I Make Wild Open Spaces

I create space. I can’t help it.

That’s how things in my life keep moving along.

For so long, I felt hemmed in. Claustrophobic. I couldn’t breathe, and I thought that was a necessary feeling. The right feeling. It was the modus operandi of the people around me, the town I grew up in. You can’t breathe, you feel constricted? Good, honey. That means you are doing your part in the system. You are measuring up. You are working hard. This is how we live, child, in order to get through life.

Those main messengers kept shouting at me:

PAY THE BILLS!

FEED THE CHILDREN!

BUY THE HOME!

THEN YOU’LL BE HAPPY!

But the happiness didn’t come.

As a child, I never thought much about the goal in all of this, the major purpose underlying my actions. My family is blue-collar; my grandmother grew up very poor. So the lesson we all learned was, “Please the people with the money, get your paycheck, all will be well.”

Only I showed up, unplanned, unexpected, in 1979. And I had a mouth on me that was hard to believe. I was talking before toddlerhood, insisting on going my own way from the start. As a kid, I hid in my grandmother’s dining room closet, slipping on an aunt's pair of high heels, putting on lipstick without a mirror, finally emerging to dance around the table and tell people what I thought of every damn thing.

I was haughty, not bad. Bold. Sassy, truth-telling. My observations cut through the noise, again and again. I didn’t care who was going to hear, or how they were going to take it. I called it like I saw it. I called it like it was.

I was fatherless, too, until my mother got married to a man she didn’t love much, and we embarked on her vision of the suburban dream. The cookie cutter mold seen in sitcoms. Man, woman, kids. “Family.” Green grass. All in a dank south Jersey town where you were told what decorations you could hang on your aluminum siding.

When we moved to south Jersey, my haughtiness stopped, and so did my truth-telling. I couldn’t breathe, neither, babe. We were far from family, from the city civilization I formerly knew. We could no longer walk to the store, the pizza shop, or see neighbors on their porches after dinner, smoking a cigarette and relaxing. But now we had THE HOUSE, the large yard, the dry grass that baked in the sun. Our house was brown, one-story, a ranch. There was an identical one five doors down on the cul-de-sac. Ranch. Cul-de-sac. These were new words. There was a lot of new vocabulary, a lot of new lessons. The lessons were, Keep still, girl. The lessons were, Stay silent.

Don’t tell anyone what is happening.

My only escape, my only source of feeling at home, were books. Teenage romances, thrillers. And Oprah. And music from the radio. And dreaming.

Flash forward, babycakes, to college, because I’ve always been eager for that south Jersey era to become a blur.

(I am telling you all of this to help you understand why I began cutting my clothes to feel happy and free.)

The college I chose was all women. Feisty, busty women, all living in a dorm, thinking we knew things. And wow, did we take up space. I was finally allowed to be who I wanted. I was finally given permission to be who I was. My hips got big and delicious. I had a community of like minds all around me, girls who danced and giggled in hallways and blared Tori Amos and watched South Park late into the night, wiry bras hanging off our closet doorknobs. We talked about boys, and we ate a lot of ice cream. Strawberry cheesecake flavor was my favorite. I also had a thing for grilled cheese.

I took up space, darling. SPACE. I TOOK IT. UP.

I didn’t worry what boys thought of me, because I wasn’t around many boys. Meanwhile I had this cool brain to keep me company, and a lot of good teachers who encouraged me to think. I wrote, I studied. I listened, I considered.

But lady, I ended up doing a common thing my senior year, don’t you know. So many of us do it. I dated a boy because he was fun to talk to, and I ended up doing a whole host of other things with him, too, and then I graduated and got a job teaching English at a Catholic girls’ high school and…

Reader, I married that boy. At a mere 24 years old.

Where was my head? That haughty Jana Marie, grown into a semi-woman with large hips, teaching at some ritzy rigid Catholic school, getting married? With the wedding ring, the big church, the bagpipes, no less? Where was I going to find my space now, chicken? Why couldn’t I breathe?

Why didn’t I feel happy?

Also, why couldn’t I shit? Within a week of saying my wedding vows, my stomach got all stopped up. Constricted, tense. I tried baths and Fiber One in my yogurt. I went to the doctor. If only someone real smart would have sat me down and told me, “Jana Marie, you’re not giving yourself enough S P A C E to be you, child. Maybe cut your clothes? Let’s see what that could do for you.”

I wouldn’t have listened, you know. I would have just turned the other way. I knew everything, anyway. Every 24-year-old does.

* * *

I am telling you this so you know how an artist is made.

And a woman, unmade, before she is made again.

An artist is not a robot. Neither is a woman. Both need space. Both need to explore.

Artists, and women, we ruminate. We wander. We act.

We cut up our clothes to make ourselves happy and free.

(At least, I do.)

An artist asks the questions and lives them. She rarely finds the answers, except through art. And the art she makes will leave you speechless, breathless, unafraid.

Afraid, sometimes, too.

Maybe her art is a little hard to look at.

That’s because the art knows you.

* * *

Now.

It is 2021. If I buy a piece of clothing that doesn’t feel right when I put it on, I cut it up until it feels good. This makes me glad.

I cannot tolerate anything that constricts me anymore, BobsaMarie. Tweetleyeetee. Tweetleyeetoo.

Narrow is fine. Narrow, I can manage. Constricting? No way, BobsameJohns.

No, no, no.

Unless you want me to die. Which I almost did, for a time.

I got out of that, too.

* * *

Twelve years after I married that college dude, I divorced him. I moved into an apartment in 2016 with my three kids, and I got a 9-5 desk job at a testing company. The company called their business “assessment.”

That first week, I met a man who had to train me on something. He asked, “Have you worked in assessment before?”

“Assessment?” I said, my whole face falling. Was that what I was supposed to be doing?

I did not explain, although it might have been obvious, that I needed this job because it made me a certain amount of money, and helped me get out of the house that was foreclosing. I did not explain that I had been a stay-at-home mother for a number of years, with only part-time work, and I felt like I had to take any decent money that came my way. This job had benefits, the insurance package, the whole deal. I planned to fit my real life in during lunch hours and after work, and on the alternate weekends the kids were with their dad.

So each day, I sat at my desk and tried to breathe as I copied and pasted numbers into spreadsheets for medical assessments.

The numbers looked like this:

M39567

M29839

B63721

To get by, I stared at inspiring papers I had posted on my cubicle walls. The picture of the Grand Canyon I’d taken when I traveled there alone, carrying my copy of Women Who Run with the Wolves. One of my favorite poems by Mary Oliver, called “The Journey.” Little sayings by Teresa of Avila: “Thank God for all the things I do not own.” I had a gemstone green tree my mother had given me for my birthday. I liked to look at it.

I daydreamed. I imagined. I put off my work. I snuck opportunities to write fiction on my desktop computer, and sent myself pages to review and edit when I got home. I read short stories from The New Yorker. I watched YouTube videos about divine awakening.

I wore really stifling clothes, and flats, because the dress at the assessment company was highly professional.

During my lunch hour, I walked to the university campus and lay on the grass, letting the sun beat on my back, my belly touching earth so I could feel human again. I looked for the cute boy I had a crush on. I sat at coffee shops with my laptop and wrote stories, and I drank coffee, half-decaf, to boost me so I could return to the cubicle for the long and boring afternoon. I thought about how other people lived. I told friends, “This job must be like my time in the ashram. This job is like me scrubbing the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush.” I was so bad at it, scrubbing toilets might have been a better fit.

“I am learning humility,” I said.

* * *

At that job, I could never have walked in with cut-up clothes. They didn’t even allow jeans, ever. The bravest, boldest I ever got was wearing my red Converse sneakers.

Courage is something I learned a little late in life.

* * *

And then, two summers after I started that job, I had a nervous breakdown, though they don’t call it that anymore. These days, when you are so overcome with the stress and the trauma you never fully coped with, and it flares up so bad that you can’t sleep for many days, and you begin to have panic attacks and wayward thoughts, people take you to the hospital and "authorities" give you a lifetime diagnosis for some disease. The nurses tell you, “Don’t worry about it, we just need to write something down for your insurance company.”

And they hand you pills that change your brain so much, you may or may not want to kill yourself.

My pills made me want to.

So that’s why I started to cut up my clothes, to make myself happy.

It’s all about the space, child.

* * *

“What Can You Do with a Little Black Dress?”: An instructional Guide

Step One:

Find a simple black dress at any retail store our outlet. OMG, you can even try Kohl’s! They have sales sometimes.

Step Two:

Bring the dress home and let it sit on your bureau a while. Decide if you like it or want to return it. Is it stifling? Is it rigid? Or perhaps it is an appropriate template for art because it is simple and clean.

Step Three:

Get creative.

Cause maybe your kids won’t listen to you?

Cause maybe you got lawyers in your life, and court-cases? Ex-lovers who never called back? Ex-husbands trying to eat you alive? Parents telling you they don’t like how you be?

Get your scissors out, or a knife.

Remember this, child: Too many women have tried to hurt themselves. Too many young girls are doing it, too. They want to feel something, so they chase pain. They don’t know how to be themselves, or if they are even allowed to be themselves. And you know you are going to be you, through and through and through. And you are going to encourage others to be themselves, too. You do this by living your own humble, magnificent truth. You do this in action.

So you get real clear.

You decide to cut. You cut those clothes.

Step Four:

Put on the simple black dress. Notice the parts that feel too tight. Notice the spaces where your body wants to breathe.

Take off the dress and cut holes in exactly those spaces.

Cut, cut, cut.

You don’t cut your body, honey. You don’t cut your beautiful, precious skin, as so many girls do.

No fucking way.

You cut those clothes. You cut that dress. You make it fit you. You make it made for you. You make it a one-and-only.

Perhaps you decide, “I want an open circle, here, around my hips, ‘cause my hips have grown.”

Make the circle. Put the dress back on. Voila! Better, but not great.

Feel your way through this, baby. Decide. Open wide.

Now, maybe you want your back exposed. It is hot outside, and you want to allow the sweat to trickle down your back. You have no qualms about seeing the sweat. Sweat shows you and everyone else how alive you are.

Take the dress off again.

Cut a hole.

Were there times your mother didn’t stand up for you? Didn’t have your back?

Good, now you have a hole to display all the times you had your own.

Were there friends who fell away? People who thought you were dumb, stupid, crazy, to say the things you said, to create the way you desired?

Make a space for all that. A hole. Now your back can breathe.

The question, my child, is not how the dress looks.

The question is, How does the dress FEEL?

* * *

This, my darling, is the making of the wild woman.

This is the way of a woman who makes space for herself, in places where space was never before created.

This is the path of the hero, the person with wild knowing.

The artist, the healer, with her healthy boundaries.

This is how a mother of three children, an independent, gentle, kind and misunderstood soul, becomes happy and free.

This is how I be me.

* * *

Epilogue: The Pieces of Dress

Behind the Scenes of My Discovery