I'm selling things for Valentine's day and I'm absolutely terrified to tell you.
So I'm doing it anyway!
Hi, Friend,
Today we are diving straight in! Perfection has held me back from sharing since Thursday. I keep tweaking the description and website. On and on and on!! I’m worried I’ll never tell you if I don’t get it over hit “publish” soon.
If you’re impatient, like me, and just want to see the dang valentines so you can support an artist you love:
LINKS:
All Valentine’s Offerings
36” Heart w/ Lettering Balloon Valentine (local to Scituate & surrounding south shore area)
36” Heart Balloon Valentine (local to Scituate & surrounding south shore area)
Valentine Snail Mail with Tom the Plumber’s LOVE POEM (open to all, regardless of location)
Valentine Snail Mail (your message, but I write it pretty)
First up, we have
#1 - BALLOONS!
For those of you local to Scituate and the surrounding area of Boston’s South Shore I am offering GIANTHEART SHAPED VALENTINE BALLOONS! With custom hand lettering on one side or without a custom message, which is still quite the 3ft statement!
Colors include ruby red, rose gold, silver, golden/gold, white, soft pink and magenta.
Delivery or pick up 🚐🎈💕
Do you love it?!
#2 - VALENTINE SENT BY SNAIL MAIL!
Surprise your loved one with an old school hand written Valentine! Worried they won't be able to read you chicken scratch? Or maybe you're simply exhausted by day's end from all those math problems and you want to support a local artisan. You might be the kind of fellow who continuously feels let down by your bodega's selection of knock-off hallmark cards. Whatever the reason, buying this valentine is good idea!
Your customized card will be snail mailed within 48 hours.
At a loss for words? Tom, has graciously volunteered himself to write your love letters! Please answer the additional questions
Greeting card front measures 6x8" folded, which is a wonderful size for framing! On high quality paper, each valentine features a hand painted watercolor heart with decorated envelope.
♥️ Last week I spent some time on my iPad drawing for the product listing. Thankfully, my art explains the gist of what I’m selling, so please check these pretty pictures for most of the details!
This is the one I’m most excited about!! Balloons, yes, I love them, but they also feel quite tied to my mom. I can clean here off them best as possible, yet she’s an infection, festering on in the darkness. The is the point where I admit I cannot change that. It will probably take a long, long time. So I do tiny little bites of balloons.
I’m terrified of success, because of the business. “The business” typically refers to my life from January when my mom forced me home from LA in January 2016 until I escaped the clutches of her grasp and wrote my declaration of withdrawal on October 1, 2020. Four years of repetitious trauma.
Sorry for this SIDE QUEST, but let me tell you the story and you say if it makes any sense: I’m pretty sure my mom trapped me in Tennessee. Looking back the timeline gives me whiplash.
-December 16, 2015 Bean Dog and I fly from LA to Nashville for holidays with return trip
-January 3, 2016 boyfriend and I move into LA apartment which I put up most of the cash for first, last and security. Because of the financial investment, it seems I would be staying, right? And the boyfriend. And the space. And California, which I loved.
-January 22, 2016 I’m back in Nashville until
-March 23, 2016 when I went to be with my boyfriend for my birthday.
-April 4, 2016 back in Nashville
-May 17, 2016 back to LA with Boyfriend’s dog. How did I convince boyfriend to let me TAKE HIS DOG FOR OVER A MONTH?! There’s no way that was my idea. My mom was obsessed with Kingsly the Boston terrier, because boyfriend was sooooo cool. Obsessed is a good word for my mother.
FURTHER SIDE QUEST: October 31, 2017 is last night boyfriend and I spent together was a night he actually never came home: Halloween. Earlier in the evening my mom had made 32 year old boyfriend (and 24 year old me) go to a halloween party with her, step-father and littlest child. Even forced to go tricker or treating. Boyfriend was uber popular by the way, why were we at kid’s party when we were in the prime of our youth?? At the halloween party the homeowner (acquaintance and supposed friend of my mother and HER HUSBAND, my step-father, who had the kid together — the child that is in the same class as her own son) ask me about my mom’s boyfriend!! Oh, that’s my boyfriend, I say to her at the end of the night. This moment has stuck with me so vividly. The way my mom was with boyfriend, especially that night. The night that ended everything. A huge fallout that she had been carefully orchestrating since October 31, 2015 when my job at School of Doodle (the reason I went to LA) ended.
-May 22, 2016 Boyfriend and I begin my favorite travel escapade: the road trip from LA to Nashville. An adventure entirely without my mom.
-June 9, 2016 back in Nashville, under my mom’s roof while she PRETENDS to be fixing up an airstream for me and boyfriend to live in. I think that thing is still in her backyard, never to become anything.
-November 2016 Boyfriend and I have moved into our own little spot finally, though I’m not quite ensure of how long it took, because I deleted all the instagram photos of him.
When a relationship ends they must be TERMINATED FROM YOUR LIFE.
-my mom
Now do you understand why maybe I don’t want to spend time making balloons? Even though they bright me money and I can do them so well. Even though I love them. I don’t think balloons can ever be clean of her. I want to be clean fo her. Please, dear lort, give me the strength to live my life away from the evil that is satan my mother.
The fear.
I am absolutely terrified of success BECAUSE OF THE WAY MY MOM ABUSED ME WITHIN THE CONFINES OF OUR BUSINESS. My idea of success is intrinsically tied to not sleeping, not eating, isolation, manipulation and other unsavory feelings.
Forcing myself to make balloons feels as if part of me is dragging my heels through wet concrete. This can only lead to an eventual point when the cement is either too high for me to keep dragging this giant part of myself or the cement dries and connection is severed. A bloody, terrible, axe-murder-slasher-film-horror level hack job.
Alternatively, I don’t force myself to do something that makes me feel bad in any way, shape or form. Bubble wrap myself. Utterly, painfully boring.
The space between fairy lala dreamland and brutal, gory death is life.
Somewhere between the cocoon and the caterpillar exists the butterfly.
The past three years I’ve been leap frogging toward one end of the extreme with all my might. To separate myself from my mother. I have to do the exact opposite of anything she would do, just to know there is such things as “options.”
At the end of the day I only know what I know. These are my experiences. The way I see it, success took at really long time, but once I found the winning piece my mom seized all control of my life. No more dating. No more friends. No more weekends alone. No more alone. No more days off. No more apartment. No more Los Angeles. No more freedom. No more adventures. No more anything of my own.
In my version of Goodnight Moon, you don’t know if this is the last good night you’ll ever get. It’s not “good” it’s “night.” Probably the person reading me the story vanishes or I die. I never understood stability, or security.
Valentine’s Day is a weird one for me. My mom LOVES Valentine’s Day. We didn’t decorate for Christmas, however on the/a/one of the first Valentine’s Days in our East Nashville house, she constructed a giant red heart of red rope light. I don’t associate that heart with the holiday as much as I associate it with the permanent facade of my house from ten to nineteen. Our glowing heart stayed plugged in year-round. The irony of a radiating sign of love on the outside of a loveless woman’s home is not lost on me. It got attention. She was an artist. It was artsy.
This was also the year my mom first showed interest in school activities. I don’t remember her at a single thanksgiving lunch or other holiday event in elementary school. Cate’s mom was my mom for those days, and I still see the three of us at the round lunch table. I was seven and I could only drink goat’s milk, because my mom’s “issue with the mainstream” was cow milk at the time. She always said Maddie was “allergic to cow’s milk.” I had to suffer. To this day, my love of goat cheese baffles my inner child, who was disgusted by the milk. One of the rare dinners my mom fed me after Maddie’s dad left was portobello mushroom caps stuffed with goat cheese. The cheese felt like connection, a rare moment of basking int he rays of her shining light. The milk was clearly someone who didn’t love me. Both are true.
Saturday January 27, 2024 - What do you call depression when it doesn’t seem worth of the term?
I’m prone to holding myself to a ridicuously standard of getting things right on the first go. I don’t want to say I was depressed again this weekend, because I conquered that feeling already last week. Right? You remember, don’t you?
How come depression isn’t done done? I think I’ve had enough, thanks.
Saturday I just didn’t want to get out of bed. It’s not really weird that I spent my waking moments begging numbness to take me like the crypt keeper. God, I wanted everything to end. This can’t be abnormal. I’m sure everyone feels this at some point in the week. I didn’t want to feed myself, which I’ve been thinking of a way I might be trying to punish myself. Trying to understand the why of actions, because I can not-WILL NOT-become my mother.
Today’s depression deserved no such title. I was simply needing to completely decompress from my life of “doing nothing.” I was worried about bedsores and the possibility that I was developing them at the under-ripe age of 30. I was thinking about the looseness of my jeans starting to cross the line from something accompanying my daily yoga ritual I had recently ghosted upon receiving my prior does of January depression. Today it felt purposeful and, I don’t know how to explain it, but part of me felt another part of me might not be acting very kind to … us? The collective we of me and all my parts.
A friend texted yesterday reminding me of a dinner I’d forgotten about. I showered, smoked the depression killing weed and made two new friends. On Sunday I did yoga.
