sideways mom

I spent the first couple of years of my life in foster care with a number of families, the last of whom left me alone in their house while they went on vacation to Florida. Over time I'd had enough of these 'moms' that in order to keep them straight I gave them different designations, with all the extreme literalism of childhood. The woman who finally adopted me and took me into her heart was Mommy-in-the-Kitchen, because that's where she always was; cooking, cleaning, caring.

Carol Bayer Sager has written a beautiful, heart wrenching piece entitled Anita's Girl for LA Magazine. In it she tells of the loving but complicated relationship she shared with her own mother until her recent death. With the wisdom of pain she describes how it altered, with the fluidity and changing circumstances of time, sometimes stressing and straining but never breaking the ties that bound them. At the very end:

I now see that my mother didn’t know how to leave me. On the day before she died, she seemed cheerful. She was hungry, and although I was always policing what she ate, I decided to let her eat whatever she wanted—like giving that party we’d never gotten around to having. Toward the very end, I was lying on her bed while she ate frozen yogurt, and out of the blue she asked, “Do you want to come with me?” I knew exactly what she meant, and I said, quietly, “No, Mom, I can’t. Not now.” “I know you have Bob and Christopher to care for,” she replied, then waited a few beats and said, more to herself than to me, “But how will we ever separate?”

It broke my heart to read that last line, for I could easily have written it, so close was it to the moments that I shared with my mother at the end of her life. She passed in October of 2006, and I know that I still haven't managed to fully separate myself from her. I probably never will. When Carol writes to her mother, "You occupied so much space inside of me. To me, you were always bigger than life. I still hear your voice—I know what you would say to me and how you would say it. You are still here..." she writes for me. And I am grateful.

I started Mom's portrait immediately upon returning from her funeral. I was distraught; determined to keep her with me, I painted her as I so often saw her ~ shifting her shoulders to look up from her chair, eyes alight with pleasure at the sight of me. I know in my heart that no one will ever be that happy to see me again. The colors were to be bright and cheerful, devoid of shadow, for I needed to make her happy and safe and somehow not alone. When my brother saw the picture he called it 'Sideways Mom', and that feels appropriate to me ~ a little fey, a little mischievous, a little off. Just like Mom and I. If I had to do it over again I probably would have made different choices, but this particular picture will have to stand as it is.

When I first proposed doing a portrait to Mom the last time that she was home with me, we decided together that it would hang over a bookcase in the living room, but I may have changed my mind. I've gotten so used to having her greet me from her perch on the easel as I come into the kitchen for coffee each morning that I may have to find a place for her there instead. She can be Mommy-in-the-Kitchen again. I don't think she'll mind at all.