Fly

Wave Runner, Watercolor 12x16, Matted to 16x20
Wave Runner, Watercolor 12×16, Matted to 16×20

A few weeks ago an aunt who had been a huge influence in my creative life passed away. Her encouragement was felt even when we didn’t see each other for years.  She and her sister were (and are) not willing to listen to their nieces and daughters downgrade their work or trash their talent, and her words of encouragement are with me every time I pick up a brush.

I found an old black and white picture of her running on the beach where our family has spent the last 80+ summers.  She was so full of joy she looked like she could fly.  Officially I’ve heard that people can’t fly, but my theory is that, instead of keeping the secret of flying all to herself, she shared her joy of life with everyone in her life else so they could soar.

I’m just figuring that out now, and it’s helping me get closer to the secret of flying, of joy and the sharing of it..

$80 Matted Ready to Frame. To purchase the Original, contact me at rachel@rachelbarlow.

Card and Prints of this painting are available here.

Pea Picker


i’d like to tell you I have a veggie garden because I’m really into organic everything, but the truth is there’s nothing quite as satisfying as watching my kids fight over fresh greens.  In my defense, I have stopped telling them the peas were candy.

You can buy prints and cards of this painting here

No I

no-Iweb

I sat down Sunday morning to work on my alphabet book for parents. I do some rhyming and then some drawing, depending on which side of the brain decides to show up for my creative sessions.

Sunday it was the letter “I”, and there are surprisingly few useful nouns that start with I. There was infant and imp and ice cream, but enough things to make a rhyme?

Parenting duties mercifully interrupted creative time, and I hoped for inspiration later in the day.

T2 needed new shoes so we did that. T1 wanted sloppy Joe’s for dinner so we went to the store got that, and running errands took my mind off of the world and it’s woes for a while.  We came home and I sat down again, scouring my dictionary and thesaurus for something funny in the letter I. I finally came up with the first two lines just as T1 announced that he was starving. I scrapped the whole thing again and got dinner going.

Later that night, the new stanza was born, inspired by my day. That busy Sunday reminded me of my Infatuation with my two Imps and how they inspire me each day. It was also a day when I remembered why it was so hard to write the letter I. There is no I in parent – there’s only T1 & T2,  and that’s okay with me.

Jitter Bug

Jitter bug medicine blog 4 8 2014

There’s a bug going around the school this spring.  I usually resist the urge to pump my kids full of unnecessary antibiotics, but last night Thing2’s nose was runneth-ing over, and I got out the purple stuff.

Literally taking his sniffles in stride, Thing2 came limping over to me (apparently this particular strain of flu is being sponsored by the American Branch of  the Department of Silly Walks) and opened his mouth.  I popped in a spoonful of grape-flavor.  He danced on one foot and then the other quickly and then looked at me and smiled.

“I’m just making sure it gets everywhere, Mom.”

“The flu?”

“No, the medicine through my body.”  His legs regained functionality as he slid around the floor, jitterbugging to his internal iPod.  “And, I think it’s working, Mom.”

One of us clearly doesn’t understand how the purple stuff is supposed to work, but it might not be the guy dancing around the kitchen in his jammies.

A Simple Life

Growing up, I loved Little House on the Prairie. I loved it so much, I thought I wanted to switch places with Laura Ingalls Wilder. I loved the idea of making everything you used, and there seemed to be a simplicity to their lives that doesn't exist now. Once I got older and learned to appreciate things like penicillin and voting, that wish vanished (now I'd settle for a Time Machine for the occasional visit),

Searching through town records and shared family trees, it's clear rural life was definitely simpler back then. You were born. You lived. You struggled. If you were lucky, you made it to adulthood and struggled some more.

We struggle with bills and schedules. We struggle with chores and parenting, but when I come across the all too-frequent pairs of dates indicating the existence of a child who died as soon as he or she drew breath, I know I don't really struggle at all.

That struggle is one any parent can imagine. To imagine it happening one or two times in a row – sometime five or six in a lifetime – and still keep fighting just so you could keep parenting the children that managed to draw a next breath, however, is to begin to understand what real strength must have been (and still is where this story continues to plays out around the world).

It is also to begin to appreciate in earnest that a complicated life is actually a fortunate one.

 

White Noise

 

Snow angel

Tuesday, we were looking forward to another  snowy night and day.  Like most northern regions, it takes a lot more than 6-12″ to get Vermonters flustered, but, to be perfectly honest, it’s not the snow that rattles my nerves, it’s the snow day.

I work from home.  Most of the time it’s a good racket – especially when Thing1 and Thing2 get the unexpected day off.  It’s not all sunshine and lollipops, however, especially when Thing1 and Thing2 get the unexpected day off.   They’re good kids, but, try as I might, I have not found the trick to getting them to sit quietly with their hand folded over their laps while mommy deals with customers online (if you’ve found it online somewhere, send me the link).   But, as I found out over Christmas break (almost two weeks of expected days off), silence isn’t always golden.

Seven-year-old Thing2 – already plastered to the ceiling in anticipation of Santa’s visit – had spent the morning migrating from lego projects to torturing his brother.  At one point, he managed to combine activities, causing a crescendo of ‘MOM!’ from thirteen-year-old Thing1’s room.  Thing1 had ‘accidentally’ knocked Thing2’s lego sculpture out of his hand.  The ruins of his engineering masterpiece were strewn about the floor.  One of the witnesses to the ‘accident’ was red faced, the other was in tears. I was chatting online with several customers at once and decided there wasn’t time to call in CSI to determine if the destruction was accidental or premeditated, and I ordered Thing2 to the living room for a cool-down on the iPad.  

Lips pursed, arms folded over his chest, Thing2 marched to a corner of the couch after retrieving a blanket from his bunk. He stood on the couch, arranging the blanket just so and, when he had created his cave, grabbed the iPad from the table and retreated under the patchwork tent.

Thing2 has loved the iPad since it emerged from its sleek white box.  Like most kids, he knows more about it than a seasoned software engineer, and I’m ashamed to admit that it plays babysitter too often on days like this.  

The next day, each Thing retreated automatically to his own corner.  One was in his room working on a computer project with a friend in Maine.  Two was under his tent with headphones borrowed from daddy.  For most of the morning, the only sound came from my keyboard.

That night, I finished work on time and, with a small break in the depression that had been amplifying for months, I thought an after dinner post was in order.  But as the Big Guy took up residence on the couch for his winter’s nap and I began loading the wood stove to cook dinner, I noticed that it was still very quiet.  The dishes clanking were the only noise. 

Thing2 was still under the blanket and headphones, his legos and sketchbooks gathering dust.  There was no new dance routine to watch and animate.  There was no impromptu party waiting in his room.  And suddenly I was scrambling for something to write.  

Like a nagging housewife driving her husband to the arms of a lover, my quest for quiet had silenced my inspiration with electronic lithium. 

Cousins arrived the next day, and neither child was interested in anything electronic as we celebrated Christmas.  

The Monday after the family left, the silence was deafening, but the iPad was nowhere to be found.  Thing2 emerged late in the morning, dragging his tent.  He looked for his digital drug, but, not finding it, deposited his blanket on the couch and padded over to the Christmas tree where his latest Lego project was still sitting, the remaining 500 pieces sorted into empty ice cream buckets.

For the rest of the morning, he delivered a muted monologue of the building of his new starship.  Occasionally, frustrated tears punctuated the chatter and interrupted my work.  I broke up a few fights, but, when dinner time rolled around my inspirer-in-chief joined me in the kitchen to show me his latest dance moves.  And, oddly enough, the noise made the work day better.  

I didn’t write that night, but Tuesday morning, that probable snow day got me just rattled enough to get out of bed early and start tapping.   

Wedge Issues

Wedge issues

Thirteen-year-old Jack and I have always been able to bond, not just over the mother-child kissing of boo-boo’s or doling out of hugs after a meltdown, but because we have a lot of the same interests.  Lately, Jack’s primary interest has been focused on all things computer.  I’ve had a love-hate relationship with this interest.  I love that he has a hobby that lets me bond with my son while we discuss digital life.  I hate that his passion has also become a wedge.

At the end of the school year, Jack brought home a less-that-stellar grade on a final exam, and the Big Guy and I lowered the boom.  He had already enrolled in computer camp (his first sleep away camp), so we let him indulge his obsession over the summer.  When he got home, however, we made it clear that until a satisfactory first progress report came home from school, he was grounded from the computer.  We live in the middle of the woods and any social event requires us to act as chauffeur, so traditional grounding is redundant.  Jack’s obsession revived the punishment as a useful stick.  

We’re not shy about removing privileges or assigning extra chores when the occasion arises, and, in the past, Jack has seen the error of his ways and usually accepted our punishments as just.  Something about being thirteen, however, has made the enforcement of this sentence much less pleasant.  

The punishment has inspired tortured looks of betrayal from my first born.  It’s prompted legal arguments about the wisdom of ending the punishment earlier and, as homework requires more time on the computer, it’s also inspired him to attempt head-on defiance of the punishment.  No longer are we the people he trusts without question.  No longer is our judgement sound.  In his eyes there is now the constant question that, if we are so wrong about this punishment, what other things have his parents been wrong about?  I don’t think he questions our love for him, but, for the first time in our relationship, he’s actively questioning if we know what we’re doing.   I have that question all the time (and I can write it because I know he doesn’t read this blog).  

I remember my parents using similar carrots and sticks and how they became wedges as well.  It didn’t take becoming a parent to see around the wedge, but I think it did take walking this mile in their moccasins to see that the wedge really brought us closer because at that point they weren’t trying to be my friends.  They were being my parents.  And that’s ultimately what any kid needs.