Cindy's life story

I know this might come across almost like a sob story. It isn't. It's a story about lost dreams and lost time, and I'm sharing it in the hope that it might reach a young artist out there who's on the brink of giving up, or someone who thinks they're too old to start now. No matter what path, artist or something else, it's never too late.

I currently live in South Pittsburg, a small town in East/Central Tennessee. I love it here — the area, the culture, the people. I feel like a native Tennessean now, even though I was born and raised in Alberta, Canada. Every so often my accent slips and you'll catch a little Canadian "eh" sneak out. At this point I've lived nearly as long in the U.S. as I did in Canada, so honestly, my accent doesn't know which country it's loyal to anymore.

I grew up in small-town, rural Lethbridge, about a two-hour drive from Calgary — home of the Stampede, for anyone keeping score. Life was simple back then, and I didn't know we were basically poor. My parents hid those struggles well. The only evidence was having to wait until Christmas for that one pretty outfit. We had food on the table and a warm bed, and not knowing any different, it was perfect.

My mother painted portraits and landscapes for fun, and sold the occasional piece. I watched when I could, though most of her painting happened while I was at school. The artistic gene runs deep in my family — a great uncle, an aunt, my mother, and a cousin or two who all dabble in the visual arts, while my dad and a few others lean toward poetry. So it was no surprise I brought home all A's in art class and B's — okay, and one C in math — in everything else.

Then the teen years arrived, and with them, a surprise. I never got the "birds and the bees" talk, so I had to find out the hard way that babies don't actually come from the pumpkin patch. I was pregnant right before my 16th birthday. The doctor pushed hard for the "day after" pill, but I refused it and chose to have the baby. I was married a month later and living with my in-laws. My daughter Brandy arrived after a difficult delivery, and three years after that, her little sister Kristy came along.

The marriage was rocky — financial strain, disagreements, and the kind of growing apart that happens when kids get married and then have kids of their own. It ended in divorce after seven years.

Being a single mother is hard, and it takes its toll, but we still found time for the simple things — like a picnic at the Milk River Hoodoos, back when you could still climb on them, follow the trails to see the ancient rock paintings, and take a "swim" in the river that was really more of a very determined wade. I was still trying to paint through all of it, working full time and raising my girls. My first real experience with a Lethbridge gallery was a letdown. I brought in a big painting of a moose, and the owner looked at it and said, "If it was mine, I could charge a couple thousand. But since it's yours, you could maybe get $300."

Looking back, that moment might be exactly what made me set my dreams of being a full-time artist aside. As a single mother of two, "maybe $300" wasn't going to keep the lights on. I know now it was a mistake to give up so easily, but back then, the world kept telling me you can't make a living as an artist — and I believed it. Wrong, but believed.

Fast forward through a relationship with a man who never quite figured out how to be a stepfather, lots of arguments over the kids and that should have been a clue, but still young and naive, it took me a while. My poor kids, It wasn't all bad, we had a few good times too, but not enough to outweigh the others, and it finally ended after seven years.

"Looking for love in all the wrong places" describes my love life a little too accurately — I should've just put it on a t-shirt and saved myself the trouble, because then came a second marriage a few years later, to a romantic who swept me off my feet and moved the girls and me to Cody, Wyoming. We opened a coffee shop together not long after we got there. My love of art was still very much alive, so I found a local artist willing to hang her work on our walls, and I felt connected to art again, even though it wasn't mine. But the rent was steep, and the shop struggled to stay afloat no matter how hard we worked at it. Eventually we had to let it go, and losing it put even more strain on a marriage that was already cracking. A couple of years in, the whole dream fell apart.Through it all, I kept painting and dabbling in other mediums, just not often, because I still had to "make a living." Then the next big blow landed: both of my daughters got pregnant and married within the same year that my own divorce was finalizing. An empty nest and grandkids on the way, all at once.

Lonely and trying to make it on my own, I said no to every suitor who came along — including the one who'd eventually become my third husband.

I met Ernest at a friend's wedding, and the four of us started spending time together, occasionally going dancing. As the friendship grew, my "no" slowly turned into a "yes," mostly because the man made me laugh with his ridiculous sense of humor. The grandkids were born, and life carried on. The years flew by. Ernie and I got married and moved to North Carolina. He was a builder by trade, and I started a successful faux-painting business, decorating show homes and working for private clients. Then 2008 hit, and hit hard. We held on as long as we could, but we lost our home and our businesses when the market bottomed out.

As the years moved forward, my daughter Brandy found herself pregnant again, but this time without a job or a husband — her own marriage had ended in divorce a few years earlier. Ernie and I talked it over and agreed to raise the baby ourselves. So we adopted our grandson and became parents — this time in our forties, which felt like a whole different kind of surprise.

A few years later, I found God and joined a Messianic Hebrew Roots church, and diving in headfirst put a real strain on our marriage. Ernie almost left me over it — the church leader was actually telling me to let him go. What kind of leader does that? He didn't leave, though. We were together, yet apart. Then I let a friend from church — freshly divorced herself — move in temporarily, that ended up lasting a year. Way too long in hindsight. She didn't help much, throwing in her two cents about my marriage. Fuel on the fire, and I spent a few months sleeping on the couch, stewing over my situation, Eventually I left for Missouri, moving there with our son and her to join another Hebrew Roots congregation, but the leader there had a very different view of family and marriage. He was against divorce whether the husband was a believer or not. My friend left to go back after two weeks and a big disagreement with the pastor there and a fight between us over it.

I had a heart-to-heart with God, and an even harder look in the mirror, and I recognized where I'd gone wrong. I called Ernie. He was happy to work on repairing our marriage. Such a good man, I just didn't know what I had until I almost destroyed it. Not long after we got back together, we moved to Tennessee, and that move has been a true blessing.

We bought a sweet little country home and fixed it up, built a small duck pond and life was going along just fine. My yearning to paint had never really left — I just hadn't made time for it, because bills needed paying and kids needed raising, and life has a way of stealing your time if you let it. But our son, now 21 is pretty much grown up and things have slowed down.

One day, as I sat in my favorite rocking chair by the front window, I drifted into the past, looking back at all the wasted hours in-between the good times and the struggles— the soap operas, the movies, the games, the complete couch vegging, all the time I could have spent painting instead. I realized something. It was my own doing. My own limiting belief that you can't make a living as an artist. I'd given up too easily and lost so much time doing things I didn't want to do, working jobs I didn't like, ignoring a calling that had been buried deep inside me the whole time. I realized I didn't want to reach my last day and wish I had tried harder, had more faith, trusted the Lord to be my provision, and followed my dreams. I didn't want my only inheritance to be regret over wasted time.

That was the day I decided: I will try. Succeed or fail, it doesn't matter — I will look back one day and say, I tried my best. I've moved from full-time to part-time work as the first step toward building this old dream, and I've started painting a little every day, slow and steady. The hard part is already behind me — changing my own mind.

I'm looking toward the future now with a kind of excitement I haven't felt in years, thrilled to finally be working toward my dream. Late, sure. But I've stopped caring about that, because I've finally learned — it is never too late.

So, once again, I know this might sound like a sob story. It isn't. It's a story about lost dreams and lost time, and I'm sharing it in the hope that it might reach a young artist out there who's on the brink of giving up, or someone who thinks they're too old to start now.

If that's you — I'd love to hear from you. Leave a message and let me know if this helped, even a little.