Drawing My Two Mothers

by Darlene Frank

I drive a long dusty road that winds through tall pines and scrub oak chaparral in the Sierra Nevada. As I park in a small pull-off, I see a Great Mountain Grandmother with long white braid, long skirt, and turquoise jewelry, walking up the hill to greet me. I have come to visit this woman who helps people draw their feelings on paper. She’s an artist who lives alone like a hermit in a house on the lip of a canyon. I’m eager for our meeting. “I think you’ll like her,” my friend Norma said.

The woman is Nina. Her whole face is smiling.

Her house is sparsely furnished—bones, pillows, paintings lean against the walls. The space is open and uncluttered, leaving plenty of room for inspiration to enter. The canyon stretches below us like a cat, long and lean. She tells me she sleeps outdoors on her deck until the winter rain and snow chase her inside. In this late summer season bright red and yellow flowers line her deck, her futon a long brown nest between the earthenware pots.

In the “drawing” room she directs me to a mattress and a pile of pillows nestled in a corner on the floor and gives me a large pad of newsprint and a tray of pastels. The broken pieces of chalk are beautiful, among them my favorite colors. Just looking at them excites me. The frustrated artist inside me has wanted to break out for years. I have come here to find out what stops me and invite it into the open.

When I called to set the appointment, I told Nina only that I’m writing a book and I’ve long been interested in drawing and painting. “I think meeting with you might help my writing,” I said.

Across the room Nina settles into her own set of pillows. “So you’re writing a book,” she says. “What’s it about?”

“My early life.” I tell her a bit of it: Dad married Mom—my stepmother—when I was three, after my real mother died when I was a baby and after his nervous breakdown. Mom and I never got along. Her relentless criticism and jealousy of my birth mother’s family bothered everyone. I left as soon as I could, marrying at eighteen.

“I’m having trouble writing about my stepmother,” I say. In truth, I’ve produced thousands of words and multiple chapters for my memoir. But Mom has become a sticking point. My concerns about how to portray her in the story float around, searching for an anchor or sense of direction. I can’t make headway until something shifts.

“Oh, so we have something to work on!” Nina sits up straighter against the pillows.

I look at the tray of colors. I didn’t come here to work on anything related to Mom. I came to play and have fun. I imagined meeting with Nina would make me feel like a kid again. I’d draw whatever I wanted, except she’d show me a technique or two to make something worthy of framing.

I don’t tell her this.

“Draw a picture of yourself as a young girl,” she says. “Quickly. Don’t think about it. Just do it.”

I lay the pad on my lap and draw a face that doesn’t look anything like me as a girl. Round, with short brown hair, no braids, rosy cheeks. A young girl’s face in pretty colors that I like. I fill in the background with soft yellow and random strokes of blue and red and green. The drawing pleases me.

“You look about eight years old in that picture,” Nina says. “You look sad.”

I’ve never thought of myself as a sad child. Angry, but not sad.

“Age eight or nine is the year of a child’s sacred wound,” she adds.

I remember nine, the year I got pneumonia and was rushed to the hospital. But I don’t believe my wound had a single moment or year. I was wounded repeatedly, over and over. Sacred or not.

“Now draw a picture for your birth mother.”

I wonder why, since that mother is long dead, but I do it.

I sketch the pages from her journal that I once saw in a dream: words floating like poems in open space on the page, flecks of multicolored confetti in the margins. In the center of the picture I add a vase of bright flowers.

I like it. I set it aside.

“Now draw a picture of your stepmother,” she says. “Draw the two of you together. Don’t use the hand you write with. Use the other hand because it will express your feelings more willingly.”

“I didn’t expect to do this kind of work here,” I say.

But she insists. “Draw your feelings. Quickly. Don’t think, just draw.”

I grip a piece of chalk. I make Mom an angular figure in harsh red outline, stiff and scowling. I sketch myself as a child standing next to her, bright green and animated, live as a jumping bean. Above our heads I scrawl words in a child’s script, heavy black letters pressed hard onto the paper.

“STOP!” I write over my head. “I hate you!”

“I hate you too,” Mom says back to me, in red.

I’ve resolved a lot of my anger over the years, but Nina said “draw quickly.” This is what “quickly” brought forth. I brush chalk dust from my fingers.

Then, on an impulse, I add something else. In the center of each of our figures I draw a small blue heart, and with my favorite sky-blue chalk I draw a line between them. A line of love, a heart connection. For we are, for all intents and purposes, mother and daughter. Not the kind of daughter she’d have wished for or imagined—she’d lost plenty of sleep over me in my teens. She’s not the kind of mother I’d have picked, either. But fate paired us.

Since I left home, she has tried with so many gestures to tell me that she loves me. The way she underlines words for emphasis in the sentimental cards she sends for birthdays and holidays. The wicker mail holder she gave me after I mentioned that I like wicker; the purple fan (when I said I like purple) that some church craftswoman made by gluing lace ribbons onto plastic forks. One Christmas she assembled two albums of photographs of me arranged from babyhood to marriage. And at my grandparents’ estate sale she bought the cast-iron dog doorstop because she remembered how much I liked that dog as a child. For years she’s been asking me to forgive her. And I do—in increments.

But part of me still wants to prove her guilty of wrongdoing in her role as mother, though I know I can’t blame her for being the way she is. Still, I’m stubborn. Her presence in my life is like a door that won’t budge, and my writing pushes against it.

I say goodbye to Nina and put the rolled-up drawings in my car.

~~~

Back home, art therapy behind me, I focus on how to write about this woman who fate decided would mother me. And I dream. An alligator rises from the wild spot in my garden—a white reptile that crawls out of the earth, stands upright, and heads for my house. In dreams the house represents the self. The alligator represents anger and strong verbal powers. Its appearance warns me not to use those powers destructively.

Soon after, the animal world speaks again.

It has been an extremely long winter rainy season in which all of San Francisco has grown weary of dripping umbrellas and damp interiors. One day a big gray spider appears in the entry hall of my house. It must have crawled in through the door from the garage, which stays open just far enough for my cat to visit his litter box.

I find the spider just before I go to bed one night, and its size makes me suck in my breath with fright. I have never seen such a spider, indoors or out: fine-waisted, yet wide with thick, gray, hair-covered legs. I shudder at the thought of stepping on it, squashing its large mass under my slipper, but I do so, quickly. I’ll have nightmares tonight for sure, I think, as I climb the stairs from the hallway to my bedroom.

My unconscious, however, has other plans. I dream that night of a South African novelist, a man with a soft, kind face who dated my college roommate and infused her life with emotional turmoil and the lives of her friends with unwelcome drama. In this dream he offers me love. Not sex, but love of the warmest, most wonderful kind, a blissful peace that holds me within it like gentle arms. I feel so cared for in the dream that I wake in a state of wonder.

In some mythologies the spider is the devouring mother, the one who destroys life. In others she is the creative force, the mother of the universe spinning her web of life. The spider is often feared, with its eight legs and dual fangs.

In my personal mythology the spider has long been the devourer. But in this dream the devouring mother has been transformed. The spider that night becomes the spinner of life, the mother of my personal universe, holding me in its tender affection. Transmuting my fear of the stepmother, and perhaps even of love. Letting me know how it feels to be held by the essence of love, and healing me of some deep loss.

I lie in bed for a long time after waking, letting myself experience the feeling and message of the dream. Maybe Mom is not the evil, destructive creature I’ve made her out to be. One mother gave me life, then six months later spun me out into the universe to find my own way. The other drew me into her web, where like a captive insect I fought, and sought every opportunity to flee. But captivity breeds strength: she had fortified within me a resolve to reclaim and remake my life. The first mother, on the day she disappeared, left a memory, lodged in my infant body, of her presence and of a vast emptiness. The dream fills in that empty space. I understand that a larger web connects us—my two mothers and me—and that in some way I have been freed.

The deep embrace of the man in the dream stays with me throughout the day, a gift of tenderness brought on, I am sure, by the spider.

That afternoon I take out the two pads of newsprint and set of pastels I purchased after working with Nina. I brush chalk and color across the soft paper.

I begin to draw nearly every day, after writing. I draw a blooming amaryllis, a woman’s face, a dream scene of a man and a boy in the desert. I buy a book about drawing and work through the lessons. The horizon of my creative powers expands. Language flourishes. Writing feels familiar again.

I wonder about Mom’s unartful and frustrated life. In what ways has she come to feel her love for me, and hold onto it, over the years? How much more forgiveness do I owe her, or will I grant her as I continue to write? Can I make art of her life, along with my own?

Since I returned from my visit with Nina, the vase I drew for my birth mother has hung on the wall in my living room in a bold red frame I paid well for. No one ever comments on it, and I don’t care. It’s not good art by anyone’s standards, including my own. Someday, maybe soon, I will no longer need to look at it.

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