Book-Child

For many years, people visiting my studio—maybe confused, searching for an appropriate comment in reaction to the paintings I was showing them—would say, “You must think of them as your children.” This always struck me as absurd and unfounded.

My children, in stages, were wet, messy things, needing me to tend to both orifices. Later, they had to be pushed around Soho, the older one’s hand clamped to the baby’s stroller as we ran across Canal Street, traffic turning into us from four sides. Two girls I taught to walk, talk, to read through pictures, to draw a neck on a stick figure, and to navigate the complexities of peers—where was the similarity to a painting? What was the comment drawing on? Artist as creator, as mother?

Now I think it was about protectiveness, that moment when a child, now almost an adult, leaves home. Cooked but not complete.

I’ll tell you why. Four days ago, two complementary copies of my book arrived at my front door, protected by a cardboard mailer impossible to tear open gracefully for the iPhone documentation of the moment. A paperback; I couldn’t risk wounding the cover. I finally held it, measuring its width with my thumb, opening it carefully for a sniff of the Garamond font-embedded paper, my father’s last name following mine on the binding. Then I closed it again and carried it to my desk, making a plinth from the stand the monitor rests on above the computer, swaddled in the box it arrived in, then stared at it—like an infant in an incubator, a thing that had grown over six years, with me always wondering how it would turn out, look to other people, read to other people. A doubling—a kind of child.

And the awkward analogy held weight. Yesterday was humid. Still unable to fully touch it, I stared at the slight curve in the cover, folded the package panels down, and weighted it flat with an empty coffee mug—beginning my attending role. The words won’t change now, the story locked into whatever edits I chose, the ending not a simple happily-ever-after one, but a parting hope. A child.