You Can’t Hide Forever
It’s 6am I’m squeezed into the middle seat of a Jet Blue flight from Los Angeles to New York. The fat man sitting next to me hasn’t showered. He smells. There are no other seats available. This is what happens when I wait until the last minute to buy a plane ticket.
My mother is having an art show tonight in New York City, she doesn’t know I’m coming. I want to surprise her but I’m sure a therapist would just tell me that I like surprising her because I’m the one who wants the attention. I’m the one who wants to feel special. And she’d probably be right.
But tonight is my mother’s night. She’s 65, divorced three times, lives alone in a house with her oversized golden retriever and her alley cat that’s afraid of people just like her. Nobody ever seems to know what she does in that house all alone. But she paints. For 50 years she’s been painting. Painting her way through each failed marriage and a life that didn’t turn out the way she wanted it to. And for 50 years she’s taken everything she couldn’t express in words; her husbands cheating on her, her own mother cold and unsupportive, her children not loving her as much as she loves them, and she put it all on the canvas, and then locked them away in a closet as if to say that conversation or part of her life was over.
But today she’s taken them all out and lugged the giant canvases from her home in Connecticut and laid them all on the walls of a Manhattan art gallery for the world to see. To see her art. Her life. Her.
65 years old and she’s not afraid to come out of the closet and realize her dreams. And for that I love my mother, not because she raised my but for who she is.
