Slideshow

Find more photos like this on Creative Crossing

A slideshow that I posted to a site that a friend, Klara Elek, invited me to join. Not to replace my art website, but sometimes one should contribute to a site.

Looking at these pieces, I realize I haven't yet begun to paint. There was a very long hiatus of perhaps 20 years, and then a slow reunion to painting. These pieces are 'to regain my hand.'

The only one that's closer to 'painting,' for me, is the Landscape Figure. I painted this in November 2006, and shortly after began a series of contract positions in reception at the executive offices of a bank, and, while I'd hoped to follow the energy in this piece and produce a series of larger size, between my relationship at the time, my daughter, who went into crisis, full-time work and desperately searching for a larger place for us to live, I neglected to push myself to produce, always thinking, 'later, when time opens out.' But the emotional energy had dissipated when perhaps there was finally and again time.

Message: when 'it' happens, go with it, push your life aside, follow your art. They'll all understand, they always do.

Rubies in Crystal blog banner

I've put up a new banner and changed the colours in the blog.

I took the photograph, a self-portrait, last Fall, after reading Peter Handke's, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams.

(Click on photo to see it at full size, which looks better to my eye. I had to shrink the image for the blog header.)

Or this, which I... don't know what to say about.



The original photo, and don't ask how I did all the colour and whatnot, I did so many things in Photoshop Elements I can't remember!

Yesterday, our doctor thoroughly checked my daughter's foot and decided that she didn't need an x-ray. This was good news. It is most fortunate for the 'other' family that her foot wasn't broken because they did not make sure she received medical care after the ex's girlfriend drove over her foot. They left the "medical care" up to me, days after the accident happened, though 'the Commandant,' or what I call the ex's girlfriend, had enough wherewithal to drive her to Toronto rather than making her take a Greyhound bus home.

the ice-pellet night

20:58 ...avoiding walking the dog in the cold, dark, snow mixed with ice-pellets Winter's night...

20:59 ...putting on snowpants, snowboots, muffs, fleece, wool socks & hat, faux-fur coat, earphones & iPod, and walking the dog... brrrr, bravo!

22:39 ...snow like little pins on the eyes was all that was exposed and got accustomed to Sirenia on low volume & thought of Milton's Satan

22:44 ...& of Wagner's Siegfried & Brunnhilde who wakes from a magic sleep

The ex's girlfriend needs a 'name.' I'll call her the Commandant. It suits her. And which she is, most certainly. One of my strongest images of her is her standing with her arms crossed, twaddling one finger on an elbow, in an Authoritarian pose, a la Milgram. Though she is a very buxom Barbie bleach-blonde who isn't skinny by any means and is quite tall and wears short mini skirts even though she's about 50 or something.

Anyway, "the Commandant" told my daughter to call her Dad for cab fare to and from the doctor.

Meaning=1) the Commandant knows exactly my financial situation and the detrimental effect getting my ex to cut child support will have on my family (she appeals to his cruelty, she knows him well). She thinks leaving 3 people without enough to pay rent, bills or eat is a fun thing to do, as any authoritarian personality would. She knows that I have a legally binding Separation Agreement where it is clear the ex must continue paying child support for my son and she knows I can't afford a lawyer who would stand up for me. She's laughing all the way to the bank.

And 2), to suggest that my daughter call her Dad for cab fare before she even dropped her off today tells me loud and clear that she knows exactly what she did to my daughter's foot when she drove over it and that she truly is behind manipulating my daughter into deciding 'not to' wait at a clinic or emerg for medical care (then the Commandant's 'traffic accident' would have to be reported and then her insurance premiums might go up, but let's care more about money than people) and how bad it really is since she knows my daughter cannot walk even the 2 blocks to the doctor (a 10 min walk at most under normal circumstances).

Could she have driven my daughter to her own doctor in the city where her Dad lives this morning? The one she took the poor girl to to get a load of anti-depressants that I assume she wanted to make the poor girl more docile and manipulable. Of course not. That would be to admit she ran over her foot and did not report the accident to the police as she should have, who would then report it to her car insurance company.

A highly manipulative woman who is extremely vindictive, oh it would make your hair stand on end to tell of some of the 'punishments' this woman has meted out to our family over the years!

You know, I wonder if the sense of ethic, compassion and fairness is a genetic trait that some people have, and others, like the Commandant, and the ex, don't have. While they treat my daughter as a weak little neurotic failure of a child, my daughter is in fact stronger than anyone in that house. My daughter has a strong sense of ethic, and for that she is amazing.

The Commandant's son, who was a heroin addict, on methadone now for 4 or 5 years, de-flowered my daughter mere weeks into her 16th year when he couldn't be charged with statuatory rape, and my daughter fell in love with him and was taken down the garden path of drugs by him and we nearly lost her, and my son, both in that house of doom, the Commandant's house, and yet her son's recovery only came about due to my daughter's strength and insistence on a drug-free relationship. I couldn't imagine living under the Commandant's rules and regulations and infinities of punishments, of which she mets out tons from what I hear, and I can well understand why no-one can live there without becoming dependent on drugs, street drugs, alcohol, prescription drugs, they all have, just to survive, as I understand it, because the core is bad, without moral understanding, without an ethic of care. I accused them of being terrible parents and so she had my ex cut child support to 'punish' me.

This is the commandant, her methods. How she 'controls' people. She particularly hates me because I refuse to be 'controlled' by her. She has never been able to manipulate me. She has hurt me and my children in innumerable ways to 'punish' me when I speak the truth about what goes on in her house but she has not been able to bully me into submission. For a decade she's been trying to take over the reigns of running my life through my children. I refuse to talk to her; I will only talk to my children's father when there is anything to be discussed regarding the children. It incites her to fury, I'm sure, that despite everything she's done, I remain a free woman raising two children alone, and I'm doing a damn good job considering what I have to deal with.

They are terrible parents and my daughter's foot is yet another example of how dangerous the situation is in that house.

I write too much. The story is so shocking.

The situation has worsened. My daughter's foot was run over on public property, outside a "Sport's World." I can only assume medical treatment was not sought because if the accident was reported it might affect the ex's girlfriend's car insurance. It is my belief my daughter was manipulated into deciding not to receive medical care due to 'the time it would take.' The girlfriend would know that if she could convince the girl that she did not want to go through the hassle of waiting for 5 hours at a clinic, or longer at a hospital, at 18 years of age, and therefore capable of making a legal decision on her own medical care, there is nothing I could do legally about the fact that she didn't receive care. I did have quite a long conversation with a police officer located in their city last night and I decided not to put my daughter through the stress of having the police go to her father's house to see if she was alright because, like everyone else, I fear what the girlfriend would put my daughter through.

While it sounds like a normal sort of thing to say about ex's girlfriends, in my experience, this one is a highly manipulative and extremely vindictive woman. I have what I feel is a horror story of examples of what she's done to me over the years he's been with her. She will strike, and she has in this case. He hasn't paid child support this month. This would not be the sort of thing he would normally do given what has happened, but at her direction, or perhaps threat, he would. That child support covers half the rent on a 2-bedroom apartment. Without it, the rent is 85% of my income, leaving scant money for only a portion of the bills and no money for food.

With this loss of income (taxable in my hands, he surely is luckier than most ex's in that regard), I can only cover a third of January's rent now because of the bills and cannot pay the remainder until later in the month, and the City, for that is who I rent from, at market rates, there are no subsidies given to me, will begin eviction proceedings within 3 weeks of any unpaid portion of rent that was due on the 1st of that month. They don't wait, and they give you no reprieve.

My daughter's foot is somewhat swollen but she is able to walk on it and claims it's not painful; it is quite bruised on the upper arch. She came home and after a conflagration between us over her either working or going to school, went to bed. I decided to let her sleep and made a doctor's appointment for tomorrow. The rub is that I actually cannot afford cab fare to the doctor's for her, for this is one of the dire consequences of her father suddenly and radically cutting child support, surely at the bidding of his girlfriend since this is her sort of thing to do when anyone crosses her.

When the girlfriend (they've been together about a decade and live together but she claims him on her taxes as "a boarder" thus avoiding the legal implications of the actual "common law" relationship they have and thus I call her "the ex's girlfriend") comes across these blog posts, I expect her to mount an armoured tank against me. But what can she do? I persist in telling truth; I do not manipulate; I do the best I can to take care of my children against what often seems unbeatable odds with what goes on in the other household.

Over my years of blogging I have endeavoured to keep the 'messiness of reality' out of my posts, preferring to focus on my art. I am not sure why I am now breaching my code, but it seems unstoppable. And if I must break the silence and speak, then speak I must.

At least I have this blog. Blogger keeps legal records of whatever's posted when.

I am too scared to call the police because I am worried about the emotional and psychological ramifications for my poor daughter at her Dad's house. She already carries such a burden, I wouldn't want to make it worse for her. I care for her and love her very much.

I cannot do what is right because I am afraid of what they will do to her if I do.

There have been other injuries where medical attention was not sought for my daughter and I have been concerned about her safety for this reason at her father's for some time.

A 2000 lb or 3000 lb car runs over a foot, your child's foot, and you don't take her to the hospital and make sure nothing's broken or strained, that she doesn't need a cast or crutches or even bandages? Surely it's not just me who finds this reprehensible?

Yet I can do nothing for fear of what they will do to her if I do.

Catch 22. Kafka's reality. It sucks, let me tell you.