The Guardian Angels Within
By Patricia F. "Patty" McGehee
As a small child I sat many days along side my mother as she
painted many works of art. She always included me in her activities allowing me
to paint my childish paintings to keep me busy and out of her way. She was a
wonderful painter.
As an abused wife, most of Mother's works were destroyed by my abusive father in
rages he threw at her in the apartment. My mother's safe place was the Delgado
Museum of Art in New Orleans.
When I was very small and not in school
as of yet, she would walk with me to City Park
to heal emotionally and spiritually.
There in the cool, serene atmosphere, (yes, there was air condition!)
Mother would dream about becoming a great artist. Delgado calmed her nerves and distracted her
from the terrible life she had.
It was on one of those visits to the Delgado Museum of Art that
I discovered Dorothea Tanning's Guardian
Angels (1946), with the beds covered in crinkled linen, and with the
horrific but also beautiful angels above. I was mesmerized by it. I was both
afraid and comforted that the Angels existed.
Back home, night time brought terror to our home as my
father's demons possessed him. I would think about the Guardian Angels in the painting.
I knew they existed, even though no one
had ever admitted to seeing one, because Dorothea had painted
them. She was the visionary proof in my
life that I was protected.
My parents stayed together their entire lives. Daddy had to
work out issues that had affected him as
a result of being an abandoned child. At the age of 16, he had run away from
Milne' Boys home in New Orleans, changed his age on his birth certificate, and
joined the United States Army. He
became a One Hundred and First Airborne Paratrooper serving over Occupied Japan.
As the years went on Daddy and I became close. He had a huge influence on me
by exercising my intellectual side. He made me read and discuss current events
and National Geographic articles. He suggested books to read
and he selected some for me. Fortunately, I enjoyed reading and I
cherished our time discussing these things.
Mother! Oh Mother. I wish she were still here, for we were
bonded. I miss her every day and treasure the time we had as mother and
daughter. She still talks sense to me within
my own sensibilities. I hear her
voice though me when addressing my daughter with motherly advice.
During the 20th year of my life (1974) I was having
difficulty managing my life's plan. I had spent one year at Southeastern Louisiana
University. I spent another year waiting tables and sewing in a sailboat sail loft living by the
beach in California.
I had also endured two, back to back,
terrible relationships with men. The second relationship left be in a state of
bewilderment. I was living in fear with
the unrealistic belief that if I formed a relationship with a partner, it would
be a violent hell just like what Mother endured during the early years of her
marriage. I had struck out twice and was keeping everyone at arm's length.
Then one day while riding the City Park Avenue Bus in New Orleans I met Van
Seibert. Under his arm was an extraordinary oil painting. I asked him where he
had learned to paint so well. He said he was working with the art therapist Ben Ploger. Henry "Van" Seibert was painting
daily under Ploger's eye at Delgado
Junior College hoping to
heal from PTSD. He had become an amazing painter under Ben and had been
featured in a local magazine called The
Dixie Roto. In New Orleans everybody knew who Van was, but all
he really was interested in was fighting his PTSD in a personal war armed with a paint brush.
I visited Ploger, and
discussed the possibility of becoming his student. He insisted that I always
call him by his first name, Ben. Ben Ploger (1908-1993) was the first Art
Therapy Association's Professional Standards Chair and he was from New
Orleans. At the time Ploger was the Chair of the Art
department and a professor at Delgado Junior College.
At the suggestion of Ploger,
I signed up to be in his Art
Therapy group class at Delgado. He suggested that I give a go at spending a
school year working with him. I agreed.
I enrolled and padded my schedule with a few other courses. I wanted to
make it a worthwhile year. Mornings would be spent in the Art painting studio
with him..
I would get up every morning and go paint in the studio, after
setting up my easel next to Van. There
were others in the group, all of them have names that I can't recall these
days. There were beautiful, but deaf,
twin girls, two other vets, a battered divorcee, and a man whose face was
terribly burned in a car fire. In the late afternoon, I worked part time at a department store.
Ben hovered around us like a busy bee pointing out this and that, things that
had nothing to do with the quality of the work but of the symbolic associations he was able to pick up on. He
would tell me. "Go ahead! Push the paint into the canvas!!! Feel It!"
Then at other times, ask about the nature of the all brown painting I was
painting and why I chose such terrible colors. And he asked, "Why do you
paint the same landscape with a huge crack in the ground over and over?" Or,
"Why are you painting skeletons of dead animals? " I had no
idea why. I had selected a cow's skull off a shelf at random and painted it. He
insisted it was a symbol of the death of something hidden in my inner psyche.
Ben was sure of it. I did not think so.
Across campus, my Psychology professor (whose name escapes
these days) hired me to interview Viet Nam
Vets by asking them 50 questions and recording their answers for research on a book he was writing. He wanted
to know how well they were assimilating
back into civilian life after their war experiences. He paid me two dollars per
interview. At the time, nearly half of the men at school at Delgado were
veterans going to school on the G. I. Bill.
I was set up at a table in the cafeteria and at the end of
the first day there were more than fifty Vets wanting to talk. I was
overwhelmed by it all. I started making appointments to do the interviews and
that made the job more manageable. I needed the money.
It became problematic interviewing the Vets because someone
told one loudmouth where I lived. Suddenly, Vets started showing up at my
apartment just to talk about what had happened to them. It was not hard to find
me. They were all polite and came just to talk about the horrendous things they
had experienced. I found it emotionally impossible to turn them away. I would
bring out glasses of ice water and make them sit with me on the stoop while I
listened to their stories. I would offer verbal comfort, insist that some of the awful things they had to do were what one calls duty. That it was O.K. Some of the things they admitted to were horrible. What they endured was horrific. At the apartment, I was not able to ask the questions since the professor that hired me insisted that I work in the
cafeteria at a table. Instead, it became a time of just being there for the about 25 or so men who
needed someone to talk to.
It became too hard on me. Somehow, I had become The Talk Lady of Delgado and everyone
knew who I was. Van insisted that I go look for a new apartment and move for my
own peace of mind. Instead, I made a sign and posted it on the door warning
people not to disturb me when I was too overwhelmed to deal with it all. That
was the creation of my first healthy boundary. What a milestone! I decided to
move away in May at the end of the school year. My time listening and talking
to the Vets was coming come to an end.
Working with Ben had been amazing and I had made great emotional
progress. We delved into to the family dynamic that shaped the ways I perceived
how relationships should be. I decided to discuss Dorothea
Tanning's painting The Guardian Angels with Ben. Ben was a devout
Catholic. I told him what the painting
meant to me. Ben insisted that the guardian angels are within us and we must protect ourselves. The angels
are only there to lead the way during
our internal turmoil of deciding where our healthy boundaries lie. This was
Existentialism at work. Ben was so pleased with me.
Ben was all wrapped up in Sigmund Freud's ideas and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche's book Beyond Good and Evil (1886.) I sincerely
tried to read it. Over and over I tried. I would bog down every time I felt Nietzsche
did not understand women. One day I got to a part that said something like
this: A woman should be taken as a possession and if she did not have sex frequently she will become mentally ill! I had reached an epiphany. I chunked Nietzsche's book into the nearest trash
can with force and vowed to NEVER let a man treat me any other way than with respect. In the anger that grew, I coincidentally
lost my fear. I
thought, what could a man from the 1880's know about a modern woman anyway? Ultimately, Ben was right. I had to be led to the right way to
protect myself. The missing key was, most men will treat a woman terribly if they can get away with it. Don't let them. There within me grew the
healthy boundaries that had been missing.
Ben and I discussed over and over the issues I needed to
work on and I was able to finally work out a life plan that was my own and I
felt I could be successful carrying it out. He also taught me how to make sure
the boundaries I was erecting were the ones emotionally healthy for me. At the
close of the school year in May of 1974 I knew my time working with Ben Ploger
had run its' course.
On May 28th, 1975, I quit my job working at the department store. I
packed up my entire belongings and fit them in my car, leaving my mattress
behind in the apartment. It did not fit. I left the key on the counter for the
landlord. I went to the The New Orleans Jazz and festival for the day with all my meager belongings stored in the
car. That evening I drove out of New Orleans to
stay with a friend in Hammond,
Louisiana.
One day a man I knew casually drove by the house where I was
staying in Hammond, Louisiana. I
was sitting on a porch. He turned his car around at the corner and came
back and stopped to visit a while. He was a different sort of man. He showed me
respect and seemed to have my best interests at heart. Today, forty one years
later, I can't imagine my life without
him, for he is my husband. I have never
had to put up boundaries towards him.
And what of Nietzsche, Dorothea's Angels, and Ben Ploger? I have fond memories of Ben. He still talks to me in my dreams, too, just
like Mother, with his white hair and steel grey eyes, piercing my sensibilities.
And the Angels? Metaphorically, they are
still inside me just as Ben had explained.
And the Angels? I visit Dorothea's image of them at NOMA frequently.
Nietzsche? Well Nietzsche, as far as I am concerned, he can
rot in hell.
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