Recently I started drawing and painting with watercolors with my daughters, as a way to give myself a break from the sadness of heartbreak. Most people I’m close to know that I do not consider myself artistic, beyond dance. What they don’t know is that my mother was an avid painter, and she was talented. I remember growing up with an oil painting of hers in our living room of a forest scene with a river and a deer. It was beautiful.
Looking back on my childhood, I knew I was not talented with drawing or painting very early on. I have clear memories around age 7 or 8 of trying to draw, becoming frustrated, and giving up. I didn’t try much after that point, and only did enough to get by when it was required for a class assignment.
Perhaps the heartbreak sadness put me in a different neural place than I am normally. I have spent the majority of my life being anxious and emotionally shut down. I can count the number of times I’ve been sad as an adult on one hand. It’s not a place I’m comfortable.
When I began to draw and later paint, I discovered that I am not as terrible as I remember being. This fascinated me, as it was like a piece of my mother I didn’t know existed was alive in me. She died suddenly on my birthday in 2006, my first year working as a software developer in tech. The small piece of her emerging made me wonder what else from her was inside of me, possibly suppressed all these years.
I’ve been reflecting on these thoughts the last few weeks, and what I’ve found was startling. I buried all the soft things in myself away from the world, myself and even most of the people in my life, to be safe.
Why though? What would possess me to do that?
My father was abusive. He verbally abused my mom almost every night, escalating to physical violence more times than I’d care to admit. My brother and I occasionally became his targets, but my mother was his favorite victim. She was so kind and patient, even while he was in an alcoholic stupor. She did not deserve his violence. I think I must’ve blamed her somehow, and on some deep level decided I’d rather be like my dad than be on the receiving end of the violence. Childhood psyche’s do weird things to protect us. Perhaps I gravitated towards math and away from English and the arts in an attempt to be like him. As young as 5, I was subconsciously shaping my identity in a way to embrace him and shun her.
My identity formation would not be complete for quite some time. In high school, I was quiet and barely spoke, and people often demanded that I stop mumbling. I felt invisible. Nothing I had done through the years to gain the approval of my father had worked. He was an alcoholic workaholic who missed school performances and award celebrations often. It wasn’t until college that I stopped mumbling, and it wasn’t until I was working in tech that I started speaking in a way that would discourage men from ignoring me and talking over me. I was firm and assertive, quick with the words, often sharp-tongued. I see that now as an over-correction to the mumbling and to the verbal abuse, but it would be one that would persist for a very long time.
Kindness and patience were traits in me that only my children would see. I’ve always been grateful knowing that the good in me came from her. The traits that made me good in math and tech came from him, or so I thought. It’s possible psychology pushed me that direction more than genetics did.
With these new revelations about my mother’s traits in me, I’m excited to find out how I will change as I attempt to dig into the past and reconcile the parts of me that have been long exiled. I’ve missed her so much over the years, but I’m only beginning to properly grieve the loss. Now that I know there’s more of her inside of me than I thought, in some small way I find myself comforted.