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Illustrated

on August 02, 2016

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somewhere

My daughter is growing up. She is funny and caring and she loves to write.

Like many mother and daughters before us, our relationship is getting trickier. Her job is to grow up and apart, my job is to help her doing that safely and steadily (isn't it?). Those two job descriptions are, as you would expect, often at cross-purposes, or so it seems.

I have come to expect that a certain level of conflict in our relationship is inevitable and normal and to back off when I get too sucked into its undertow. However, at times, I miss those easy days when she looked to me first for ideas, suggestions and merrily (usually) went along with them.

These days, she is exercising her birthright of controlling her own life by rolling her eyes at my harebrained schemes, feeble attempts at getting my children out of doors or socializing.

I miss the discussions most of all where we had time to talk, not just about video games, but about things she thought were interesting.

This holiday, I discove…

i.v. fluid sick

This has been a challenging year for me and my family. Through grim periods and light, buoyant ones, I have often turned to art for inspiration, solace and distraction. I've always understood on some level that art is important, not just as an optional luxury that can only be valued when times are good. However, this year, my understanding went bone deep that art can keep us breathing.

I have been writing for fun, which has encouraged my kids to write for fun. We've been tracing images, creating comics and inventions. We watch movies and make movies and critique movies. I have been reading books to shut out the world or to open it up.

A friend recently admitted that she kind of wished that she were just enough sick to be in hospital on i.v. fluids for a few days to get caught up on sleep and netflix. "You know," she said, "i.v sick, but not so sick you cannot sleep or enjoy movies."

I like to think about art as a fluid. It is normally circulating throu…

the space between words

Sometimes life gets on top of me. I am either so busy living my life or coping with something that consumes all my energy that it is almost like I become deaf.

I vaguely notice that something in my body is not working, my knee hurts, or my head pounds. I tripped over a pile of things when I was sweeping a while back and jumped back up. 10 hours later, I started wondering, "why can't I grip anything with my left hand?"

It was not until a while later that I remembered, "oh yeah...I fell on it."

This deafness to my self causes me to block out pain and work too hard.

The voice of me inside gets so muffled I start doing things based on old information...ways I used to think, old beliefs and discarded notions.

Recently, I've had a chance to unwrap the cotton wool from around the crevices. The wool that was insulating me from me.
The padding that was allowing me to fall flat on my face and not notice until several hours later.

In the process of unwrapping the …

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Erin McDonald's words and photographs (sharing is encouraged, stealing is not cool)

Illustrated

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