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“It’s just a house! Do something with it!!”

  Last year, Paul and I bought the family beach house and these words from my mother’s painting class keep me going. She charged her painting students with this and other pithy sayings when they were blocked. Today, the words seem prophetic. On the 15th anniversary of my mother’s death, my dear husband and I […]

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“It’s just a house! Do something with it!!”

  Last year, Paul and I bought the family beach house and these words from my mother’s painting class keep me going. She charged her painting students with this and other pithy sayings when they were blocked. Today, the words seem prophetic. On the 15th anniversary of my mother’s death, my dear husband and I […]

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Can You Keep a Woman’s Secret?

Self-Preservation in a Time of Misogyny: While International Women’s Day honors the known as well as the unknown stories of those who have long kept a woman’s secret, I believe we honor ourselves when we honor our mothers and grandmothers, ancestors, and women of all races, creeds, and eras. Therefore, I’m not content to confine this activity to one day, or one […]

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Can You Keep a Woman’s Secret?

Self-Preservation in a Time of Misogyny: While International Women’s Day honors the known as well as the unknown stories of those who have long kept a woman’s secret, I believe we honor ourselves when we honor our mothers and grandmothers, ancestors, and women of all races, creeds, and eras. Therefore, I’m not content to confine this activity to one day, or one […]

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Guided Self-Discovery Can Be Sublime

The Mother-Daughter Way LIVE weekend was a celebration of shared self-discovery. On the sign-in book, I see these comments: “A warming of the heart,” “Wonderful sharing and fellowship,” “Beginning to really enjoy life,” “Sharing with others is very healing,” and “an opening of the heart in remembrance of Mom.” Although our event began on a snowy […]

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Transcendence in the Mother-Daughter Way

    For the final week of the Mother-Daughter Way, we focus on transcendence. What does that mean in everyday terms? When my mother asked me to sit for this portrait, I resisted. I was busy. She was dying. I imagined having yet another unfinished portrait to remind me of the ways we couldn’t sign […]

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Nurture Your Blessed Autonomy

For the 11th week of the Mother-Daughter Way, we are nurturing a blessed autonomy. In this photograph, my grandmother reads her memoir and shares her vision of more than 90 years on this planet. She was sure that the world outside of her small apartment would receive her words, and that they would live on. […]

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Thrilled to unveil Alice’s Cape May, the part represents the whole . . . .

The Part that Represents
The Part that Represents

Studio Palette of Secrets and Unfinished Business
Studio Palette of Secrets and Unfinished Business

Fifteen years ago, Saturday, my mother began painting a large oil portrait of me. That may sound unremarkable, since she was a painter and I am her daughter, but it was highly charged for two reasons: I was busy, healthy, and I hate to sit for portraits. She was weak, breathless, dying of breast cancer, and she had never been satisfied with any of the previous portraits she’d attempted of me.

Continue reading Thrilled to unveil Alice’s Cape May, the part represents the whole . . . .

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Loving, Losing, Letting Go

Yesterday, I helped out as my friend Sandy Sampson conducted an estate sale to empty her parent’s home. I had to see how she did it. Sandy is an awesome daughter who provided much family caregiving over the past decade. Her father, Harry Trigg, died in April 2009, and her mother, Marion Jane Bold Trigg, […]