This past Sunday afternoon, I found myself inside a giant caterpillar. I was at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, MA and had crawled into the oversized replica from the cover of his book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I needed a private place to manage an unexpected eruption of tears. Scrunched on the kid-sized green bench, I also laughed. It was a spectacularly metaphorical place to feel grief. Metamorphosis. Starting in one place and coming out in another, changed. Grief is a kind of metamorphosis. It arises from so many kinds of loss. From death to children moving out to changing jobs to losing a race you trained months for. And other things.
Butterfly development is like grief. Grief’s path can feel slow and plodding like the slink of a caterpillar. It consumes everything. Requires cocooning and time. Magically transforms. And emerges with wings that can send you soaring. If you allow it to have its course. If you don’t stay stuck in one part of the process because you fear the next step.
My path to sitting in this giant caterpillar started in the morning. I rushed out at 6:30am to hike. I say rush because according to my phone, the sun and blue sky were about to make a 2-hour appearance. With sunlight as rare as the solar eclipse this month, I wasn’t going to miss it. For 2 whole hours my face was drenched in unfiltered light. I felt wholly alive. My mittened hands reached toward a sky so thickly blue it looked almost purple. Patches of yellow daffodils dotted the brown landscape and laughed their silly faces into the golden cold. I felt springtime happy. Energized. Hopeful. And then, gray clouds peeked over the edges of the sky.
I pulled into my driveway just as the clouds rolled like ceiling paint across the and blotted out everything. I sat blankly in my car. I felt like a flat tire. Winter felt too long. A shift in enthusiasm too far away. Tears welled in my eyes. It wasn’t about the weather.
I wanted to stay cocooned in the car but I needed coffee. And ok, I wanted to avoid whatever emotion was rising. Like I told my friend last week—I can’t take anymore self-awareness right now. We laughed. But I meant it. Facing hard things is exhausting.
As the coffee brewed, I tried to focus on the roasted scent of freshly ground beans. The gurgle and pump of the coffee maker. The steam rising from the carafe. I hoped it would be like caffeine for my emotions. It wasn’t. I pictured mud.
A cyclone might be the only thing with enough force to propel me onto a colorful journey. Dorothy was lucky. Flying monkeys and a green-faced witch sounded like fun right about now. Would at least be something I’d have to find energy for. Toto jumped across my thoughts.
“It was Toto that made Dorothy laugh and kept her growing as gray as her surroundings.” It’s the one quote from the book I always remember. Toto represents our ever present inner ability to play and laugh. Unconditional love. No ability to judge. Just to love.
I sipped coffee from my frog-handled, hand-thrown mug. The frog made me smile. That’s why I bought it. It was my kind of fun. That was it. I needed to create or find or buy some fun. My ability to make things fun has been my super power. It is, as they say, how I roll. Not lately. I needed to find my Toto.
Okay. What can I do for fun today? First answer: I could go to the Humane Society and get a dog.
Hmmmm. Seemed kind of extreme. And in my current state, likely to result in bringing home more than one four-legged Toto. I needed easy fun. Fun that didn’t require me to walk it in the rain.
Enter Google: What to do for fun in Western Massachusetts.
First on the list of 21 things was the Eric Carle Museum in Amherst. I’d been there once when my son was 7 years-old. We’d gone from Boston to Springfield for the Basketball Hall of Fame. It was the early days of GPS and we somehow found ourselves passing the museum on the way home. I had no idea the museum existed. We all loved Eric Carle’s spectacular art and books. It was an over-the-rainbow experience. Children’s books. Illustrations. Heaven.
I got ready to go.
I love children’s books. Three decades ago, a life coach I employed to help me find a happier career direction than television news asked me this: “If you had $500 to spend in a bookstore, what books would you buy?” Easiest answer of my life. “Children’s books,” I said. She was shocked. And apparently stumped. Instead of directing me toward being a teacher or child therapist or children’s book writer, I took my BA in English and MA in Broadcast Journalism and went into PR for biotechnology companies. I don’t blame anyone. The obvious is sometimes the hardest thing to see. Like why I hadn’t been back to the Eric Carle Museum in 14 years.
The fun started with my drive from the Berkshires to the museum. It was a traffic-free, leafless journey through quiet mountains and tiny New England towns I’d never heard of. I avoided stopping for maple syrup 3 times and talked myself past a general store that would have sidetracked my adventure for probably the entire day. I passed a public library as small as my small house. I smiled. Ok, this was fun.
I arrived as the museum opened. Then it opened me. Eric Carle’s life story and time line spanned two walls. A reminder that few of us have an easy or linear journey. Close by, a large room dedicated to making art, was flooded with natural light from floor to ceiling glass. It looked out on to what will soon be blooming apple trees and grass. Art creations dangled across the windows like ornaments on a tree. We are all artists. We all create our own lives. The gift shop was overstuffed with picture books like too much frosting on a cupcake. The big screen in the auditorium played a video of Mr. Rogers visiting Eric Carle in his Northampton art studio (located just miles from where I was standing.) Fred and Eric made art together. It was soul sunlight.
Art shakes me into my feelings. So do picture books. And creativity. Moving through the first exhibition gallery was no exception to this truth. It was library-quiet as I moved around the art. The exhibited illustrations were so alive I felt their breath on my neck as I passed. I was moved in a hundred ways. It was powerful. Like a cyclone. Be mindful of what you wish for. I found myself transported and confronting a Wicked Witch.
It happened in front of an illustration of houses by Simms Taback, for his book, This is the House that Jack Built (2002). Below each illustration, was a newspaper real estate clipping. He drew his illustrations from what the clippings described. It reminded me of the 7 childhood houses I had lived in across 5 states. All before I was 18 years-old. I remembered the real newspaper clipping of our house in Illinois when it was up for sale. I was 12. I still have it in a scrapbook.
Suddenly, I saw my not-so-easy-journey as a time line stretched across a wall. It wasn’t the time line I wanted to see. It looked more like someone stuck in a chrysalis than someone who made it to the butterfly stage. It wasn’t so much that I saw everything in the light of childhood sexual abuse, violence, family alcoholism, or the moving that framed my yellow brick road. It was what the hollowness of those experiences told me about who I thought I was and who I was allowed to be. Illusions and lies that served others. I saw the choices I made based on those lies. Big choices. Ones that I now know I can never undo. I have done my work around all of that. Decades of it. There was something still to grieve.
The Wicked Witch staring me down was one of those lies. The lie about my writing ability, my agency to create and the lie I believed about what that had to look like to be enough. It had to be in a museum. It wasn’t. The emotion that had started in the car that morning found its way into my throat.
All I have ever wanted to do is write. All I have ever been told is some version of “You can’t. It’s not for you. Do something that will make you money. No one wants to buy what you have to say.” Basically, you are not enough. I believed it.
Writing is who I am—I began daily journaling when I was age 8. I had to write. So I wrote on the side—the side of my entire life. I co-authored and authored my ex-husband’s book ideas. Eight of them. I earned a Master of Broadcast Journalism instead of one in creative writing. I wrote press releases for work. I have written stories and proposals, picture books, and novels in the shadows of ‘real life.’ On rare occasions, between full-time media or PR work or raising a child with special needs, I found enough ruby-slipper power to try to sell my own work. I consistently almost did. To large publishing houses. Including a book called Melting the Wicked Witch (more on this in my Substack archive).
I pretended to be proud that my work was so seriously considered. Deep down, I embraced the rejections as proof of what I was told—I’m not good enough to make a living doing this. It’s not meant to be on my time line. The flood of emotion around this awareness clogged my chest like I’d swallowed rocks.
As far back as I have memory, I believed I was nothing on my own and in danger of death unless I erased myself to highlight others. My only possible purpose was to serve those around me and have no needs of my own. I had to make myself less-than so I could exist and at the same time be the best at everything. Try that trick. It’s a loop of insane impossibility that keeps all the lies in place. I was nothing if I was not perfect and so famous that I was a household name. Like Oprah. Or Giesele. I had to marry a man to have value. I believed all this in a deep place. I devoted myself to these lies relentlessly. Impossibly. For decades.
All this ran through my mind in a flash, in front of the all those tiny houses, and then coalesced into the one sentence that needed to come out of the shadows: I thought I would be somebody by now. I thought I would be somebody. That’s when I headed for the caterpillar.
This wrong and multi-layered belief that somehow I wasn’t somebody because I wasn’t spectacularly famous, in a museum or attached to a man broke the dam. The raw emotion shuddered up my torso and into silent tears, all in the cocoon of that giant caterpillar. None of this was about the people who forced this belief into my little-girl self. The grief was over the choices I made to prove the lies were true and the decades of self-hatred I employed to carry this heavy, twisted torch. I became expert at never-good-enough: never thin enough, pretty enough, nice enough, smart enough, creative enough. Fat, ugly, stupid was my mantra. None of this was true. I believed it was. I had been utterly cruel to myself.
Once illuminated, truth can be painful. Then it transforms. Therein lies the butterfly wings. The lightness to fly. To be changed. Tears streaming, I realized I wasn’t desperate for spring. I was desperate to forgive myself. The Wicked Witch was melting. Truth was the metaphorical bucket of water.
As I crawled out from inside the giant caterpillar, the real-life metaphor was not lost on me. I laughed again. I had literally emerged, transformed, from a cocoon of lies that can not contain me further. The giant caterpillar was the butterfly of me. I understand what is behind me. I have wings to live beyond it.
I left the practice of surviving my life somewhere back in a once purposeful cocoon. I am in a new practice. With new wings that I have no idea how to use or where to let them take me. Like everything worthwhile, the new takes time. Patience. Mistakes. Resting. More trying. Restoring. Trying again. It is how all of life works.
Before I left the museum, I chose to celebrate by doing the art project. What was it? A mobile of birds. More wings. Flying. Spring. As I cut and glued, I nudged myself and told the work-study student who’d designed the project that I was a writer. A children’s book author. I told her about the Kids Super Journal and Teen Super Journal. It lit her up. She suggested I contact the museum to do a workshop. I will.
On the way out, I stopped in the gift store fully planning to purchase a picture book. Instead, an illustration fell into my hands (image below). In it, I see the me that I never had the chance to be. Surrounded by her books, planning her writing projects, smart, fun, creative, supported, loved, comfortable in her skin, no clue about the word enough. It reminds me of the imagination and creativity I already own. And the agency I have now, to live my art in whatever way I choose. I see possibilities that could fill a million bookshelves, out in the light of day.
Forgiveness is about love. I love myself enough to forgive. I have always been somebody. I am me.
FOLLOW THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD
Create your own story time line. Imagine it is going on the wall of your personal museum. What is the museum? What is on your timeline? What are the most impactful moments, people, choices, circumstances in your time line? What will you leave out? You can plot it on paper, find photos, draw, paint, collage, do it in sidewalk chalk, even reverse the order.
What feels like play and fun for you? (Not what you think should be fun—that’s fake fun. Be honest about what feels like fun for you.) Journal for 3 minutes and make a list.
With Gratitude
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Love this line: "like too much frosting on a cupcake." ! You are a wonder, my friend. Thank you for sharing this with us.