Art Enabler
In which my mother helps my career take off while never leaving the floor.
1983 Cocktail Hour. I was already an influencer artist, as you can see by my bold blue strokes and horror-movie handprints that are our backdrop. We were toasting the successful opening of my Park Slope, NY, exhibition, sitting on the floor like famous people. My tired mom was an art enabler, and my first agent, from preverbal to present.
Also pictured is my newborn sister, now the driver in the family, who thought the Fischer price keys my mom tepidly dangled were a bullshit consolation prize for having been born. My own kids still have some of those long-suffering plastic toys from our childhood, but what we don't have in any huggable form is our beloved matriarch. Cancer renovated her insides with its horror movie hands!
In 1983 no one knew to drink water, so likely 1000% fruit-juice— where the sugar was coded as something else by the Health Food Movement— filled my cup. The Fates don’t give thumbs up to all raised glasses, nor much down time to caregivers of small children. "Marts on the rocks" — her nightly ritual with my father— might have helped her let go after a long day of parenting temperamental artists (is a baby’s cry not a form of musical theatre), but who gave the universe permission to let her go as a parent?
Today, my nucleus accumbens, the region of the brain active in pair bonding, is glowing with electric signals, a high-wattage light house calling out to her recently launched ship. Only a fool would hope she just got delayed fishing ice cubes out of their broken plastic not-at-all-BPA-free trays (you guys can replace those, it’s been a while since 1983!), and would be back in a minute with her vodka for a chat about the themes in our gallery! An artist, though, must be at least partially a fool.
In her kitchen, the PBS news hour blasted to ward off evil spirits (RIP PBS?) with the common good, and to connect her to the world beyond our wet paints and high-octane creative drives.
She who was my primordial conversation partner is at God's happy hour now (it is Happy, right? Or is heaven kind of a downer after all the hype?). Maybe she has a little buzz on to exhale from the work of leaving her body, and is bragging, as the cups loosen her and loosen her, about her children and grandchildren’s masterworks. I hear they are generous with their celestial pours. Maybe some of your beloveds are there too, swapping tales of scribbles, of Once Upon A’s.
When I asked her (again) to tell me my birth story before she died (and I hope you’ll take the sacred hour to tell yours with me, too), asked her (again) what her first postpartum had been like, she said, "Once you came home from the hospital NICU, I didn't stop talking to you for that entire first winter!"
Ooooohhhhhh. Now I understand why I believe communication makes the world turn! If only I could —as I must— reach her through more than just sentences.
In fact, her thin arms whittled down impossibly, almost to the diameter of sentences before she passed through the eye of the needle— now they can hold me only in an abstract sense. Nothing about a mother is meant to be abstract. Did I have enviable surety, in 1983, rarely more than a few feet from her, that she could keep me from the worst pains? That my biggest loss would be running out of my blue paint just when my customers were demanding a stormy ocean landscape? I think even then I knew better, but to keep my patrons satisfied, I painted about it, drew about it, and wrote stories where main characters name Ara (leave off the S for savings!) met melodramatic ends.
We sent her into the ground with handwritten notes tucked into her shroud— mine low-key for a high-key message, on the yellow post-it’s she used to annotate her book club books. For now, and until life closes my tab, those and these will have to suffice. It’s not enough, but what artist doesn’t seek something beyond normal limits?