Art's+Embrace

In my life, there are often times, times like now, where I feel incredibly inadequate. My mother has always had high standards, high standards that I have never been able to reach. There always seems to be a foot, an inch, for me to cross into approval, a hurdle I've never been able to push myself over. I feel like a marathon runner, dehydrated, my muscles eating away at themselves, finish line ribbon just a step away as I collapse to the ground, watching the other racers pass me by. Perhaps, I have sometimes thought, I am not my mother's child at all. But I am reminded of this thought's falsehood several times. When she is not being ashamed by me, we sometimes act in similar ways.

Dad said she was a lot more fun when they were younger. Though I've found a Police CD in the cabinet, though I know my parents used to smoke, though I know she used to have hair all the way down to her back, it's hard for me to picture my mother with a cigarette in her hand, long hair falling in front of her face as she rocked out. I suppose you have to change when you get old and have kids. I wonder, am I on a road to becoming my mother? It is a scary thought, a terrifying and abhorrent mental image to watch me twist and turn into my mother; hair shortening, face frowning, irritability rising. My friends claim that my old age will be an odd one. I wonder if I'll be like the grandmother at Manoa pool when I'm eighty, decked out in short bright pink hair as I swim for three hours a day. But as for the current moment, I would rather not wonder so about old age, so many miles ahead. Right now, I wonder about frivolous things, something that would probably make my mother angry. I wonder how I'd turn out if my parents had any intention of letting me go to an art school, I wonder how I'll be because I never will go. I wonder what kind of art I’d create, what kind of hip clubs I’d hang out at. In my mind, during class, I am off in New York.

These are the products of my everyday imagination, the one that rules over me when I am slightly distracted by something else, stay as a dull murmur, white noise in the background of my life.

But at night, when there is nothing to distract me, I’d like to think my imagination kicks into a sort of overdrive, like a quiet restaurant with instrumental music playing whose walls turn in on themselves as the floor flips, to reveal a blaring nightclub with a disco ball and a constantly playing heavy beat.

At night, I become an artist, taking away the pains of the day through creation, I feel adequate. My worries float out of my head, onto the paper. The pencil lines, the streaks of ink, the brushstrokes of paint, the letters keyed into documents—they each hold my pain and passion that I am unable to take out elsewhere. I bleed my feelings upon the paper, and it never leaves me empty, only whole. I cleanse myself of hurt and want with my pencil and eraser. I am adequate, I am a creator. All of us want to leave a mark on the wall of society—I want to leave a mural.

While I draw, write, or paint, everything else floats away. I am suspended, weightless, within my own imagination. I do not notice the outside world. There is not even a paper. As I put the finishing touches on my drawing, in my mind, she springs to life. Art is always there, my muse, my mother to comfort my from my actual mother; she has always loved me. Art is a dancer, fluid and solid at the same time. Art is a singer with a voice like the comfort of a beautiful starry night; she is the song that is never sung twice in the same way. She is the blood that flows through my veins. I am Art's daughter. And unlike my real mother, she is never disappointed in me. When my mother looks down her nose to a grade I’m not proud of, when she badmouths my music, when she criticizes my work and my friends and what I stand for, I run into the arms of Art. Her arms, though paper, are warm and familiar, perfumed with a scent that creeps into my nostrils and intoxicates me so I am sleepy and carefree. I fall asleep on her lap and she tucks me into bed. I wake the next morning knowing from the open notebook on my nightstand and the pencil smudges on my fingertips that the past night I slept well.

Unlike my real mother, it is easy to see Art with a cigarette dangling from her lips as her heels cut into a dance floor to the beat of Roxanne. Her hair is short and red, and her face never looks a day past twenty. My mother has always considered Art to be beautiful, but she has never truly felt her love and caring. She is not a part of art in the way that I am, she is more of an acquaintance than anything else. Their relationship is a curt “hello-how-are-you-fine-good,” and then they are off, but not before my mother has arched a half-disapproving, half-awed eyebrow at her high heels, off the shoulder top, shouting hair and exposed bra straps; and certainly not before Art has thought to herself that my mother could do well with some black hair dye and heels that didn’t look like they came out of The Walking Company. In truth, they could be very good friends if they tried hard enough; but neither has taken such a step.

With my real mother pushing me as hard as she does, I’d never be able to make it without Art. My real mother makes me strive for good grades and a respectable college degree, while Art pokes at me to relax and see the beauty in life. My real mother tells me not to make decisions I’ll regret, and Art tells me that you can never be old and wise without being young and stupid. And when you really get to thinking, with mothers like that, maybe I won’t be so screwed up when I’m seventy after all. Although Art has assured me that the hot pink pixie cut will look good on me, even when I’m sun-damaged and saggy.