Who do I admire most

I made this piece for the Creative Therapy website in 2008 when I was a contributing artist. You can see the post here.

The person I admire most is my mother. She has gone through so much in her short 62 years. Married at 17, a mother to 3 kids by age 24. She was my everything growing up. My best friend, the one I told all my troubles to, the one who was always there for all my personal triumphs. Like the time she came to see me get an award at a color guard awards ceremony the same day she got out of the hospital after a month in there for major abdominal surgery. She was weak and pale, and I had to make the fruit salad, but she was there, cheering for me and smiling from the crowd with big tears in her eyes.

She is the go to person for many people. She learned in her 40′s that she has the gift of empathy. Before she thought it was a curse, but when she learned that she had the ability to feel other peoples pain, and show them how to heal it, she became a minister and spiritual counselor, and started exploring her psychic gifts. Now she teaches classes and does readings by appointment for people, and really helps them. She is not one of those crystal ball carrying, chime ringing, patchouli wearing hippie psychics. Just a normal lady with an incredibly abnormal gift.

I love this photo of her. She does a lot of inner child work in her classes. This little girl went through a lot, lost a mother to a nervous breakdown for a year, was sent to live with different family members, had all her hair cut off by an aunt who didn’t know how to fix “girl” hair because she only had boys. She didn’t see her parents or siblings for weeks at a time, in fact they had all moved into a new house, and she found out about it from a kid at school who asked her why she wasn’t with her family, and she said because they don’t have a house, (they had lost it in foreclosure) and the kid told her, “Yeah they do, they live next door to me, and your sisters and brothers are there, how come you’re not?” She was molested, and abused, and forgotten so many times by people. Put in the trash can upside down as a freshman and everyone saw her underware. She was picked on and teased for being little, and sensitive… the list goes on and on… Knowing these things about her, and seeing that in spite of all these horrible things, the beautiful look of bliss on her face in this photo. Wearing her older sisters bikini 3 sizes too big, her smile and dimples lighting up her whole face as she beams and radiates pure joy.

The things she experienced turned her into the person she is today. She says they were all gifts. All these experiences have enabled her to help so many people. The mother in me wants to take that little girl and protect her from all those hurts, but I know that like a fine tapestry, all the threads of all our experiences make up the sum of who we are as beings on this planet. She wouldn’t be who she is today without those experiences. I am so proud to call her my mother. I am so proud that she has passed on some of her beautiful gifts to me. Every day I strive to be more like her. I ask every day WWJD? What would Judi do? The answer usually comes to me… loving and gentle, just like my mom… “Just focus on the love. Let the love in, and the rest will work itself out.”

This was made with a recycled chipboard letter box and wood circles from a placemat. Photograph popped up with recycled foamcore.