Monday, January 17, 2011

Living Outside of My Skin (Part 2)




Chapter 2
Good Morning Starshine!


Sometimes plans change when new things are presented to you. We were in sunny Florida living with my parents. I was working at a local mall working two jobs trying to save to get our own apartment and awaiting art school to start in the fall.

In this period I had met new friends through work and they were all young and unmarried. I am only 18 years old myself at this point and since my brain was still developing I had a yearning to go be with girlfriends and experience youth. I love dancing so I started going out to the dance clubs in the area with my new friends.
My parents were fine and supportive of me doing this at first. I think they felt I missed some of what being a teenager was like. My husband was off trying to "find himself" at the time and was not too concerned that I was off with the girls. He had no interest in spending much time together as well. It turns out was one of the first signs that something was wrong after the fact.

Unfortunately, it just made my confidence take a turn for the worse. The more I went out, the more I felt like I could never be "normal". As I looked around and saw everyone having such a great time I thought there was me...married, a young mom, and stuck with this body that made a sedentary elderly lady look fit. I can never be "normal" or a whole female. And that stuck with me. I think the main thing was that because my body had to grow up so fast that my mind and my inner self just never caught up.

The more my husband and I kept doing separate activities, the worse I got. I just couldn't seem to get a grip on what I was feeling. I do know now that I felt neglected, confused, jealous of my friends, and just plain inadequate and ugly. Feelings a healthy minded person could fix. But who was I really?

In the middle of all this, I took on a third job and decided that it was more important to get out of my parents apartment then go to school. Yeah I know it was very immature, but I did say that my brain had not finished developing. We did move into our own apartment and I thought that it would bring my husband and I closer together.

I started selling hand painted t shirts at the Hollywood Race Track on weekends when they had a flea market. I had picked up a love for textile painting at the art camp my art teacher had sent me to during high school. Hand painted t shirts were right up my alley. I sold a few and it gave me a new confidence and it felt good.

A few weeks doing this, I met a designer at the flea market from New York. She mentioned that she had a great friend here in the South Florida area that had an art studio that specialized in textile painting. I was like "WOW" I am about to "make it big". Haha.
I met her friend and was hired on the spot on a temporary basis. It was AWESOME!
I walked in and there were huge rolls of fabrics out being hand painted on the floor. Silks, Egyptian cottons, anything you could imagine. It was spectacular.
These fabrics were made into drapes and upholstery in homes and even yachts all over the United States and beyond.

I loved working there and was hired on permanently after a few short weeks. My passion had been discovered. It gave me a new found self esteem and I loved every minute of it. My boss was this amazing woman who to me had done it all. She was such a caring and loving person. A second mom to me. I still have the biggest place in my heart for her.

The longer we were in Florida, it became quite apparent that my marriage was not going to last. And that turned out to be good thing in the long run. But there were many years in between of mental anguish and scarring that would affect me forever and melt over into my future relationships. My confidence as an artist was growing, but my confidence as a woman was diminishing by the moment.

We did have a second child while trying to hold things together and I am so thankful for my second daughter. I was able to bond in a way I did not get to with my first child in the beginning because I was so young and was still in high school. My kids kept me going. No matter what I was going through in the bad times, they were my mainstay and I was always going to protect them.

"You know what happens to scar tissue. It's the strongest part of your skin.”
Michael R. Mantell


To be continued...

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