Well it's taken a while but here it is - finally! I have stewed for quite a while about starting a blog. Unfortunately life just didn't allow me the time to start one, until now.
Since this is the beginning of my new blog, I thought it only fitting to start at my beginning, with art work featuring my parents, and also with endings as well as rebirth.
I had a horrible series of events in 2009 that didn't allow me much creative thinking time. We went in to New years day 2009 hoping for a brighter future as my husband was laid off from his job in mid 2008. Over dinner, we toasted in the new year with my parents and sons, our hope for a better year. Little did we know what dark days lied ahead of us.
Shortly after that toast my father suffered a congestive heart failure and subsequently died 10 days later. They had been home visiting for the holidays, and they left an active lifestyle back in Florida. My mother was showing beginning stages of dementia and we knew immediately that she could not return to live alone without any support system. We moved her back home to be near us, and help her live as independent life as possible with her increasing failing memory. She had a very difficult year, being diagnosed with a small skin cancer lesion which was luckily caught in time, and needing knee replacement surgery. She would never get that surgery; the day before it was scheduled she suffered from a TIA and went on to fall several more times in a few short months. It was discovered that she had a detached retina and did undergo surgery to fix it, only to succumb to a major hemorrhagic stroke which ultimately ended her life on January 8th, 2010. We could never have guessed when we made that New Year's toast of 2009 with the two of them that we would be seeing the New Year of 2010 come in without either of them.
Going forward in this new year, we do have new hope. On the day my mother passed, my husband found out he got a job! What an unbelievable range of emotions we had that day. With all the responsibilities of taking care of my mother, work and teaching students how to be more creative, it didn't allow much time for my own creative play, something I use to cope with life's stresses.
This new beginning will be to reconnect to my own creative soul, my rebirth, and I will be documenting my journey as much as possible. I have never kept a journal for any period of time before, so it will be a new challenge for this as well.
So here's to this new year; I will try to live my life more fully, begin anew with new ambition and new hope to enjoy the ones I love for as long as the universe will allow me.
