Category Archives: daughter

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Thanks

The photograph is from Thanksgiving in 2007, a friend using my camera. That is me and my daughter dancing. She was good at that lift! It’s mostly timing, rather than body weight. She jumps at the same time as I lift — and I’m jumping too!

My daughter called last night, stranded in New York City, the bus company she had set up with turning out to be very fly by night. But her brother got her a train ticket and she ran for Penn Station and now is with family! Hooray! I am thankful!

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Panoply

I took this for Photrablogger’s Mundane Monday #79 and then am delighted with Jithin’s post. I love the row of pans, a panoply of pans. Also the breakfast was fabulous. We were the second table occupied on Sunday morning, and many of the pans were in use by the time we finished!

I was in Bellingham just Saturday and Sunday to wish my daughter happy birthday. Who can identify the restaurant?

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Black lives matter

My family moved from upstate New York to Alexandria, Virginia when I started high school. My mother, Helen Burling Ottaway, took life drawing classes at the community college to meet other artists and because she would have a model. More than one.

She met Michal Platt and took classes with him. He pushed her. My mother did tiny etchings and fantasy drawings and big drawings and watercolors. Micheal wanted her to do powerful drawings. So she did. When he had to be gone for a day from the class, he would have my mother fill in teaching.

I have this picture hanging in my clinic. The title is “One fist of iron”.

The stages of grief for the recent deaths include denial, anger, bargaining, grief and acceptance. It is not a series one goes through. We do them over and over, going from one to another, like a spiral, a whirlpool, a tornado. Black lives matter, police lives matter, I wish my mother were still alive.

 

 

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Break your own rules

If I say “Food fight.” you may think of Animal House.

I think of my mother.

I am in high school in Alexandria, Virginia. My sister is three years younger. We are in the kitchen, it is hot. 99 degrees F and 98 percent humidity and the back door is open. We do not have air conditioning. We are eating watermelon. The old kind: with seeds.

My mother holds up a seed, pinched between her fingers, looking wicked.

My eyes narrow. “If you shoot that, you started it.” …. not in the house, is the unspoken rule that echoes.

She shoots it at me.

We all three start pinching the slick black watermelon pits at each other, laughing like hyenas. In a large kitchen with open shelves and dishes placed on all the shelves, often nested. It devolves into small chunks of watermelon, hurled at each other. No rinds, because of the open shelves. At last we all run out of pits and watermelon and stopped

There is silence while we survey the very impressive mess. There are watermelon seeds everywhere. And the floor is pretty wet.

Watermelon is STICKY.

We laugh more and start cleaning up. I leave for work or school or something.

Later my mother says, “I washed the floor three times before it stopped feeling sticky. And I kept finding watermelon seeds in the dishes on the shelves for the next two years.”

And: “It was worth it.”

The photograph is of my mother in high school.

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Cindy gets real and skips the ball

We had a lovely dinner with family and friends. I look at the tablecloths and napkins that I have inherited and I am glad that I live in a time where I can work as a female physician and am not embroidering elaborate tablecloths and napkins. Some of the ones that I have WERE done by female relatives. Amazing and work that is currently not very valued.

So my centerpiece was an acknowledgement of the changes: Cindy is not going to ride in the coach. She has a canoe and paddles and a backpack, sleeping bag, stove, water bottle and GPS. She is going to find her own way and paddle her own canoe.

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Mother Daughter Show III

The Mother Daughter Show III is hanging, with a few additions still to come, at Pippa’s Real Tea, in Port Townsend, Washington.

Gallery Walk is Saturday June 6, 2015 from 5 to 8 pm and the first Saturday in July as well.

The photo is of four framed etchings: state I, II, III and IV of the Four Seasons. Each is a limited edition etching individually run and numbered, twenty of each edition. Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. These are by my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway, not by me.

I have not done a full inventory of our art, so I don’t know how many I have of each of these etchings. These are 18 by 24, so technically difficult. I do not have the press, but I may have the plates, though they may have been damaged. And even though I know how to run etchings, I don’t have her skills in inking the plates and more importantly, wiping the right amount of ink off. I may have notes about the ink colors, but the trick would be finding them. And is the same paper still made?

At any rate, I am really delighted to have our work up and ready to show for the months of June and July.

I lost my father today two years ago, so am thinking of both my parents.

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The Introverted Thinker on high school fights

I just watched Taylor Swift’s Mean and it makes me think of what the Introverted Thinker says about high school fights. I asked if she sees a lot of bullying.

“Oh, mom, mostly it’s not bullying. Mostly it’s misunderstanding.”

She said that mostly the fights are mistakes. “Mom, one girl isn’t really thinking and she says something as she’s leaving. She is not even trying to hurt the other person. But she says something that is not thoughtful or can be taken wrong.

Then the other girl thinks about it and gets all upset. She talks to her friends and then snubs the first girl. The first girl doesn’t remember the comment and has no idea that it has hurt anyone. She doesn’t know what the fight is about, so she feels attacked out of the blue by the second girl and her friends.

It’s silly and it’s usually a misunderstanding. The first girl made a dumb or thoughtless or confusing comment. It gets taken wrong and then it all escalates from there.”

It is hard to go back to a person who made a comment that feels really hurtful and ask: what did you mean when you said this? There is bullying and meanness as well. But my daughter thinks that it’s mostly not deliberate or thoughtless cruelty: mostly it’s thoughtless comments.

Taylor Swift Mean
More Introverted Thinker and Extroverted Feeler stories here.