Mom now Pasadena then Pasadena mom gratitude

 I Remember the first pots I made here. They are very special.

Everyday I worked. I am here to be a potter, I told myself and time was all ceramics.

At the guidance of Otto heino I left Thousand Oaks to come to ceramics school with Phillip Cornelius because I liked his style. Where are the hippies at?

I told myself that nothing could get in the way of my love for ceramics. In my first apartment I had no bed for a long time. A sleeping bag and a wheel for trimming pots on the weekends.

Mom would visit and break all the pots I made.

Make me 12 more. Make me 12 more. Make me 3 more like that one. Make MORE.

I got to school in the morning and left at midnight.

On weekends I would visit mom and feel so fulfilled and grateful to be with her. I loved her so much.

Everything she said, everything she did, everything she gave me I kept. Even socks from Costco. 

I was fulfilling some kind of mom world where I had her and nothing else no one else mattered.

Mom. Ceramics.  Black and white.

It was during this time in Pasadena that Chris and his family started to enter my being.

I felt happy to be accepted but terrified at the favoritism and competition placed on my shoulders with Jo’s girlfriends. It was confusing. I wanted to be in a normal family for emotional support but it wasn’t right. I’d thought if I could only make them love me, but how? And why? No more thought was payed and ceramics continued.

Chris would call ask if I wanted some food, a place to do laundry I said of course.We stayed up all night talking and listening to music. Drinking tea. Going to get tea. I’d hang out at the occidental library looking for books on art.

Art. Being an artist. It was an obsession and I couldn’t figure it out. It’s not what people make it up to be. Being an artist is so social.

It’s how I feel, it’s a filter that I feel in my arms and legs. It’s who I am.

Mom is who I am.  Do I have her ability? Just as my own? The genetics that go back 6 generations where we all have the same painting style without knowing each other or speaking to each other, it’s just there.Ceramics. It’s just there and I use it on my nervous system to process the world as she did. As I do. Everyday.

2008.

I get a solo show of printmaking and ceramic work. Mom dies.

I’m wearing an outfit. I collapse and start screaming. I faint and wake up.

I throw up in a bush. I am no longer alive? She is going to die but how will I? Live?

My skin was so youthful and my body was tiny.

Something in me cracked that day. I stopped everything. If mom doesn’t approve of me, who am I? She will never love me again. It was so present the feeling. 

Now will just continue, to everyone else this is just a normal day and this is the day when my soul shattered into pieces I cannot get back….

I go to the hospital.

Chris parents are there in her icu room before me. Why?

I hold her yellow bloated hand and she’s gone, moving only on machines.

Dialysis and pale sickly nightgown hanging from her wide thick body that I loved so much. It’s her but it’s not her.

Me and Jamie tell the chaplain that our mom taught us to be patient, kind and compassionate in all situations. I see a halo around her head and she goes. 

The machines beep, doctors take orders and mark the time. The hospital staff hugs me and I collapse on a couch next to a garbage can puking. 

I’m in rough shape. A shape I would be in for the next five months /6 years.

The next five months would be the hardest time of my life. Something I can only have in my mind now.

I can write but it wouldn’t compare to the work it took to pull myself out of that hole.

It was really a journey. 

For years I didn’t make pots.

It took years after she died. I was a painter in that time.

The pots I first made in Pasadena mark the style I keep for the rest of my life as a potter now and the place Pasadena. To be able to return now holds so much sweetness. 

This is such a meaningful gift to be able to create again. It was very hard but I persevered and now make pots again.

Important. 

A collector today coming in only a couple of hours. Flying just to see my pots. Special. Meaning. Beautiful. Gratitude.