I’m healing this week from having whatever horrible bug that decided to hijack my lungs last week. I have chronically wimpy lungs from growing up in Chemical Valley, West Virginia, so whenever I get a respiratory bug, it gets dramatic pretty quickly and I always take forever to heal up from it. I feel a lot better this week but the cough lingers and my voice is just a squeaky whisper. Super fun when teaching middle schoolers, let me tell you.
BUT! It has been a really fun week at my school, because we are making these super cool little ceramic sugar skulls. This is my first clay project at this school ever, and my first time teaching ceramics since 2006, when I taught ceramics at Taylor Books in Charleston WV and there was a person running the studio so I only had to teach the building part and wait for the pieces to get fired. I still have a lot to learn about running a ceramics program. I’ve wanted a kiln since I started teaching in 2000, and I had no idea that this school even had a kiln when I started teaching here because nobody had ever used it. It took a year and a half of squeaky-wheeling it, but with the help of a super supportive Parent Teacher Organization and one parent in particular, we were able to get a clay program started, and I am eternally grateful.
We really need it, too. Art making is so good for mental health, and as we are seeing such a rise in mental health problems in students, we are also seeing a major shortfall in arts education opportunities for them, despite the fact that there is so much data out there that points to the mental health benefits of arts education. I think that clay, especially, provides incredible opportunities for students to improve mental health. Clay is tangible, resilient, somewhat forgiving, but also fragile. There are so many social-emotional lessons kids can learn when working with clay that translate into working with other humans. And, when you’re done, you have a tangible, beautiful thing of value.
I think that art is healing me, too. My oldest son, Isaac, passed away in 2017. Six years before that, I left an abusive marriage and entered the hell of the family court system and the institutional abuse that comes from co-parenting with an abuser. When I finally moved to California just months after Isaac’s death, I was able to start to heal. But healing isn’t linear. There are many fits and starts. You can make so much progress and then find yourself back at the starting line for no real reason. You heal, little by little, but you are never the same. Your kintsugi scars just add a little sparkle to your life and remind you that life continues even after you thought your soul was destroyed.
This reminds me of a beautiful quote from Chris Cleave’s book Little Bee:
“On the girl's brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.”
Though losing a child is the most horrible thing a parent could go through, and I will never heal completely from this, there is something beautiful about the healing process. It is by healing, teaching, creating art, and living that I carry on his memory. Everything I do in the years that I have left has a little bit of him in it. He continues to live in my heart, and creativity comes from the heart, so this means that everything I make on this earth contains a little bit of him. And as I work with young artists, I like to think that he is part of that process, too. I feel his presence everywhere I am, including my classroom.
As I heal myself through creating, I find new ways to teach my students how to heal through art. Quite often, my toughest, meanest, most damaged students find peace in making art. I am blessed to be able to help students find a path toward healing. It just makes sense that our first clay project is to create calaveras (sugar skulls) for Dia de los Muertos — a holiday devoted to honoring our ancestors and celebrating all the things we carry from them into our own lives. We may not have these ready in time for Dia de los Muertos after I missed an entire week being sick last week, but this project to me will always remind me of the healing power of art.