What I was going to be.

I was going to be an artist. From the earliest times, I filled my copy books and any scraps of paper with drawings and designs and clothes... how I loved to design clothes.. My parents had friends who were in the art world and they were going to help me go to Slade which is one of the most famous art schools in England.. I loved to spend time drawing and designing, the hours would speed by and I was in another world. I did go to Art School finally after taking my O levels, and I did love it... but found all the learning about perspective and form hard to chew, so when my dad accepted a place to teach back in his home town of Aix en Provence, I wasn't too worried about leaving. The trouble with me all my life is that I do not like to be told what to do- this has got me into hot water at times, and made decisions hard, but I am best left to my own devices and not reading the instructions.. which is why that sewing machine has stayed so long untouched.. I have to know it first before I can attempt to try and work it. My husband is a genius at interpreting books of instructions and following them through so he gets results quite quickly, but I hate reading the things as my brain doesn't seem to assimilate in the same way and I get offshoots of ideas that generally throw out the way to do and I get lost and frustrated.. so going to Art school and being told what to see and how to interpret it to get it down onto paper didn't fit well with me. Even at the beginning at school where the Art Mistress said to get proper proportions when drawing a figure, you had to measure the head, and then 8 times it to fill out the body area, I refused to do this, as my eyes seemed to be able to measure that anyway - so I am a failure at following instructions.. When I was first pregnant and went to an ante natal class, when I saw that the midwife taking the classes was not married, had had no children, I didn't go back as she had no idea really it was all theory and out of a book, so that wasn't going to work for me... hmmmmm.. Well, I was taken in one day overdue as my tummy was feeling so tight, and they thought I might have started labour.. so I was lying on a bed as you do, and ruminating as I do, and suddenly heard a woman screaming, and I remember thinking... oh this might hurt!! Then heard the baby cry and knew that she had safely delivered and I went off drifting into sleep... not for long however as that tight tummy started to give me the most enormously strange pains, and I was off on my first maternal journey, that ended 12 hours later with a beautiful baby boy.. who because he was delivered by forceps I didn't see again for four days, as in those days they cot nursed them to get over the trauma.. You see reading diagrams, and instructions for some reason do not turn into retain able facts for me, and although I had read the various baby books, the pain factor was barely mentioned and so I ignored it until I had to get on and deal with it.. which I did, and there you are... Having all these babies over a 12 year period and working outside at a career, I never really got the time to sit and draw again, and I missed out doing my children except for the last one who I did draw when he was three months old and I have kept framed.. So now I have more time, I am going to see if my skills are still there and although I am really hard on myself as I know what I want it to look like and feel it looks different to what I actually achieve, I am going to set aside a time along with time to blog .. what ambitions to hold, when there is so much more to do every day, but I think it will feed my soul which is feeling very in need to  be soul fed indeed! Somewhere along the lines, I lost myself in the day to day working routines, so perhaps before its too late I can once again be ambitious and see if I can be an artist