Perspective

Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear

In the nineties I watched Absolutely Fabulous known as AbFab a British sitcom celebrating the hijinks of a heavy drinking drug abusing mogul and her model friend. Both women were into hilarious promiscuity. They were vacuous and funny. But I wasn’t laughing. I identified with the mogul’s mousy daughter, a character described by Wikipedia as a student and aspiring writer whose constant care of her immature mother had left her a bitter cynic. A girl who kept everything running while two glamorous women drank and laughed and schemed. I’m not a cynic, but I’m still that mousy daughter trying to make sense of her own life. The oldest of my mother’s nine children, a girl who grew up taking care of her younger siblings. A woman who can’t believe she lives in a country that wants to pay women to have more babies. Correction. Wants to pay white women to have more white babies. Who will feed and rock and comfort those babies.

No. No. Not another child unwanted and alone.

By the time I was ten years old I knew the signs she was pregnant again.

Another baby she couldn’t take care of. Another baby abandoned by another father. Another child I would be expected to care for. That’s the story under every story I tell. A mother too soon. A mother to my siblings. A mother to my own mother. Her strong right arm she called me, meaning she counted on me to take care of all she could not handle. Her need of me communicated with threats. We seldom talked; there were few actual conversations. All these years later the brutal silence between us is a scar as noticeable to me as the marks her fingernails made up and down my arms. Pale commas in my forearms. Memories embedded in my body. Stories burned into my brain. Stories of hurt and also of healing. Come from perspective, a larger circle of thought overlooking a life lived.

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In 1980 after leaving my son’s father, I lived in my painting studio across the hall from a red headed poet. The electricity in the building was wonky; there was no hot water. The pipes wailed at night as did my neighbors toddler who seemed always unhappy. I missed my own child four years old at the time. I didn’t bring him with me when I left his dad late one night, ran down the porch steps my clothes in a trash bag my child in his warm bed. “Come with me to Junior’s, the oilmen’s club,” the redheaded poet who lived across the hall from me suggested one night. “You don’t need a job. That’s how I pay for this place. It’s easy money.” We sat together in the hallway outside our slumlord apartments. Talking about how broke we were. “Those guys will pay for it,” she said. “One night, you can make more than you make shelving books at that library all damn day.” I hadn’t started smoking yet. Hardly ever drank. I was oddly naive and inexperienced for a young woman who’d grown up the way I’d grown up. Listening to her mother make it with so many men. Cuddling on the couch with those same men myself. My mind at that point in time was still a blank screen of denial around the brutality. A door shut against the soul blot of my small frame lying beside those big men. I watched the poet take a drag on her cigarette not knowing what to think or say or do and thought about my son, back home in his bed. Glanced through my open door at the painting I was working on. A five by six-foot canvas propped against my easel. A painting of my son and his friend. The sketch I’d just made on the surface of the canvas still dripped with thinned down ochre paint. I surveyed my work in progress and thought about my young son and his friend. Too soon they would be grown a brief sketch painted over with thick paint. I was no longer a child. I was a mother myself. While I painted my son ran around the studio laughing. His mother here his father there. That wasn’t what I wanted for him. Sometimes back then it seemed like the world inside and the one out there would never mesh. Like I’d live my life forever between the two. Avoiding the past. Afraid of the future. A secret agent in my own life. “Hey, I’m beat,” I told my neighbor. “I got to get some sleep.” I never went to that posh oilman’s club on the Northwest Expressway in Oklahoma City, never drank their martinis or dined on their thick steaks. I didn’t want to meet wealthy men. I kept my low paying job at the public library shelving books. Reading on breaks. In the quiet orderly stacks of the library downtown.

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1985 at CalArts having lunch in the school cafeteria with the conceptual artist Douglas Hubler. “You remind me of another girl student I had back in the seventies,” he said. “She was the most talented one here at the time.” Mouth full mid-chew, not even bothering to swallow so much in a hurry to find out what happened to that former student. To know how not to fail, how to fulfill my supposed potential, I swallowed quick and blurted out, “What was her name?” Maybe spit some bits of food as I asked the pedagogical conceptual artist about the female student from the past thinking I might recognize her, this talented former student of his. “What’s her name?” Who was she? I needed to know. I’d left my son with his dad in Oklahoma to get a master’s degree in that school almost an hour’s drive up the 5 freeway from the Hollywood apartment where I lived with my drunken boyfriend. Art supplies purchased on credit cards. My half of the rent paid for with student loans. “What’s her name?” I asked again. He took another bite of his sandwich before he told me, and I winced. Her name just a name. A name I didn’t recognize. Had never heard before or read about in an art magazine. “What happened to her?” I asked him, in a panic. “What about her work? Where can I see it?” He shrugged his shoulders and gave me a wry conceptual smile and I wanted to kick him in the teeth. But I didn’t. I went back to my studio; I went back to work. I made a few good paintings and a couple installations while I was at CalArts. One small triptych was stolen from a show, taken off the pedestal and out of the gallery. The others were too big for me to keep when I moved after graduation from my apartment in the flats of Hollywood into a converted single car garage in Venice. I sawed those too big to keep paintings up and stuffed them in the trash. Destroyed the largest work and stored the rest, the newest paintings the twenty-eight panels I’d painted in a fever late at night in the Hollywood apartment I could no longer afford. I’d set up a studio in the dining room and night after night painted. In a burning need to define my own aesthetic. I worked to say: this is my thesis. This is my answer to your painting is dead dogma Mr. Conceptual. Twenty-eight images depicting a body in relationship. To be hung together like a puzzle. Body part to body part. Covered with Acrylic paint. By my hand. Against a hard surface. Made by a woman. Brain and body up against the world. A soft body. Body Logic has never been shown and has always been stored away. Stored away along with a few pieces of furniture I’d brought from Oklahoma. Body of work. Hidden away.

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“We are in part of nowhere,” I once overheard a little girl say to her sister. The two of them staring out the window of a train car on its way to San Diego from Los Angeles. Staring out the window at parking lots and office parks and all the in-between of travel. I jotted down her statement in the notebook I always carry with me on trips. Since forever I have watched and written, delineating the negative space. The space around and between the subjects. When visual perspective, the appearance of objects in depth as perceived by normal binocular vision eluded me I was somehow still able to take in a wide view of the world, to see the world not as mine alone but shared, in relationship. Because in many ways I am still in the backseat of my mother’s car, driven to make sense of the world moment by moment. Creatively always in part of nowhere.

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Fall of 2000 after graduating from San Jose State’s School of Library and Information Science I applied for and got the job of Art librarian for Otis School of the Arts in Los Angeles. It was a dream job. Working in an art school. I’d left a job at Corbis Images where I worked as an image researcher to take the job. I was ready to use all of my skills and hopefully make more money. Even acquire a pension. In library school I’d focused on the intersection of digital libraries and visual images. So, I was excited to apply what I’d learned and to assist the head librarian, a woman I’d known in the art world for years. The art library like most libraries was in the process of moving into the digital age. Art professors needed quick and easy access to images for their lectures. So. Assisting the head librarian with the creation of a digital library of easily accessible art images was the first task at hand. First day on the job my boss gave me a two-foot-high stack of articles to read and between figuring out how to print slide labels using mail merge and checking out art videos to students I read through that stack. A few days later I jotted down my last note and carried the stack back to my boss. As I approached her desk she yelled out in a panicked voice: “Don’t drop those articles!” And in a flash of repressed anger, I imagined myself flinging that stack of loose pages up over my head, into the stuffy air of her office. In my mind I watched them flutter down from the upward thrust of my toss falling all over the thick carpet of the library. Back in the real world I carefully placed the stack of papers on her desk and then returned to mine. But the dark nebula in my PTSD mind continued to expand. I knew how to distinguish disappointments from profound betrayals. I knew how to search through a library’s catalog. Cross referencing subject headings. Chasing footnotes and bibliographies. I knew how to design an image database, create search terms, search language. I knew how to do the job. I didn’t know how to be micromanaged by a female boss who sounded so much like my mother. That night I gave my foster father a call. Told him how bored I was. How I dreaded going to work in the morning. How quickly cutting edge had become conceptual housework. How my former employer had offered me the job of Trends Analyst. A job they had just created for me. Come back they said, and I wondered what to do. “What should I do?” I asked him. I didn’t want to be a quitter, but I also didn’t want to give up the chance to do more interesting work in an environment I knew was more open, less restrictive. “Always do what only you can do,” he answered. The next day I handed in my resignation.

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A few years back when I was still on Facebook a message popped up in my inbox.

Did you know my mom?

I stared at the flickering response prompt. Not recognizing the addressee, clicked on the icon photo attached to the sender.

Your mother was my little sister, I messaged back. Three years younger than me.

Oh. How old are U?

I told her my age. You look so much like her. I am crying right now.

Oh. I do? I’m sorry.

No need to apologize for being a beautiful girl—no need to apologize at all—I am very happy to be in touch with you.

Ok.

I hope you like the photos I posted. If you ever need to talk or have any questions just message or I can give you my phone number.

K

Good to meet you.

You too.

As she was not yet eighteen, I let her know she would need to get permission from her father and her stepmother for us to stay in touch. I told the girl I would “friend” her stepmother to ask if she wouldn’t mind if her stepdaughter and I became “friends” via social media so we could continue to communicate.

Do you know [x]? To see what she shares with friends, send her a friend request.

I also texted one of my younger sisters, to let her know that Moody Sister’s daughter had miraculously out of nowhere simply texted. I was so happy the girl had reached out.

A few minutes later I received a message in my IM box.

My mom isn’t going to accept your “friend” request.

Okay, okay, I texted back, take care. Here’s my number if for any reason you ever need to get in touch.

I typed that response and closed my laptop. Eyes so tired they were crossing. Fracturing the view outside my dining room window.

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I am careful not to take education, libraries, grocery stores with full shelves, a warm bed at night, a hot bath at the end of the day, my husband’s hand in mine, all these comforts, I was and am careful not to take human connection, the people who love me even the people who don’t love me for granted. The other day walking out of yoga class wet and sweaty and red faced from moving with a room full of serenely kind people a thought soared across my consciousness. Not quite thought. More a stored memory of unfulfilled want dislodged. I wanted Mama to love me; take delight in me. To wonder at my very being. Fully alive and come from a long lineage of powerful women, I wanted her to recognize me. Love me. In infancy, in toddlerhood. And then when mother love didn’t come my way I locked and blocked that helpless hopeless feeling way down deep. Held my breath until I passed out on the floor. Rode my trike as far as my legs could pedal. Twenty blocks away before I was found. Leaving. Leaving. Always leaving. Protecting myself from annihilating disappointment. It’s taken a lifetime for that insight to flit across my brain. Taken a lifetime of moving eyes across a page, moving my body through space. Continuing to participate in life even when I wasn’t understood or accepted or even seen brought me, gave me perspective. Perspective come from those challenging times when circumstance overcame the buried call and response of old wounds and somehow I, me, the character I write about, the essential center of who I am in this world spoke up. A mother to myself. A shield. A protector. A nurturing presence in a long dark night. We can be that for one another and ourselves simultaneously.

A balm. A comfort. A reminder. Hurt people do not have to hurt people.

We can heal. We can gain perspective.