Last month I returned home. It had been nearly a year. My phantom limb of a mother is still in Texas, where I grew up. We were once close. It has been years since we spoke at depth, without the sense of urgency and loops of her creeping dementia and the eventual near silence of her Alzheimer’s. A reality I have largely been shielded from in Glasgow.
Walking through her storage unit, filled with the remains of my parent’s life, I had a resounding appreciation of the loss my distance allows me to ignore. My uncle left me a box of her old primary school work and a painting from high school. She had always said she wished she had become an artist.
The painting disturbed me, disturbs me. There is something wrong with it, something captured of her, parts of her, that I am unfamiliar. I am acquainted with many parts of my mother, but not whatever emotion that is that I can’t quite put my finger on.
Three abstract faces in contrast, one blank, one neutral and one in a near scream.
My partner commented it looked like something I’d have done or one of the drawings in my daughter’s room. In my adolescence I drew and painted regularly. I would process through art, channelling emotion onto canvas. Broadly considered troubled, art was a way to communicate in ways I could not verbalise.
I was drawn to faces, there were themes around masks.
My father would show them off with pride to friends at parties, fragments of my emotional life evident in each. He wanted me to be an artist… or a lawyer, he was not bothered which. I became a therapist.
My own daughter began drawing more when she was 8 and has sense become engrossed in art. One of the first things she drew was a very detailed skull.
There are themes that arise in therapy, patterns become clearer, but not all patterns are our own. Some are echoes, intergenerational trauma bleeding through. We begin to repeat the patterns, the mistakes unconscious of the drive, blind to the unmet need. Who is my mother?
My mother was pressured to become a doctor by her academic parents. She was one of only six women in her medical school class. Near the end she shifted and specialised in psychiatry and began studying a very pure version of Sigmund Freud’s teachings. In the boxes of storage was a comprehensive collection of every work written by Freud.
When my grandmother turned 80, my mother hired a ghost writer to write her biography through interviews. My grandmother refused every attempt at arranging a meeting. She wanted to die with her secrets.
You don’t though. Your daughters and theirs carry it on, but we are not sure what we are holding.
