I have a little girl character who’s supposed to be me, but I often find that she turns out to be Kira. She has this big personality and sometimes it gets her in trouble, but usually an adventure ensues. I draw Romily as an octopus because they’re really smart and I like the contrast of all the soft curves and edges withher straight-line personality. Octopus Romily obviously makes an amazing barista with all those arms.
Class is only two evenings a week, and although I spend a lot of time in the shared studio space avoiding my housemates and their yogurt accusations, I have the bandwidth for one more course.
I schedule six driving lessons with a company that offers a program for “nervous adult drivers.” (Personal growth moment: I manage not to hook up with any of the instructors in empty restaurant parking lots.) I mostly drive with a nice lady named Francie who has a smoker’s cough and smells like apple cinnamon. Every time I slide into the driver’s seat I feel the twinge of looking over to the passenger side and not seeing Nick.
Admittedly, I do get more driving experience when I’m not going through a romantic crisis on top of learning to complete Y-turns.
After the sixth lesson, I schedule my road test. I’m still a “nervous adult driver,” but I get through it, even though my straight backup goes slightly crooked. I type several notes to Nick about this achievement and delete all of them. Deleting his number was a good call because the amount of effort required to contact him in a more roundabout way is just enough to determe.
I do a video call with Mom and Perry that evening to share my accomplishment. They look happy and pleasantly tipsy. Perry mentions something about finishing up some work and says good night, leaving me and Mom in a one-on-one situation for the first time in months.
“How’s the job?” she asks. “Is the campus pretty in the fall?”
“It’s fine,” I say. I suppose I could assure her that I show up on time and try not to eat lunch at my desk, but that’s not what’s on my mind. “I need to tell you something,” I say before I lose my nerve. “I’m taking a class. Or, auditing it, I guess.”
It’s funny how easy it is to omit huge parts of your life when your main form of communication is quick text messages. Maybe I learned that from my dad. I don’t have some big official news to share. There’s no specific achievement here. But I tell her about how I’m drawing again. How this class has forced me to approach art in a different way.
I give her a very quick peek at the various notebooks I’ve been drawing in for the last few months, even though everything in them looks chaotic and unfinished.
“You sound lighter,” she says finally. “You really do.”
The connection isn’t crystal clear, but I’m pretty sure she’s tearing up and trying to swallow it down. I guess that’s a family trait.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ve had this idea of myself where I had to be a certain way or I was failing. I had to achieve every step on this prescribed list, to the point where I was hiding in a room, missing chunks of my own life because I was so desperate to get back on that one track. That might not be the only path for me. Maybe I just couldn’t see that while I was living in your office.”
“All I want in the world is for you to be happy, Sam,” she says. “I mean that. I’d do anything to make your life better.Anything.And that doesn’t change just because you’re an adult. When your dad left, I promised myself that I would always be here for you. No matter what. No matter how old you are.”
I wait for thebut.
It doesn’t come.
“Youhavebeen there for me, Mom,” I say. “You gave me a place to come back to.”
“I felt so frustrated—”
“I’m sorry.”
“—with myself,” she says. “I couldn’t figure out how to give you what you needed to get back up. And yes, I was frustrated with you, too, but I took everything so personally. Like, yourunhappiness was a reflection on my failure as a mom. I lay awake so many nights, just replaying all these different moments from your life when I might’ve made a wrong parenting decision.”
Meanwhile, I was in the next room, staring at the ceiling, replaying all the ways I disappointed her.
“It must be so hard to be a parent,” I say. “Having that much patience. Making sacrifices. The whole idea of unconditional love seems like this incomprehensible, superhuman thing to me.”
“Like an X-Man?”
I snort. “I don’t think any of the X-Men have a mutation for unconditional love. When they did have kids, most of them were terrible parents.”
“I guess no one’s writing comic books about people who lead regular lives and also happen to be really great at raising kids.”
“Actually, a lot of our drawing prompts are about creating characters who lead regular lives,” I say. “Some of them are even good parents.”
“It sounds like you had to work some things out. Like art therapy.”
Her comment gets under my skin for a moment—I detect a whiff of condescension in using the termart therapyto represent a huge body of work I’ve produced for a college course.
But it unlocks something, too: Giuseppe Baggio’s detractors like to claim that his works are the childlike scrawlings of a PTSD patient expressing himself for the first time. Perhaps I’m playing out my version of Baggio’s art breakthrough. Maybe this makes me more qualified than ever to write about him.
“Please don’t lie awake, worrying about me now,” I say. “I don’t have everything figured out, but I’m working on, like, one or two things at a time instead of trying to solve my life with grad school. It was supposed to answer everything: here’s whereyou’ll live, here’s what your career will be in six years, here’s what you’ll tell your relatives when they ask, ‘What are you doing next?’ I’m not sure that’s the right answer after all. There’s a lot I can do with six years of life.”
