Ball and Chain and Pieces and Extraordinary Visuals

This book grabbed me, took me for a ride, Janis Joplin and I were in the front car of this roller coaster, and it was wild. Suffice it to say that one reading of this book will not do justice to the layers of meaning in it. I've done three readings, and went through it today with a magnifying glass to inspect the images and reprocess the story again.

This is an intense story dealing with drug and alcohol addiction, child abandonment and child endangerment issues, and broken hearts. Some people, I'm afraid, would read this and not consider how prevalent this scenario could be in today's society, but wake up and smell the coffee in the screaming coffee cup chained to a nail with a pop pill on the head on page 6 and tell me you don''t see the baby angel's wings being torn off her body because the baby cannot, and never will, hold her parent's ill relationship together because of the effects of her parent's reality of pills, coke, alcohol, and numbing-down-to-cope-world that her soul elected to be inserted into.

The drawings, oh my...some thoughts on random neural firings on various pages:

Page 1 -- broken Christmas tree, innocent yellow rubber ducky and two hearts pierced by the tree.
Page 3 -- look at her hand, LOOK at the engagement ring shackled and chained! Look at her index and middle finger, broken at their ends and bound like the Japanese geisha feet of the 1800s, look at her ring finger, past the ring, do you see her finger drawn, quartered, and bleeding into the glass of wine??? Time bomb theme, ticking, ticking..... so many small things adding up to disaster.....the dice....

Dice. many images of dice in so many pictures. Gambling on life.....It won't happen to me.....He won't hurt me, hit me, leave me, take my child.......gambling on  vocation, choices, leave the children for a while, a pill will make me feel better. Daughter gambling that mother will come home for my birthday, she left her pills, she hugs me, she leaves me, she is gone....I have lost her number and can't call........gambling with life choices, affections, responsibilities, who is mom, who is really caring for whom?

Page 4 guitar with heart tuning the strings of my heart, take a piece of my heart.....

Page 6 screaming from cup tied down, wings being torn.

So many images of broken home, broken hearts, broken lives, broken children, broken mother...

Page 10 images, glass with fly under, fork with coke spoon at end, cigarettes, nostrils bleeding, lines of coke, eyelashes from - what - crying? broken child's bicycle, rubber ducky on stove, glass of two glasses - we were two as one and you left me - pills, hearts.....Page 13 we are bleeding, you hurt me, so much pain, so much we don't want to see but we are bleeding our emotions.......take my brother and hide and hold and hope.....

Daddy wasn't Santa but he took her brother and left her with a broken woman coping as best as she could....leaving, returning, pills, coke, window washing for what, getting the next hit or the next meal....?

This was a dark story, but I was caught up in it and captured and affected. Too many images to relate, but some that captured my imagination. Her teddy bear shows up quite often, probably a talisman of security? Lots of broken things - furniture, glasses, cups, wine glasses, hearts...... Pills with hearts on them, X's on them,,,,,mother's shielding her heart with pills, trying to lessen her pain. Hoping mom will show up..........

The story Somebody's Mother was interesting..... Not really judgemental from the author's stance, but the other mothers giving Her mother the firey eye told of their judgement. Her mother affected them in a physicality way - she's too thin, she has my child's attention, what stories....... The firey eyes of the children (p 30-31) tell of their enchantment with mother's stories as her "elegant arms" weave in the air, adding to the drama of what is verbally unfolding. The moon is connected to her hair, the man-in-the-moon not appearing to have any sort of emotion. Baby on mother's back, baby in the oven, child at mother's knee, kids rapt attention to the tale being told -- sounds like a very lovely recollection of the mother that other kids thought was somewhat cool, interesting, and we want to hear more of ther stories. Sun, firey eyes and gem on mother's finger tip the only color in this black/grey and brown/tan world.

Dismembered body, doll like stitched; holding mom together through her addictions, disappointments, gambling in life that isn't working but one more roll of that dice and we will be fine..... broken home, broken dreams. Shield my face, don't hit me, I'll make ends meet...wash your window????

New Lesson -- mother saves me at the beach....so many people, look at the sand crabs, mommie where are you? The world is very big, the child is very small, my parent is my hero, there you are? Take me home, bathe me, wash away these things I've experienced, it's not the sand that bites my flesh but the memories that bite my brain, make me sad, I want to protect you, mom, but you gambled our relationship away .....

And I didn't even have her number any more....
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And I felt sad for her and wanted so much to ask Kalamity J if she and her mother reconciled, or even if she found out how she was doing, was she alive, what about her brother, did she find her MIA father?????

However......here's a couple of quibbles.....
Back cover Kalamity says, "...I've bundled up my life's most painful essential occupant and bound her essence on the shelf." Okay, but there's a contradiction here. Wind back, inside front cover: " *This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead) and events is purely coincidental."

So, how much is the revealed truth and how much is not?????

Still, a powerful story.

"....take another piece of my heart...."