Inside the walls a therapists office I came face to face with my inner demons, the past dredged up, the old wounds opened and laid bare for me to see openly. It was grusome, ugly, and left me raw and vulnerable. Going home afterwards trying to paste a smile on for the boys and Tim was something I was unable to do, it wore on me, exhausted me, frightened me and at times I would walk out of his office and swear I would never return. The numbing silence was so much easier some days, the scars much easier to bare than the raw open wounds, and yet healing came. I think I expected to be healed in one visit, talk it out, have him tell me I’m fine or at least that I would be fine. The truth of the matter is that I wasn’t fine, so many feelings had been locked away for so long that when the doctor started to undsedate me I began to feel far too much. Things that hadn’t moved me before began to hurt much more than I had ever thought possible. Old wounds made for a rotting infected mess when reopened.
I was a full seven or eight months into these horrific ‘talk’ sessions when I was walking through the One of Kind show with a friend. I saw a glass blowing company with all sorts of beautiful pieces of glass hanging in the tent they had set up and I was in awe of the beauty of each piece; but one piece stood out to me and I was drawn to it, much like a moth to a flame. I stood staring at it and a lump formed in my throat, and then I felt a dampness on my cheeks and as the tears dripped onto my cheeks I realized that I was moved, really moved for the first time in a very long time.
As the glass blowers work they have pieces of glass that get cut off of the pieces they are working on, those pieces would normally get thrown away as trash but this artist saved them, worked on them, and put them together again into a beautiful heart that hangs in a window, so that when light passes through it, the light and colours shatter themselves across your walls. All those broken pieces, put together again, made new, made beautiful. It took me a long time to walk away from that heart, I couldn’t explain my feelings around it for a long time, it was so raw and painfully beautiful.
A few days later friends came for dinner, they handed me a gift and I opened it, there inside the pretty tissue paper was the heart that I had seen only days before. Once again the emotions overwhelmed me, tears filled my eyes, there, in this space was this beautifully imperfect heart. A symbol of love, friendship, hope, beauty… it was emotional then and still is now when I look up at it in my window every day.
The heart is a symbol of strength to me, my sons heart, patched, repaired, broken and fixed up with replacement parts, beats underneath the white scar that signals his proof of life; and my own heart was just as broken, though I didn’t bare the white scar on my chest, it was shattered into a million pieces as well; and then God came along, and just like that glass blower he took all the broken pieces and he put them in the fire, forming them, cooling them, heating them again until one day I stood looking up at my window at that little heart and seeing it for what it really was, understanding for the first time why it brought such evocative emotion with it. God, had put all the pieces back, it looks broken and healed, it’s imperfect but beautiful in that imperfection.
L
Through the Lens of Motherhood 