My first art exhibition, at Medieval College Chechel, England | Photo by author
My mother was angry. I shouldn’t have been surprised. “Oh, sure! Just pick up the brush and start painting,” she said sarcastically. “You never learned a lesson! What about all those people who studied for years and never got anywhere? You don’t deserve all these accolades!”
Something clicked inside me. This was the first time I had seen evidence to the contrary.
“I’ll do it, otherwise this wouldn’t have happened,” I said.
This only served to increase her anger. And I didn’t care.
Finally, I understood.
For decades, I believed I was worthless. That I will “never achieve anything,” that I am “stupid,” and that I “don’t deserve anything good.” I believed all the terrible things she said to me throughout my childhood and beyond.
I remember when I studied social work in college, my GPA was a perfect 4.0. Later, I did a four-year Homeopathic Practitioner program and got straight A’s there. I wasn’t stupid. You were, in fact, very smart. She deserved those grades.
Up until that moment, I had always believed that the terrible things she said about me were true. They were facts. Suddenly I realized it was just her opinions. These were her beliefs. They had no basis in reality at all. And because she had been cramming them down my throat my whole life, I believed them too. I accepted them as the truth.
This was just her truth, her beliefs. They don’t have to be mine anymore.
The important thing is that I felt just as strongly then as I do now – that it was my voice and my choice – no one else’s.
This gave me a stronger sense of who I was then and who I am today. Conversations about “My body, my choice” often revolve around abortion itself, but let’s remember that this is the very choice we are fighting for.
I dropped out of university and left home at nineteen. In 1977, my roommate and I took a Greyhound bus in New England; Our destination was California.
Susan was selling pies at Heidi’s Pie Shop, and I was scooping ice cream around the corner.
From Los Angeles, I traveled alone to Yucatán; Later, when I returned to the United States, I joined a hippie commune and practiced Eastern meditation. I have not become more enlightened. I got pregnant.
I went back to school, got my degree, and became a teacher. And now my daughter has two girls – my beautiful grandchildren. “Life is a tree with many branches,” as a wise man once said.
My novel, Life asks Violet, Ava, and Margot to turn around their lives and examine them from a new perspective. Sometimes self-understanding comes from within, like a slowly clearing fog, and sometimes from without, like the cry of a hawk.
Ava, my young feminist, on her white horse, spear in hand, riding happily into the future, never would have imagined that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade! She speaks, as I write, to women everywhere.
Let’s celebrate Violet’s rainbow. Watch the white dove fly.
Related: The Other Opposite Of Narcissism Is Echoism: What You Need To Know
