There is so much darkness and destruction in divorce, and the best way to combat it is to create!
Even if we aren’t getting divorced, our lives get imploded, exploded, and chopped up over and over again. It feels terrifying, but it’s also an amazing opportunity to recreate our lives in a new way that aligns with our dreams and visions.
The first step to combatting destruction is to CREATE!!
Create what, you ask?
ANYTHING! Step outside everything you know and just start, just for yourself, without plans to ever show it to anyone else.
Buy some canvases and paint! Dance! Sculpt! Play the piano! Sing! Plant flowers! Write Poetry!
It doesn’t matter what you do with it after it’s created–throw it away, burn it, stomp on it, hang it up–whatever! Just do it! It’s not the result, it’s the ACTION.
The act of creation creates a polar opposite to destruction and pushes it out on its own with no effort on your part except to create.
I’m no painter, and if you saw my attempts at painting in a preschool, you wouldn’t be able to pick out which were done by an adult, but after D-Day, between caring for traumatized kids and caring for the house and working and teaching and dodging the bullets shot at me from my ex and his lawyers–basically keeping the ship on course–I set up easels in my greenhouse and spent the first winter of my grief surrounded by flowers and waterfalls painting multiple canvases of Wonder Woman, flowers, pets, ancestral stories, and an old photo of my magical Mexican grandmother as a child.
My grandmother had always told us magical stories about her own childhood, about her mother, who had run away with a band of gypsies to find the gold hidden in the hills of Mexico. My grandmother was eight when she was left to fend for herself in her village, but she did have a grandmother who was a Mayan Indian Princess with blue eyes who would walk to her village to visit her occasionally, and she had a little brother, Louie, who was so small when he was born his bed was a cigar box. I have one childhood photo of her at the age of eight wearing a white dress with a big white bow in her long wavy black hair. I wanted to surround her with gold, so I watched a you tube tutorial and gold-leafed the background of her portraits. I also painted the Sea of Cortez and wrote all those magical stories into the waves in gold. Something about the process connected me with a matriarchal core strength that was healing me without me even knowing. Studying my grandmother’s face was therapeutic, and gave me strength and courage. She had been married for sixty years. She had eight children, loved boxing, and ran her own mexican restaurant in San Diego. She was known as the most beautiful girl in San Diego and married my grandfather, a potato farmer from Idaho, after exchanging a few letters. No one knew my grandmother’s true age as she didn’t have a birth certificate, and the woman who showed up at her door twenty years later, claiming to be her long lost mother, didn’t know it either. Everyone said this woman was not her real mother, Juana, who was known to be tall with green eyes. This woman, Nana, was short with brown eyes. But my grandfather insisted they take her in. Nana practiced black magic, stole things from the family, rode to Tijuana on the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle to sell said stolen items, and eventually, after twenty more years, Nana asked my grandfather to run away with her, that she knew where the gold was hidden in the hills of Mexico. That’s when my grandmother kicked her out.
Oh the ancestral stories… I could go on and on… but the point is, if my grandmother could overcome the craziness of life, I could too. And I have a whole lot of gold leaf paintings of her to encourage me. At the moment they are propped against a wall, but it was the act of creating them that helped. I would usually have to repaint the faces over and over again because the eyes were lopsided, or the lips looked crazy. I would work on the details deep into the night, and sometimes I’d fix them, and sometimes I’d have to start all over again.
Sometimes I felt like painting a woman bent the darkness trying to crush her, sometimes I wanted to paint something like Munch’s Scream, and then I’d see a Monarch land on my Raspberry splash flowers, and I’d be off to the races mixing colors and painting five paintings at once of butterflies and flowers.
So in Harry Potter terms, if divorce is a dementor coming to kiss me and suck all hope and light from me, “creating” is the Patronus that comes galloping in to blast out the darkness.
In fairy tale terms, if I’m locked in a room full of smelly nasty straw, creating is how I spin that straw into gold, creating is how I light up the darkness, creating is how I save my own life.
When I painted my Wonder Woman series, I asked my daughter what I could write on her wristbands. She suggested, “She needed a hero and so she became one.”
