Myrtle Hoglund Hull, RIP

My mom passed away about an hour ago. Thank you for all your prayers.

This photo was taken at her 90th birthday party in May.

my visit with Mom

First, thank you all for your prayers. I know they have given me strength, and I'm sure they are giving my mother peace and comfort.

I'm so glad I went to see her yesterday. She was more out of it even than I expected, and she could not respond to me verbally at all. (The nursing home has her heavily medicated because keeping her pain free is their priority right now.) She was moving somewhat restlessly in bed, but she did turn her face to me, and later she held my hand for a long time.

I told her I love her and that I was sorry for the times I hurt her and I forgave her for the times she's hurt me. She told me a few years ago that she fears death, so I read her John 14:1-6 and told her not to be afraid. I told her everything would be all right.

I have no way of knowing if my words sank in at all. So I prayed that the Holy Spirit would reach in and communicate with her at a level far deeper than my words could reach, and after praying that for a while, she calmed down and drifted off to sleep.

I have to believe that the visit made a difference.

Now we just wait.

I feel much more at peace about our relationship. I'm very tired, and I hurt both physically and emotionally, but I know this is just part of the process.

Thank you again for your prayers. Please keep remembering her. I'm praying that she has a peaceful passing.

prayers requested

I know I'm supposed to be taking a blog break, but I could use prayers. One of those pianos I didn't mention in my last post is about to come crashing on my head.

My mom has gone into decline. She's not eating, and half the time, she thinks my younger brother is our deceased oldest brother or she asks about my father, who's also gone. As of today, she has been switched to hospice care. I'm going down to see her this afternoon to make sure I get there before it's too late.

The nurses won't give any definite predictions, of course, but the hospice nurse told Bob today that it could be a couple of days or a couple of weeks. At any rate, I don't expect that she will last till Christmas.

Sunday will be the anniversary of my brother's death.

I'm alternating between grief and numbness.

Juggling Pianos

A friend of mine uses the expression juggling pianos to describe that feeling of trying to do too many things and the resultant fear that something is going to come crashing down on your head.

I've been feeling that way about my life. The only good thing is that it is mostly self-inflicted, and so I can make some changes to alleviate it.

On the work front, I have worked harder and longer the last 15 months than at any other time in the last 15 years. We're still experiencing financial issues because of a string of unexpected expenses this year, and it's very discouraging to work so hard and not make much progress.

I expect to be working somewhat more than full-time for at least the next six months, perhaps longer. I'm grateful, but I'm also anxious about it. It's very hard to do the personal creative work I crave when I'm working such long hours at a creative job.

My first choice has been made. I've decided already to give up on the Suite 101 idea. The subject about which I'm most qualified to write (history) doesn't generate enough advertising revenue to make it worth my while. It would be better for me to use that time on my regular jobs.

Then there is the crazy patchwork quilt of my creative work. I'm taking an art class, . . . but I'm not finding any drawing time outside class.

I write poetry and fiction . . . but very sporadicallly. And it's difficult to find time to market my work.

I want to start writing a memoir but I haven't even begun the outline.

I blog but only two or three times a week, and I don't keep up with reading the posts of others.

I have activities at church that I've been skipping more often than not. I've had a hard time keeping up with my half of the household chores. And now we have Christmas bearing down upon us with all its extra activities and responsibilities.

I can't do it all. No one's been asking me to do it all except myself, but that's sort of the point. I need to take more control of this creative force that drives me so hard and channel it so it's more productive. I feel like, except for the freelance work for which I get paid, I'm doing a half-assed job at everything. The things I care most about get only the leftover scraps of my attention.

So one of the things I'm going to do this Advent is to listen and pray about priorities. I have to decide to let go of some things. Michael and I have talked about it, and we feel certain that my art class is going to stay. But all those other creative pursuits . . . including this blog . . . have to be reconsidered. I think I need to choose quality of effort rather than quantity of creative avenues. For 2010, I think I need to choose one or two areas of focus rather than three or four.

So I'm taking Advent off from blogging. If I decide to continue with it, I'll be back next year. If I don't, I'll post a farewell.

Movie Review: An Education

I've been feeling overwhelmed with some personal things lately, so that's why I'm not posting much. But I did want to tell you about a movie Michael and I saw this afternoon. Michael has been wanting to see this for about a month, but I was only moderately interested. I was wrong. The movie totally blew me away.

An Education is a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl in England during the early 1960s. Sixteen-year-old Jenny, who is bright and pretty, is enrolled in a girl's school and is being pushed hard by her lower-middle-class parents to excel so that she can pass the exams needed to be admitted to Oxford. At the beginning of the movie, she is excelling at this task, but she finds the work boring. As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that Jenny doubts whether education will really produce the life she wants; careers for women were still quite limited in the early 1960s, and she has little interest in teaching or civil service, the options presented to her. Jenny dreams of a more sophisticated, cosmopolitan life, a dream that seems to come true when a 30-something playboy enters her life. However, the education he gives her is not what she anticipates.

Just reading a summary of the plot in no way prepared me for how intensely the movie would affect me. Although I didn't have anything remotely like the romantic experience of the character in the movie, I identified with her in so many other ways that at times watching the story (which is based on the memoir of a British writer) was almost painful for me.

Like the character in the movie, I grew up knowing from early childhood that I was expected to be the first of our family to gain a college education . . . but my family had little concept of how to really help me achieve that or what a difficult transition they were actually pushing me to make.

Like the parents in the movie, mine pressured me to work hard to make sure that I would earn that education myself.

Like the character in the movie, I knew that my family saw education as a means to a practical end--a more prosperous living--but I had something else in mind. In addition to wanting knowledge for its own sake, I was like Jenny in wanting a life of culture for myself: art, music, fine dining, and the experience of going to Paris. No one in my family had any experience of such things, nor did they value them, but I craved them with a passion that never abated. (And this was in spite of the fact that for all of my twenties and part of my thirties, I felt like a white trash imposter every time I found myself in one of the cultural situations I craved.)

And like the parents in the movie, mine failed to parent me in significant ways (although in very different ways than the movie portrayed).

This film had intense personal significance for me, but even without that, I think it's well worth seeing. The performances are quite superb. Carey Mulligan, the actress who plays the lead, does an especially brilliant job. The script does a good job of making each of the characters complex and nuanced (with the possible exception of the headmistress). At the end, the father (played by Alfred Molina) explains himself in a way that added so much depth to the whole story and helps the audience to understand and sympathize with him, despite his mistakes.

In fact, the main character in this movie is failed by every adult in her life except one. Jenny herself is not blameless; she makes several bad choices of her own. The results very nearly ruin her. However, the movie does not end there. I will leave it to you to find out the details.

This movie is still in limited release. I hope it's at a theater near you because I strongly recommend it.

word verification

I'm very sorry. I hate word verification, and I know the words are sometimes very difficult to read.

But the last week, I've been repeatedly targeted by spam for viagra and cialis and also some very strange pseudo comments that seem to be computer generated (or written by someone with no facility in any known language).

So for the time being, we have to play the security game.

Big Head (my third nude)

Here is my third nude for class. I'm somewhat annoyed with myself because her head is too big. But considering where I am in my art studies, I guess I shouldn't be too hard on myself.

I want to thank all of you who prayed about the guilt feelings I was having about studying art. I haven't been troubled with them since. A friend of mine suggested that I try writing affirmations, and I have been doing that several days a week. But I know your prayers helped too. Instead of feeling bad about studying art now, the class has become my little Zen pocket of the week. For the three hours I'm there, I feel focused and totally in the process. It's a great feeling.

My teacher keeps telling me that he's astonished at how little experience I have doing this. If he keeps praising me this way, I might be the one with the big head. :-)