Mothering

What was your role in your family?  That is a huge question with hugely important answer(s).  What things did we have to do to contribute to our family?  We know that kids today have not been raised with the kinds of responsibilities we had.  What are five most important things we learned from our mother?

My role, I thought, in my family, was to be a replacement baby for the one she lost.  I grew up trying to be as perfect as I imagined that baby girl would have grown up to be.  I never made it.  I, along with my younger brother, we never called our father's kids.  We were called "Norm's kids' (my mother's name) by our step-siblings so I sensed I was a fringe child on top of being abandoned and then adopted. We were pretty much just supposed to not make waves and to be quiet.  I wasn't either one of those.  My role in my family is vague until I was much older with children of my own and my parents had aged.  Then I became a cheerleader for my father and he depended on me.  I spent a lot of my life just not 'measuring up' to what I thought they expected of me.  My role is quite vague.

The things I learned from my mother are also quite vague.  I learned not to upset her and make her cry.  I learned that you must consider what others would think.  I learned to bake bread and make divinity.  I learned to love family, and home, first and foremost.  I learned to be of service to others.  

I am grateful for her life of sacrifice.  She sacrificed in unbelievable ways for her parents and siblings.  She was the brick of her family.  She sacrificed for me, for my younger brother she gave birth too, knowing that she might lose both of us when we were tiny.  I was a non-thriver.  My brother had to have his blood changed.  I am very much like my mother in many ways, many good ways.  I miss her every day.

In this painting in my art journal, I begin blocking in colors for the nature background.  I, loosely, followed art sherpa's Mother and Daughter in Poppies, to get some guidance.  The sky is Turquoise Sparkle;  the hill is a mixture of lime green and Forest Green; the foreground is Yellow Ochre with a bit of the green mixed towards the closest area.  

I grew up at the foot of this hill.  It had a spring at the top, which I did not add, but there was a rickety fence at the bottom of the hill.  I wanted to show a fence, freely done, at the bottom.  (BTW every child who grew up at HillSpring was either on the front or back of a toboggan and went through this fence at some point in their childhood.) I did the fence with a slice of credit card edge that I scraped through some Whisper Cream and a mixture of the greens and Yellow Ochre.  I let it dry, thoroughly. 

I needed to get some shapes in for a mother and a child.  I am taking a stance here of "I wish we could have ____".  My adoptive Mother and Father were old enough to be my grandparents, such blessings to me, but unable to do activities a child would want to do.  I have chosen to show the Mother and Daughter facing the hill together.  We each have our stories of the hill, she in her 50s and I in my childhood, but many of our memories of the hill would probably be much the same. I drew the shapes with a charcoal pencil.  I have had problems with the charcoal pulling through, but I will use it to my advantage with this one. 

 

At this point,  when totally dry, I block in the shapes of the Mother and Daughter, with some white.

Perhaps it has an unfinished look, and that is significant.

©Carol Desjarlais 1.7.20