I was about to put this in a pile to paint over when I looked at it more closely. On the back my daughter had dedicated it to us,her family, For Christmas. It’s a painting of the three of us plus our dog Gretchen. On our shirts you can see the letters LOV. It’s an idealized picture of our family.
Around the same time I did a project called freedom to choose, in a woman’s prison in Chowchilla California. It may have been the first time I’d ever left my daughter overnight and she wrote me three letters for every night I’d be gone. One of the other volunteers came into my hotel room and saw all the letters with the drawings and asked how old my daughter was. A young age eight.
At that age she still believed in Love And Unity. She still believed, at least as far as she was able to still,  life was as magical as we tried to paint it for her. Trying to hold that picture for her in a very dense world was no small feat.
Yet the next year all our best attempts began to crumble as both my then husband and I went into deep crisis. That left her without anyone to anchor into and of course had significant impact on her. This has been one of the thing that’s been absolutely hardest for me to forgive inside of myself. And I do. I absolutely know I did my best.
I’m not 100% sure of my motivation in sharing this. But I suspect it’s because that vision still lives in me. Creating a world that is beautiful for my daughter is high motivation for me. Supporting the world that she believed in at that time, what else could be more important?
