stitching/painting selves, tweaked here & there








la voilà

herself be a dogwoman





scored these two at a local flea-market the other day, more precisely the historical cookbook caught my eye and friend A. found Clarissa Pinkola Estés for me; despite having spotted the book in many blogs over the years I never got 'round to ordering it & now I have a Dutch copy; A. bought it 'cos she thought the title fitted me De ontembare vrouw = the untameable woman, not a literal translation of English version, apt nonetheless.


herself and Snoop feeling fluid after a swim


AAAHHHH

herself at night






i think she has many stories to tell....i guess i'll be making more



Summer has arrived, 30+C/90+F
Snoopy and me go swimming a couple of times everyday now





My mother was not an easy woman to please. In retrospect I think she was not happy with herself and wanted better things for me. Up into my early teens I told her everything, that all changed when I wanted to become me. 

The last thing she said to me in her Danish mother tongue 'Mor, mor'

There are many things I enjoy doing and never got to do with her. She belonged to the generation of women who got the opportunity to go to university (Denmark was very progressive in the fifties). She felt the household duties and 'feminine' skills not worthy of her time. Despite claiming to being emancipated however, she never worked full-time (a weird luxury typical of The Netherlands, meaning Dutch women remain financially highly dependent on their spouses and after divorce fall into poverty-trap, but that's another story). 

As I stitch this dress together, I think of the many women I have met over the years in this virtual world, where I read so much about how they learnt their skills from their mothers and grandmothers. I did not. I know I cannot change the past, I do at times feel regret that we had so little in common. We both love(d) buying books & reading. I realise this is a huge gift. We shared the same sense of humour and impatient attitude to stupidity.

using small patches from the garden tablecloth which never quite worked for me, i had to unquilt the entire thing to save these small stitch-stories, am roughly modelling the shape on my favourite linen sage dress


She loved colour, colourful clothes, colourful flowers and would fill their town garden with begonias in every shade of pink. She loathed snails and slugs, would catch them and cut them in two with a pair of scissors. She would laughingly remark to her friends I didn't mind, I did, she just didn't hear. A person can be many people to others, I get why her many friends admired and loved her. As her child it was easy to become invisible in her shadow.

She did say the funniest things tho:

'Don't say no to the future' (something she had picked up from her favourite aunt) this certainly helps me when I'm fretting over f.e. modern technology and whether or not I should be using it.

'If they see something god didn't make, let them holler,' she loved sunbathing nude.

'If you don't want to stay lonely, start your own club and invite folks you like.'

we do what we can



After last post I decided I do want to learn more about snails and slugs, I'll start with those I might encounter in our part of the world. 
addendum
in a newspaper article I read this: slugs play an important part in the eco-system, they help improve the structure and fertility of the soil and are themselves a food source for many other critters, such as magpies, blackbirds, hedgehogs, wrens, toads and frogs, even spiders are known to nibble a slug or two; whenever there are 'too many' slugs is a sign, it most likely means the balance is disturbed! So gardeners beware, make the garden attractive to all kinds of plants and animals and the so-called pest will be contained.....


I also bought another Mary Oliver, which has some of my favourite poems by her, I just love her writing.




CØRØ*


*We are collectively addicted to money,
without it no poverty!
Hare wonders if this might be true.

Comments

Marti said…
This has been such a moving post for me Saskia. Seeing your Estes book sure takes me back. I first read it when it came out in 1992, had then, again when I was in a writers group in 2005 with grace. The fierceness of women, the hard won fight to be our authentic selves, some of us living our dreams, others of us, life stepping in when least expected, finding a man to love, so different from those I had known, solid, no-nonsense, shy yet strong, sweet, caring and kind, secure in himself even though he grew up in an orphanage from the age of 3.

I think of mothers and daughters: do we ever live up to their expectations for us. Mine, a woman who had known hardship, and poverty, working as a servant from the age of 11 and then becoming a governess, migrating to America from Spain in search of a better life. For her a better life meant getting married and becoming a mother. We were at odds for I wanted nothing to do with that, wanted to go to college and become a foreign correspondent, covering Latin America. Back to my words above of life and finding a special man, totally unexpected, a man who understood my dream of college and supported my going back to college when our twin girls turned 2. Those twin girls, perhaps taking my dream to heart, traveling the world for joy and knowledge, living and working in Japan and Istanbul, not afraid at all to go for it...

If I were to draw myself, would I draw a fierce , spirited woman? I like to think that I might, at least the front of me would be so but the back of me, would be more in the shadows, a woman who was not fierce enough to run with the wolves and see the world on her own. And maybe, it is that back side that my daughters recognized and decided to change for themselves...
Saskia said…
dear Marti, thank you for this, your sharing; I needed to read your comment several times as there is so much of a life therein.
You and Grace go way back....I cannot understand why, seeing as half the world's population is female, so much 'history' in any field is/has been described from a mainly male perspective; and how during many years of my life I failed to notice this. Now that I do, I notice how much others remain unaware of these manifold blind spots. But I'm not going to dwell on that here, am moving like a wolverine now😂
How lucky we both are for having bumped into the right man for us, the person who supported us in realising at least part of those dreams for ourselves....I also recognise how our two sons are each barging on ahead beyond familiar paths where we parents once stumbled, daring to live their lives beyond what we could have imagined for them! again thank you for your deeply felt wordsxxx
Maria buysse said…
thankyou both , maby later , will i tell you mine
Saskia said…
in your own time ((Maria))

tungsten

tungsten

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