Desire

My latest post is up on the Huffington Post.  As a regular reader here you might find it familiar.  As I was re-reading it I was thinking about the legacies that travel through generations and what power those stories hold.  This year has been amazing, but also challenging.  I am trying to learn two huge things at once: how to be a mother and how to make a living with art.  It’s been a steep learning curve and every day is something new.  Motherhood actually feels easier on some days than the making a living part of my life.  Sometimes it switches.  Mostly it’s all a toss up.  In both cases I am constantly at the edge of what I know how to do and it is TOUGH GOING.

Both my grandmothers were complicated women who took the simplest path–a path already cut for them, with clear boundaries, rules, and outcomes.  It wasn’t a choice for them–they did what women did for their time.  I know both harbored other desires, but their lives weren’t a movie, so those desires weren’t always acted out in direct or even healthy ways.  Both were pretty pissed in their own ways, but didn’t know where to put that anger.  I don’t know if my father did, but I know my mother suffered some of that rage.  Every time I think about quitting and giving up art as a job I think about not only my grandmothers’ histories of thwarted desire, but the legacy of that thwarted desire.  I want to TRY as hard as I can because I want to know that I did try.  In doing so, Gus may not need to consider whether desire is something you build with or burn with.  It is my hope that he doesn’t consider it at all–he just lives it.