My Mother, My Art

Once, as a teen, I was rooting around behind the basement staircase. I stumbled across a set of vinyl 45s in yellowed paper sleeves. I walked across the room and opened the lid of the record player, pressed the record down on the spindle and carefully dropped the needle. It was my mothers’ voice, both distant and warm, as if were flowing down a copper tube. They were torch songs from the 30s and 40s, smoky, tremulous. I felt I had stumbled on something almost illicit, a mother I had never known. But when I mentioned the recordings to her, she shrugged. “I wasn’t very good,” she said.

Looking backwards through that long copper tube, there’s a mother I can see only dimly. When Renee and I were toddlers, she dressed us in ruffled pink dresses with tiny matching umbrellas. She staged photos of us in blue satin dresses she’d sewn herself. She baked elaborate cakes: an Easter bunny with coconut fur and a gumdrop nose. She made tiny clothes for our Barbies: a lacy wedding dress, a blue chiffon ball gown, shorts and tops for Skipper. She put wine-colored votive candles inside of cinder blocks and placed the blocks near the front window: the pink glow of the flames reflected on the snow. She played the “The Good Ship Lollipop” (we all admired Shirley Temple) on the piano as the three of us marched around the room singing. She did what women did in those days: cooking and sewing and decorating the home, elevating the children with culture.

But at some point it all stopped. Her copper colored hair went from luxurious rolls to the tight perm she would keep for the rest of her life. Her face grew angular, her body flattened rather than filled out. When did it begin? When my father proved both cruel and unable to keep a job? After my father left, when she had three teenage girls to raise on her own? Or even earlier, a result of the belief that she shared with the culture at large: that a mother’s duty is to sacrifice herself?

By the time I started playing the piano, singing in our high school chorus, taking ballet, sewing dresses for myself, she had let most of these activities go. She grew sheepish when I asked her to play the piano, though I knew her natural talent was far greater than mine. When she remarried, this time to a born-again Christian, she accompanied him on his visits to homebound church members, his volunteer work at the hospice. Her new husband encouraged her to join the church’s bell choir, so she did, her contribution relegated to a single note here and there.

Now, I struggle with my desire to do both writing and art. It feels selfish, doing what pleases only myself.