Different is good.

I became obsessed with this image for a long time after my mom died. She loved chubby baby necks, especially when they belonged to her grandchildren. Every time I looked at this picture, I became that baby, held in her soft hands, kissed by her pink face. I couldn't get enough of it.

I drew it on napkins, in the margins of meeting notes, on the backs of credit card offers. I drew it all the time, even when it would behoove me not to. I tried several times to draw it on 8 1/2 x 11 drawing paper with high quality artist pencils with great detail. I got really good at Mom's closed eyes and the cowlicks on the baby's head, but I still couldn't get it just right. I don't know what I expected it to look like or what would finally satisfy me, but none of my renderings seemed to do the trick. I was still compelled to Draw This Image.

Growing up in my house, you quickly learned (primarily from my father) that different was bad. He never actually said the words, "Different is bad and don't you forget it." But he possessed an astonishing vocabulary of derogatory terms that described women in general and people who weren't WASPs and seemed to have no qualms whatsoever in using them in front of anyone at any time. The filter that keeps most of us from saying every asinine thing that comes to our minds seemed to be permanently in the off position in my father.

When I was eight years old my mother took me to my neighbor's dance recital. Something in me responded to the lights, the colors, the movement, the spectacle and I knew then I would shrivel up and die if I didn't start dancing, too. I remember hearing my father say, "Dance lessons? What does she want to take dance lessons for? She's never gonna make a living doing that!" Clearly my mother had approached him with the idea to sort of ask permission, as she didn't have any money of her own because Dad was of the generation of men who proclaimed, "No wife of mine is gonna work." I guess it didn't cause him any shame or embarrassment that I always had holes in my shoes and we could only afford to shop at Jamesway or Newberry's and even then only during sales or on layaway. But being an intelligent woman, Mom pretended to have no decision making power while somehow making him think that dance lessons were his idea in the first place. I took dance lessons for years and years and even now I ache to go back to it.

Decades later I realized that maybe he didn't care one way or the other if I took dance lessons, but instead, like any good father who wouldn't let his wife work, was concerned about money, and I began to have compassion for him and everyone like him who had never been given permission to express themselves in ways that didn't involve fixing things, building things or shooting things. Still, what he had communicated and what I had heard was, creative expression was not useful and therefore inherently bad.

So when I was completely overtaken by this pressing need to Draw This Image of my mother kissing my baby nephew, but who could have been baby me, I realized I could never be completely satisfied with my efforts to make a pencil drawing that exactly resembled the photograph. I longed for color in my forbidden art, but was terrified of it. Eventually, when I had covered every scrap of paper in the house, chewed my fingernails until they bled and had nearly torn my hair out, I finally drew the picture in abstract. I still drew what could be mistaken for a woman kissing a baby if you stood way back and squinted, but the colors were all off. Purple hair, green skin, yellow eyelids, red background. Not everyone can look at it and figure it out right off. It's really rough and only took me a few minutes to make, but something changed in me that day, in those few minutes. Something inside of me had finally made its way out and I was free of it.

That's what making art--any kind of art--is like sometimes. You've got to get something out and who cares if you make a living at it. This tiny step away from black and white realism in my timid art life, which had previously consisted of drawing tiny nudes from postcard photos, then stuffing them inside a notebook in a box in a closet, became slowly, painfully slowly, work that is completely abstract and nothing if not color. What I've discovered is that, for me, abstract work is a way to avoid my father's criticism. He can't look at my stuff and say, "That's a flower? If you say so."

The sad part is, he never me saw me dance or sing or act nor saw any of my drawings at all. I took in all his criticisms, those meant for Mom, those meant for all those good-for-nothing [non-WASPs] and those meant for me and now they are my own internal dialogue that I fight against every day. More often than not I think I am a fat, ugly, lazy, stupid, dim-witted, thick-skulled good-for-nothing who shouldn't dance, sing, act, write or paint because I'll never make a living at it.

Some days this overwhelms me so much that I think the world would be better off without me and I should just stay home, but I'm the breadwinner right now, which is okay with me. So I get out of bed and go to work and I'm completely surprised when normal nice people interact with me like I'm a normal nice person too and I begin to wonder if this nasty inner dialogue isn't true at all.

Sometime during my first year out of college, Arby's came out with a slogan, "Different is good," which they plastered all over their packaging. I bought a soda, saved my cup and hung it from my rearview mirror. That was huge for me. It was a huge act of defiance of all that I had been told. Fifteen years later I'm starting to get it. Different is good.