A Flow of Strength

Several years ago I was really struggling as a parent. I felt like every day was unbearably hard and I couldn’t quite figure out why. Yes, I had two young kids, but I know plenty of people with more kids than me that seemed to be handling things just fine.

As I was going through this time I kept asking myself, why am I even trying to create art? What am I trying to accomplish with it? Does it matter?

One day I was reading about one of my great-grandmothers, Thora Gardner. She died when I was very young and all I remember about her was seeing her sitting quietly in a rocking chair in my grandparents’ living room. My two older sisters would tease and tell me not to talk to her because great grandma was mean. Her peaked black cat-eye glasses confirmed to my young mind that she indeed must be mean. ‘A Mean Cuss’ would be the exact phrase I used to think of when anyone talked about her.

But there was more to her story that I did not know.

Her husband passed away from pneumonia at an early age, just days before Christmas in 1929. She was now a widow with four young kids and a baby on the way. To support her family during the Great Depression, she worked on their family farm in the desert of Nevada, with the heat and the dust and the nothingness that comes with it.

Reading about her life and the challenges she went through as a single mother resonated with me in a different way than they had when I heard her stories before. I wondered how she did it—were there family members there to help her? How did she keep going when things were hard for her?

The only real answer I came up with was that she didn’t have a choice. She had to keep going so her kids could eat. She couldn’t take breaks because there wasn’t anyone around to help her. She did what she had to do.

These thoughts led me to other thoughts—about mental health, emotional healing, and how over the years these things are coming to light so people can learn how to cope with the array of life challenges and emotional struggles that we face.

I thought, had I gone through some of the things my grandmother had gone through, yeah, I would have been a mean person too. Probably even ‘A Mean Cuss.’ There wasn’t any time to process life events or traumas because life had to keep going if you wanted to survive.

So many more thoughts came and went. I tucked these stories in the back of my mind as I pushed through my own struggles.

One day I was at a breaking point. After having a terrible time with the kids, I told my husband to leave me alone, and I went to paint. My creation was a messy and ugly painting, the kind you throw away when you are done because it’s awful, but you need to get things out. Unleashed on a canvas were all the pain, stress, frustration, and tiredness that come with being a parent.

We all have different ways of coping with our stress and disappointments. This just happens to be mine. But why? And where does it come from? And what does it matter?

At some point as I was painting, I thought about my great-grandmother. As I cried and smeared the paint I suddenly felt that she was there. Then I had this feeling as if she were talking to me, though I did not hear a voice. “You can do this—I’ll help you—you can do hard things too.” I’ve always felt a closeness to my grandmothers. At different times I felt them helping me throughout my life.

I kept painting over the next several days and weeks, and every time I did, I would feel this flow of energy, almost like a flow of strength, love, stamina, and calm. It felt like it was from not just my great-grandmother Thora, but also all the women in my family who had ever been mothers. It felt like I was gaining strength from them in a very tangible way.

As I was going through this process I wondered if they were helping me because somehow I was helping them. Creating art, making beautiful things, learning how to manage my range of emotions, all things that they maybe weren’t able to experience. Could it be possible to help them heal their pain while they were healing mine? Through my art?

I admit that on some level this doesn’t make any logical sense. But in a spiritual light, it made all the sense in the world.

Painting and creating art might always feel like a selfish endeavor. But if it helps me to keep going, to keep feeling human, to keep myself level-headed, if it helps me to better understand my pain and even possibly to feel connected to and strengthened by my foremothers, then isn't that enough to make it matter?

Art is a powerful gift where I find meaning and healing. Knowing my history and learning from it enriches my journey, and through creation, I can connect and be strengthened by forces far greater than myself.

After working for nearly ten years in the advertising world as a marketing photographer, I shifted gears into full-time motherhood. I started painting and creating work in collage. @amyhunterart