2023-09-14 22:08:07
Welcome to the holiday edition of steps upwhich we will celebrate with Tami Bezalili. According to Wikipedia, Tami is 70 years old and is a painter, sculptor, illustrator, drawing teacher at Bezalel and a writer (‘Tishari’ and ‘Oh Mama’). I can add that she has already retired – which removes from the list only teaching at Bezalel, she continues to do everything else – and that she is married to my mother (herefollowing: my stepmother).
Tami is a writer, so even to my very dry questions she answered like a writer. Her answers appear here as they are, without the questions and without trying to arrange the text under the headings. Because as Tami says: Sometimes transitions happen without us feeling it and in the end what matters are the stories we tell ourselves regarding them.
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Beginning:
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In the transition from childhood, when my body slowly changed its shape and began to take on a shape that gradually resembled that of my mother, and since I was a parent and very mature child in my own eyes, and my mother was in my eyes my child long before I had my period, I was in a period of continuous shock, because according to My friends who got it long before me, it was clear that only following you get your period are you considered mature enough to raise children.
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My mother underwent a breast biopsy at the age of 41 which, following much worry and drama, turned out to be benign.
“During menopause, things like this happen, things are sometimes discovered in the breast, and menstruation stops, and the hormones go wrong,” Dr. Fleischer, her gynecologist, explained to her, and to prevent all this from happening, to fight the terrible old age that threatened to destroy her, he prescribed hormones for her.
The house was immediately filled with books on the subject, all in English. Late in the evening, following they got home from work, instead of Tennyson and Blake songs like they used to do in passing, my parents read articles to each other regarding “menopause.”
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I was 15 years old and talking regarding menopause, which I hated with all my heart, was all I cared regarding. My mother seemed to me to be a young and beautiful girl, and I was happy because I was sure it would be like that for me too, my period would stop when I was still young, by then I would have enough children and following that I wouldn’t have many more years left to suffer from it.
But to protect my heart, my period didn’t end until I was 54, when I was already sure that it would stay with me forever and accompany me to the grave, and that I would be the only old lady in the entire nursing home who, in addition to diapers for incontinence, would also need tampons.
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All the friends around me who were my age had already gone through hot flashes, sweating, sleep problems and taking hormones, while I had never experienced any of these.
And that’s how I also reached the end of menopause, without knowing it.
During all this I went through regarding 40 years and two periods of marriage (which lasted 35 years in total) and I had three children.
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At the age of 56, the love of my life came to me – my third marriage. The revival of the passion for life that came along with it accompanies me to this day, being 70 years old. So the transition to the third age also comes to me when I am already a foot and a half into old age, and once more I only realize in retrospect that this transition is also happening to me without me feeling it.
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In her transition, in a room in my parents’ shack, when I was one year old, I stood in my baby bed, and watched mesmerized by the white curtain that fluttered in the wind on the edge of the window in front of me and played in the shadows. Because of the movement of the curtain, the small space constantly changed from a state of light to a state of shadow, and it changed me accordingly, one moment I was happy and the next I was sad. The whole world flickered around me and only the beauty of the room, which did not care at all regarding light or shadow, remained stable in all this and did not change at all. There was something very soothing regarding it.
Today I think that the beauty of that room reflected the love of my parents, and that this was the moment I realized that beauty is related to love, and that light, like darkness, appear on all kinds of levels and that both change all the time, and to each of them you can attach endless stories, that there are no better companions than which to navigate life.
From a distance of years, it seems to me that looking at that curtain is what finally made me an illustrator-illustrator who tells stories.
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Changes involve the passing of time, and the movements that happen in time are not always simple, and even if I am sure that I am frozen in place and not moving, time moves in front of me and it changes me, I move from period to period, things pass me by, and I am always in conversation with losses of various kinds, I am always separated from something that I knew in favor of something I know less, whether by choice or not. Transitions happen all the time, and without asking me, but always, sometimes compulsively, I try to catch them by the tail to make a good story out of them.
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All the significant transitions in my life, including the “menopause” which is such a mandatory transition, only became clear to me while looking back and I never felt them as a separate entity. They probably walked closely with me, got into my pages and papers, and there they became stories regarding life-anguish, physical and other, until they changed and became other stories. And maybe I didn’t feel them because I was just inside them.
Changes involve time passing, and the moves that happen over time are not always simple. I think that the never-ending engagement in art developed patience and patience in me, sometimes one small painting took months, and moving to a new studio required a year of adaptation, but at the same time the ability to be empathetic mainly towards myself, and this replaced the feelings of guilt, which was unlike him to stick Me in hopeless ways.
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For example, what I went through with the children every time I got divorced and married, and in the process I also lost a child, became over time a complex story in which there was not only the grief of loss and great sadness, but also a lot of courage on the part of all of us, and especially love.
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I think that every time I wanted to change direction in my life it was not because it was bad, but because it was no longer good enough. In my eyes looking back, I know that “good” has always been a value for me.
Today I am where I always wanted to be, at home, painting, writing, and with a beloved partner, and it turned out that the last transition, shared by both of us, is not only “good” but really good (Tafou).
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It seems to me that I am carrying out quite well what my Iraqi grandmothers taught me and I pass this on to you with love:
“Do what you want and don’t give up anything, but without noise, quietly.”
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I’m letting this wave take me to a doctor’s office. Happy New Year friends.
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#step #Tami #Bezalili