Chapter 2: The Girl I Used to Be
Let me tell you about the young woman who painted that willow tree, because I had spent fifty years forgetting she existed, and standing in Arthur's living room was the first time in half a century I remembered her.
Before I was anyone's mother or wife, I was a painter. Not a famous one, not even a professional one, but a real one — a girl who saw light and had to put it on canvas, who spent weeks on a single pond because she couldn't get the way the sun came through the willow leaves to be exactly right. Painting was the truest thing about me. It was how I understood the world. When I was nineteen, I sold a few small pieces at a little gallery, and I remember the feeling of someone wanting something I'd made, wanting a piece of how I saw things, more than I've remembered almost anything since.
And then I got married, and I had four children, and life closed over that girl like water over a stone. It wasn't dramatic. It was just the slow, total way a woman's own self gets spent, one sacrifice at a time, on everyone else. There was no time to paint when there were diapers. No money for canvas when there were school shoes. No space in a day full of other people's needs for the private, selfish, necessary act of making something just because it was beautiful. I put the brushes away "for now," and "for now" became fifty years, and somewhere in there I stopped being a woman who painted and became only a woman who provided, and I forgot — I genuinely forgot — that I had ever been anything else.
My children never knew that girl. To them I was always just Mom, the one who gave and gave, the resource, the babysitter, the loan. They had no idea their mother had once signed her maiden name in the corner of a canvas and felt, for a moment, like the most alive person alive. I'd given that away too, along with everything else, so quietly that even I lost track of it.
And then, at sixty-nine, alone on the far side of the world, finally doing one selfish thing for myself, I walked into a stranger's house and found her — the girl I used to be — hanging in a place of honor over a kind man's fireplace, loved by him for forty years while I'd been forgetting she ever lived.
