Surviving Divorce through Creative Endeavour
I stood in the vegetable patch, my baby on my hip. We looked at the overgrown broccoli. What on earth was I going to do now?
We had done the ‘tree change’ in the hopes that it would help bring greater serenity and joy to my marriage, but on reflection, I think it drove us apart. We separated when our son was 9 months old. My baby and I cried at each other as he sat in his highchair and I fed him yet another bowl of spaghetti. And then, I decided to get on with it. I just had to figure out what ‘it’ was going to be.
I found a great Art Therapist. I was living in country Victoria in Australia at the time, and she was in the next big town up the Hume Highway. So up I would go over couple of weeks, and draw some lines and smear paint over a page, maybe make a collage, and talk about my feelings. And I remembered how much you can convey so quickly and simply with colour and line, and how lost you can get in textures, and shapes and blobs.
We soon moved to back to Melbourne, and as we moved out west, I remembered we would be close to the Footscray Arts Centre. I signed up — this was an expensive class (relative to my income at that time), but I don’t regret it. Each week for the whole of term 4, I would waddle around the back of the Arts Centre to the big warehouse type space, and get to try a new medium, surrounded by likeminded souls, wanting to express themselves on a page.
I met a new friend — Rachel Mifsud-Dykun — and she had a son around the same age as mine. We traded stories of grot and grime, and giggles.
Since completing the course we have kept in touch and regularly visit each other. We excitedly exchange stories of our growth as creatives. She is starting a business doing life photography (and is so talented — she captures the most beautiful moments).
As for me, I ended up finding YouTube. Oh my goodness, the creative community on YouTube is so much fun. If you have not found Jazza, you should.
The group that has been the most amazing for me has been Kick in the Creatives. Their Facebook group is so warm and supportive. I found them through their podcasts, visited their YouTube channel, and then nearly fell over when I got a warm message of welcome upon joining their Facebook page. I was so isolated, working from home all the time. Instantly, a new world opened up to me. People shared their work, I shared mine, and we egg each other on. There are poets, digital artists, painters, sketchers, watercolourists, gouache-ists. So many mediums, so much to admire. So much that is aesthetically pleasing to scroll through.
Now I seem to be gravitating towards other creatives. I took part in a Business Incubator Program run by Tara Darlington at Empowering Motherhood over the last few months, and have ended up encouraging a fellow ‘Incubator’, Diana Anchique, to publish her poems. Our friendship has developed rapidly as we share our writing, our hopes and dreams for our entrepreneurial enterprises.
You may find you have withdrawn or slowly become cut off from your hobbies and friendships as you go through divorce. But you will emerge again, on the other side, and blossom like a gorgeous bud that’s been quenched by a good downpour of rain… if you can find the right groups to give you some wind beneath your wings, and you can move in a new direction with clarity.
