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LOVE* IN THE TIME OF CORONA
October 2023
* including self-love
In 2020, after my husband’s stroke and during the corona shut down, the first 9 Lucinderellas appeared. I am a domestic feminist, basket weaver, seamstress and patchwork quilter, but had never produced anything like this before. Afterwards I began searching for a teacher to help me process what my hands were trying to tell me and found Barb Kobe’s Healing Doll Way. It has provided structure, training, encouragement and an international supportive community that empowered me to continue the work of searching for the fragments of my being that had gone into hiding due to:
• Incest and sexual abuse,
• abandonment, servitude on a foster-farm at the age of 8,
• financial emancipation at the age of 15,
• entering the university at 16,
• marriage to an alcoholic at 18,
• joining a Sufi community at the age of 34,
• running away to Germany with the Love of my Life when I was 40, and
• being an old American, living in Germany with a husband who has multiple illnesses: type 1 diabetes from the age of 8, 5 transplanted organs, aneurysm, triple bypass, spinal meningitis, stroke, kidney failure, dialysis and dementia.
Processing my life through making dolls taught me to respect my unusual experience and skill set, rewrite my own HERstory and essentially re-parent/recreate myself.
My husband’s dementia suddenly got worse this month, causing me to re-activate the mental acuity and survival skills I developed as a child. I have been on red alert and operating on pure adrenaline for 13 days now, but have managed to carefully document the decline for his doctors, utilize local dementia resources and draft a strategy. My doll tribe (animate and inanimate) provided valuable insight, reminders and comfort.
This collection documents the Lucinderellas that deal with my marriage. I offer them as an example (neither typical nor proven) of using and further developing the time, talents and treasures I have been given to develop my own form of wholeness and, inshallah, be of service to the ONE.
October 2023
* including self-love
In 2020, after my husband’s stroke and during the corona shut down, the first 9 Lucinderellas appeared. I am a domestic feminist, basket weaver, seamstress and patchwork quilter, but had never produced anything like this before. Afterwards I began searching for a teacher to help me process what my hands were trying to tell me and found Barb Kobe’s Healing Doll Way. It has provided structure, training, encouragement and an international supportive community that empowered me to continue the work of searching for the fragments of my being that had gone into hiding due to:
• Incest and sexual abuse,
• abandonment, servitude on a foster-farm at the age of 8,
• financial emancipation at the age of 15,
• entering the university at 16,
• marriage to an alcoholic at 18,
• joining a Sufi community at the age of 34,
• running away to Germany with the Love of my Life when I was 40, and
• being an old American, living in Germany with a husband who has multiple illnesses: type 1 diabetes from the age of 8, 5 transplanted organs, aneurysm, triple bypass, spinal meningitis, stroke, kidney failure, dialysis and dementia.
Processing my life through making dolls taught me to respect my unusual experience and skill set, rewrite my own HERstory and essentially re-parent/recreate myself.
My husband’s dementia suddenly got worse this month, causing me to re-activate the mental acuity and survival skills I developed as a child. I have been on red alert and operating on pure adrenaline for 13 days now, but have managed to carefully document the decline for his doctors, utilize local dementia resources and draft a strategy. My doll tribe (animate and inanimate) provided valuable insight, reminders and comfort.
This collection documents the Lucinderellas that deal with my marriage. I offer them as an example (neither typical nor proven) of using and further developing the time, talents and treasures I have been given to develop my own form of wholeness and, inshallah, be of service to the ONE.
| 2023.10.31_love_in_the_time_of_corona.pdf |
