Diversions

I am another of those who hates Mother's Day. I forget that I am a mother. It's great that the kids make things for me and wish to be kind, but I focus too much on the generation ahead.

This is the second year that I've been able to greet both of my mothers, and it's still overwhelming. For a multitude of reasons. I still feel connected/unconnected, mostly. There will forever be that cognitive dissonance, reminding me that I inhabit that space between two worlds and belong to neither.

That aside, I do have to work today. I will get to see babies born, and women become mothers for the first time, or again.

This morning my family took me to my favorite restaurant for brunch in Berkeley, La Note, where we sat in the garden and ate heartily. I could relax for an hour, drink my cafe au lait, eat my tartine, and pretend I was in Provence again. If only.

Then I was granted leave by the family to spend another hour in one of my favorite bookstores, and I only came away with only a few titles. Mark raised an eyebrow but made no comment; he hates it when I spend money on books, but today I have a reprieve.

I am going to take Callum's class on a sketching trip tomorrow, to the bay. I will talk about the process of drawing, and drawing for pleasure, and real versus imagined landscapes. Maybe about romanticism and landscape? I don't know. I am leaning towards Caspar David Friedrich in my present mood.

I just want the children to think, to be inspired. To see their home in a new way, and to express it in a way that is personally meaningful. So much of the "art" program becomes "craft" as in let's paste this here, which isn't quite the critical training that I'd like them to take away from a lesson. It's not too early for them to learn about how and why artists did things. Art shouldn't be rote doing.

Also while in the bookstore, I was struck by a line in a book about art theory for the uninitiated, by Cynthia Freeland, one of those down and dirty, give it to me in thirty minutes but yet thoughtful primers. It's a deceptively simple question: "Why has blood been used so much in art?"

And I knew that I was in the right place: here was the blood I was looking for. Here is something to dissect, something that might help me trace out my body, my mind, my place. How does one even begin to define "blood"?

And now I go to draw it, clean it up, watch its bonds, prevent its loss.

How tightly I am wrapped up in blood, how very tightly. From my blood disorders to my blood doctors to my job to my fascinations to my blood relatives to the insistence of some that blood doesn't matter, and shouldn't matter to me at all.