took an extra Prozac because I despirately need the effects of that drug, even if it is a little too much for the day.

Mike and I climbed the mountain again.  Again, we failed to reach the top.  Everyone we passed had been to the top or clearly was going there.  We shake our heads in wonder at the fit Vermonters.

Mike and I had a difficult decision to make last night.  We are asking London to take her dog with her when she goes out to socialize.  Last night she went bowling after work and we would have liked to have had her take her dog and leave him in her car.

It seems a bit extreme given that the dog is very easy to take care of.  The problem is that Mike and I were promised a dog that would be totally London's responsiblity and who would be going everywhere that London went.  The point isn't wether or not we want to take care of the dog, we are perfectly willing to do so while London is at work or at school.  This we are doing already.  It is just that this dog is a big responsibility and one that London willingly took on.  He changed her life, narrowing the possible places where she could live that eventually brought her to Vermont, and Mike and I see that the dog will continue to influence her life to a large degree - just as if he were a human child.  There are many young adult women who hand over their child to the grandparents so that they can go out and play. 

Probably Mike and I are hard when it comes to personal ability and responsibility because we have both been homeless in our lives.  Mike lost his house and lived in a tent in the woods.  I was kicked out of an apartment that I shared with a roommate and went to live in a women's shelter run by the YWCA.  I actually ended up homeless using the facility twice.  What happens is that you get a sense that you can make it on your own without any help.  It is a hard lesson but ultimately empowering.  Mike had London's dog with him after he lost the house and he took that dog everywhere with him.  At first the dog had anxiety about being left in the car and he chewed all the seat buckles off and tore at the seat cushions.  Mike didn't get rid of the dog because he didn't want to disappoint London.  Owning the dog and being homeless was a really, really, hard thing but he managed to do it.  I guess this situation with the daughter parallels the earlier situation with the father.

Posted by dignifyme at 10:13 AM EDT

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Mood:  irritated

I've just been asked by a family member to deleat a blog entry.   If you read what I wrote, and you now see it missing -  well, you can guess why.  I know that at least you read it Pam. 

It is too bad that criminals get the kind of protection that they get. 

Sometimes it is important, when trama has impacted on your life or the life of a loved one, to talk about the reality of the crime and the consequences that it has had for the victim and the victim's family.

I'm afraid, at this point, the criminal has too much power over this family of mine. 

Stories of fear and horror need to be voiced, not silenced.  How else are we to understand the kind of world that we live in?

Posted by dignifyme at 10:38 PM EDT

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