Sitting on my sofa with my laptop on my knee, I find myself stuck. 42 000 words into the first draft of the story, I am grounded. The weather is conspiring against going to the beach and walking my way out of my stranded situation, causing the dog to harrumph in a sulk. I find myself staring at the painting in front of me, a portrait of my father that I entitled, Accordion Man. I wonder why I never succeeded in painting a portrait of my mother. I was never satisfied with the attempts I made. Last week, while writing, I realized that, once again, the mother/daughter relationship had crept into my work.
The room is silent except for the old dog now quietly snoring beside me on the sofa. My eyes wander, and then rest on Clyde Woman that I painted as an imagined portrait of the great grandmother I never knew–Agnes the central character in my first book. For the first time, it now strikes me with certainty that this painting is actually a portrait of Mary, my mother. Behind the figure is the Cloche Lighthouse at the mouth of the Clyde River in Scotland. It is the place we lived at the time of my birth. She wears a white apron and holds a fish in her arms, a grim set to her face. The grimness is understandable when you know many of the circumstances of her young life. The white apron, she would not physically have worn in my lifetime, even though such a garment could still be found in readiness behind the front doors of tenements in Scotland until the 1960’s. By that date Mary was settled in Australia. However, this garment, a mantle of respectability, a resistance against the judgment of the Victorian era that maintained the poor were responsible for the condition they found themselves in, I believe was handed down through the generations to be mentally worn by my mother during my childhood and perhaps beyond.
The fish, although held firmly by her hands, still controlled her. It is the Christian fish of her protestant upbringing, that when she married my strongly socialist, atheist father, she tried to let go but never quite succeeded. My intelligent, funny, artistic mother was full of joy and anger. Contradictions that were often hard to understand. I believe we can unwittingly, inherit things that we thought were left behind in our past. I believe, attitudes, culture, sometimes trauma can be imprinted into our minds and bodies and as much as we try to deny them, they can surface when least expected.
I am stuck, halfway through my present book, yet suddenly, I am thinking about another project. I feel certain that next, at long last, I need to write about Mary and set us both free from the bindings of the fish and the white apron.
