About

Wife, mother, artist, teacher, and friend: with four children in three years things get pretty crazy. Finding time to reflect on motherhood and identity, making art, and connecting with gal pals new and old brings me back to sanity (or as close as I’ll get in this lifetime.)

Addendum:

I needed a facelift (which goes without saying.) I don’t look like this anymore.

Jennie, age 5
Kindergarten, 1976

So after 6 months of blogging it seemed time to spruce up the face a little bit, you know? The blog face that is. Why not start with the About page?

When I started this blog I thought I’d write about craft projects with my kids, awesome recipes, pinterestable birthday cakes… but now I realize that’s just not me. Or it’s the me that I do when I’m doing jazz hands in the pre-school parking lot but it’s not me me.

Me me is the things I’m thinking about, the things that drive me, the things that go through my head while driving my minivan.

Jen & Co.
February 2014

I started writing mostly about my kids; them growing up, teaching them things and so on. But then writing about my kids made me think about how I survived my childhood with a crazy family rife with disabilities and illness (and love, there was lots of love, too) and a mother who tried hard in her way but didn’t always have the resources.

Mom, me, Butchie, sister, sister, Dad, brother
Two years before my father got sick
1977

So then I realized I wanted to write about my resources; my beautiful kids, my awesome husband, the dear friends who fuel me, going running in order to catch myself and always the ocean, the ocean.

This is my Gravatar:

This is me wearing the red gingham dress.

Jennie, sister, sister, Mom and goat
1973

I had always remembered seeing pictures of my siblings at the petting zoo, but not me. And in my memory my childhood is like that- fourth child, healthy child, peacemaker. Nothing there to take a picture of. But here it is, I found proof. My mother took me to the petting zoo with my sisters, my father took the picture, my retarded brother Butchie stayed at home. But I’d forgotten. If I hadn’t found this photo I wouldn’t know that I’d been to a petting zoo before I took my own kids.

So for me, this blog is proof. It is proof that as a parent I cared about my children deeply, and I tried mostly pretty hard and I failed them a whole bunch (I may have yelled once or twice or used my third arm…) It’s proof that we did things, we thought about things, I noticed them growing, I marveled and cried and laughed.

For now this is the place I’m keeping this time in my life, of becoming who I am today.

This is a print I made about being a sister and a mother and a friend. It’s called We All Wear This Dress. I could have named this blog that. Because I’m finding that we all do wear this dress (and that’s not just for the ladies… gentlemen wear this dress, too.) My sisters and I literally all wore this dress. And the print is mended with thread the way my mother mended our clothes, the way we each mend the things in our lives we cherish. I am wearing the (metaphorical) dress my mother wore when she raised us. We all mend. We watch. We fix. We reflect, or at least I do.

And these are the stories I tell my Mama friends. Hopefully they’re the stories that we all tell each other.

Sometimes I rhyme things, like in the Elf on the Shelf. My Mother’s Letters got me Freshly Pressed (and Date Night and the Wind Turbines did, too!) and a lot of people read Lederhosen, which contains some of my prints and is more about my retarded brother Butchie than about German leather shorts. This one is, too (about my brother, not leather shorts.) And here’s one about getting old. Oh, wait, here’s another one. And here’s one about female beauty. Which brings us back to the facelift.

I’m not actually going to get one. Although if someone offered to inject botulism into my face for free, I’d be all in. Botch it up! Get all up in those forehead wrinkles! I’ll say it’s to relieve migraine headaches so my daughters don’t get the wrong message. There might just be a blog post in that…

Right now I’m cooking chicken piccata so I should probably go. When the smoke detector goes off the fire trucks always come. Long story… I’ll tell you about it later.

I’d love to hear from you. I am so happy you’ve stopped by. Come back soon.