There is a picture made from a leaf and marker hanging on the wall above my desk.  At the bottom it reads Cayanne Love. Twenty five years ago I would have laughed at the simplicity of this picture. When I was 13 the walls of my bedroom were covered with posters and pictures from magazines, poems torn from library books and handwritten aphorisms I’d read. It never occurred to me then that someday they would be replaced by sheets of copier paper scribbled with crayon and haphazardly constructed pictures of foam stickers and cut out shapes.

For the past 2 years the walls of my house have become a gallery for the art of two aspiring artists, one standing on the verge of six and the other three and a half. What for the first months we lived here were bare have become a crowded gallery that pays homage to the day to day concerns of the very young. The walls are a blank canvas in themselves that have become bursting with life.

During this past summer is when we really began to fill the empty spaces.  I was unemployed and each day we did an art project of some kind. Now, with the girls in school most days, I find myself longing for the chance to cut shapes from paper or slip in a lesson on time by making a paper plate clock. Surprisingly I even miss the mess and inevitable spilling of painting. But maybe more then anything I miss the chance that art gave me to teach and interact with my girls on a very deep level. It made us the Three Mouskateers, as Cerise says, and showed them something I had forgotten how much I loved.

Still I never thought of myself as an artist.  I spent several years of Saturdays when I was a pre-teen at The Maryland Institute in downtown Baltimore taking art classes and alot of that had somehow laid dormant until I began to think about how to fill the hot hazy afternoons of an Eldersburg summer. The joy and pride that shines through with each touch of brush to canvas or crayon to paper even now brings a smile to my face.

I watch as the silly beliefs I had in art have melted like an ice cream cone in August.  The idea that art must have meaning or even have the veracity to cause a fundamental change in the world. Now I know that true art must before anything be an expression of joy and that is what my children exude in page after page of stick figures and scribbles that are roller coasters or castles. The walls of my house are the most beautiful walls I have ever been surrounded by, adorned with a thousand mystical stories that only I and my girls could retell.

A friend of mine came over and said “I don’t know if I’d let my children just hang pictures so haphazardly all over the house.” I asked “why, it makes them happy, but even more importantly it makes me happy.” My friend said “Well I like my living room to be my space, their room is one thing, but you have pictures all over.  Where is your space?” I thought about it a minute and said “This is my space, what else would I want to be surrounded by.”  Our conversation turned to where to have lunch but I kept turning over in my head the idea that you wouldn’t want your walls covered by a thousand masterpieces, that you may rather have blank walls staring at you.

Then it came to me, I have always loved to cover my walls with pictures and stories, it just took me growing up to find ones that truly made me happy.  Ones that were simply because someone wanted to put pencil to paper and create, without forethought to what was being done, lost in the process not the meaning.  I still have a copy of Elizabeth Bishops One Art on my pantry door and a poster of Professor Longhair behind my desk, but they are surrounded by pictures of princesses and our family that would only be recognizable to the hand that created it or the father who takes such pride in displaying it.

I have been waking up early on Sunday, before 6, and going to mass.  It’s been a quarter century and I have come back to my Roman Catholic upbringing; I went to confession and have been taking communion.  It is strange, foreign yet familiar, and I am scared. 

I stopped going to mass when I was 13, my mother was angry at God for the death of my cousin and I was angry at God for letting my cousin molest me.  My maternal grandmother was devout, praying novenas for me year after year, and she loved my cousin, more then me I thought, and I didn’t understand. So, I blamed God, turning my back on the community and comfort of the church in favor of marijuana and LSD.

This lead me down many dark roads and to try any drug you can think of at least once.  I felt death wrap its hands around me more then once and saw God pouring down as I tried to commit suicide in music. I hated God, the church, and everything it represented..  The ceremony and ritual seemed to go against the truth I had read in the bible and the idea of having to go and worship every Sunday seemed like jumping through hoops. 

I found a moral compass in myself, it is something felt and followed if you believe in your internal goodness.  Why did I need to go to church and have someone tell me what it meant to be a good person who walked right?  So I turned my back on the whole idea and found spirituality in other ways; a blade of grass, the last rose of summer, a song. And as long as I was high those things were enough.

Two years ago I walked away from the altered space I had dwelled in for 20+ years.  I began to grow up and finally matured emotionally from the 13 year old I was when I chose to numb the pain of my childhood with drugs.  My body had become that of a man but my head was still an angry kid who was lashing out at the world. It took a lot of painful soul searching, the dissolution of my marriage and forgiving God..

The soul searching was in short a complete psychological reevaluation of everything I believed.  It made me see that I was a self-loathing, sad person who had latched onto a culture that seemed, at the time, to provide me with warmth and companionship.  It didn’t judge me and kept me in the stagnant pool of thought that says it’s ok to ‘follow your heart’.  You should be true to yourself but when you have children there comes a sense of duty that must be embraced.  This sense of duty informed me that my happiness was secondary to my daughters needs and I might need to do things for them that I wouldn’t do for myself. 

I didn’t plan on quitting drugs, I woke up one morning and didn‘t get high, went about my day and went to bed.  I woke up the next day, didn’t get high…. After about a month I didn’t even think about getting high. This is when my life fell apart.  I looked at my wife one day and realized I didn’t know who she was.  Our relationship began with a bottle of vodka and an oxycodon  and was a blur of cocaine and alcohol. It ended one Monday in July 2008 when she left.  I packed up and left the house we had shared with my daughters that Thursday and the three of us moved to my mother’s house 

She wouldn’t let go of her past, she resented being married and her ‘boring’ life.  She wanted to be a woman in her twenties, out and about on the town, making the scene.  Her life inevitably changed for the worst in her eyes by getting married.  The sense of this was palpable and she sought out what she wanted in a person who would let her be herself. I didn’t understand and immersed myself in my children’s lives and became detached  from her, I looked on her as a manifestation of everything I had rebuked. It caused a war within me. I knew that it was best for my wife and me to be together for our children, but if we lived two separate lives it would never work. She felt it too and decided that it was better for her to just run from our problem as opposed to trying to fix them.

It took a long time to find some peace and comfort, I spun up and down through the grieving process for over a year; from anger, to bargaining, to denial, to depression until I finally found acceptance.  I studied Buddhism and it showed me many ways to forgive her for the perceived violations she had committed against me and our children but  it took forgiving God to ultimately free me from the past.  I had to struggle, like Jacob wrestling with the angel, to do this and the way came to me when reading a book called Strong Fathers / Strong Daughters by Meg Meeker. There is a chapter on God.  The author is relating what a woman who survived Auschwitz said about God ..

“God didn’t make the camp or kill the Jews.  The mistake He made was giving men free will and the brains to figure out how to torture people.  I knew that He hated Auschwitz more than I did.  Many of us had faith.  We needed hope. Whether we made it out alive or not, we needed to know that somehow, some way, life would be better.  Would it be heaven? We didn’t know what we thought.  But God gave me hope and that kept me alive. I couldn’t afford wasting energy on hating Him.”

From there I ended up going to mass one Sunday a few months back. It is comforting and I find giving myself to God, thinking about what is said, being absorbed in the ritual, is a way to stay focused on the challenges of my life a single father. I find that it also helps me to know that there is a community for me, one that expects things of me beyond ‘following my heart’. Beyond that, though, my real reason for going is that sense of duty I feel to my daughters.

It is said that talking to your children about religion is second only to talking about sex on the uncomfortablity scale. I don’t have a problem saying what I need to my girls but I also feel that living by example is the greatest way to reinforce in them that God is there and loves them. Cayanne and Cerise need to be taught a faith in God, because life will inevitably take them to a place where I can not help them.  Do I want them to be alone when they are there or willing and able to put their trust in something greater then themselves?  I will not always be there when they feel emotionally rejected, abandoned, or just misunderstood.  Where will they find security then, will they have something strong, loving, and secure to hold them?  I know that I will not always be there for them and I want to give them something to turn to other then drugs or sex like I did.