Going back to what I love
Oh now feel it comin back again
Like a rollin thunder chasing the wind
Forces pullin from the center of the earth again
I can feel it.
~Live Lightning Crashes
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted. When I started this blog I was working & going to graduate school. Now I’m on disability & have dropped out of school. I’m not unhappy with this at all. I’ve gone back to the thing I love: metal work. I work mostly with sterling silver. I’ve made several pieces already & have several more planned. My friends & strangers keep telling me to sell my work, but I’m not proficient at it enough yet to feel comfortable parting with what I’ve made. Each piece is a step forward & I want to see my progress.
Another thing that happened was both my grandparents died. They were married over seventy years. The memorial service was surreal & very stressful. A man who molested me over a period of five years while I was growing up was at the service. My mother had invited him. She has this twisted fantasy that it’s all a misunderstanding & someday I’ll be close with him. I froze at the service when I saw him. I let him hug me. I couldn’t do or feel anything at the time. In the days after I judged myself very harshly & ended up in the psych ward of the local hospital. So much for all the EMDR therapy I went though. I changed therapists. I hope one day to have no reaction to this man & to feel at peace with what happened so many years ago.
In other ways my parents show love & tenderness towards me. So I know they love me. There is either something going on between my parents & this man or something happened to my parents in the past that makes them unable to process what I’ve been telling them. I just want to accept the situation because there is nothing I can do to change it.
In spite of my misgivings I’ve been working on jewelry for my mother. The pieces have stones that my great-grandfather cut & polished. It gives me a sense of connectedness to make these pieces. My mother will wear jewelry with stones her grandfather made in settings made by her daughter. I’m making some jewelry for my cousins as well.
It’s not the cutting or soldering that’s hard when I make these pieces. It’s setting the stones. It’s a lot harder than it looks. I have to worry about wrinkling the silver that holds the stone in place. After I finish, I think about my grandmother, her father, & my mother. I wonder about what I don’t know that made them how they were or - in my mother’s case – are.
On a previous posting I said I was tired of hiding. Now that I’m not afraid anymore I can tell you my name is Jody. Vrba is the name of a man who escaped a Nazi concentration camp & lived to tell the world about it.