The D-Word

by Jodie Pierce

Something you don’t realize while being raised by young parents is that together you are both growing up. You don’t share the same milestones but tend to shape each other’s personalities. When I was younger, I took a liking to drawing or painting. Anything I could be creative with, I loved it. I can remember sitting in my shared bedroom with my two other sisters playing dolls, dressing them up in dainty outfits to perform a fashion show for our parents later. As we sat cross legged on the dirty white carpet of our room, we heard our parents arguing. I was much too little to even understand what or why they were fighting. I used strapping on my Bratz dolls sandals as an outlet to drown them out, but next thing I knew we were being summoned downstairs by our barely 20-year-old mother.

My favorite part about painting is the control. I have the power to build, create and destroy. Any piece I put my time and effort into is initially part of me. A part of my personality smeared on a canvas, forever a reflection of me. Essentially it is my creation, and I am responsible for the good and the bad of it. It’s hard starting out as an artist, especially as a child; you have such high expectations of most things in your life, and you don’t grow out of this naïve-ness until you understand you set your own expectations. Trying to draw a hand or a face would frustrate me, because you have the image in your head but your brush to cloth can’t create the exact image. You just have to accept that at that time that is the best I can do. In the future with practice, I might be able to, but as of right now I must not be mad at myself for trying my best. * * *

As my siblings and I ascended the staircase from our rooms, we saw our father with his bags packed by the front door. My father did travel for work often, so this wasn’t an unusual sight for us. We started our routine good-byes as we always did when he left for a work trip. But this time the mood was off The room felt a different color. I could feel the heaviness on my dad’s chest, as if I put too much black paint on my brush causing the shadows to outweigh the highlights. His voice so steady he could draw a line with it, he told me he was leaving for good. With cumbersome amounts of tears coming from my face, I could feel every drop hit the floor as they ran down my cheeks. I begged him to stay with empty promises of being a better child He hugged me one last time and walked out the door. I blamed him, I blamed him for leaving and walking out the door without trying to stay.

As an artist our greatest advantage is forming layers, there are so many ways to interpret what someone has created and why. So many people walk into an art museum and go to the same painting as hundreds of others, but their point of view of the piece itself could be entirely different from the next person. But maybe this is also a disadvantage. Trying to make a point so clear yet no one can see it. That’s how I felt as I grew older, learning about who your parents really are and seeing through the veil of the persona they put on. My father tried to explain many times that he left to make our life easier, I was so set on knowing the reason, so set on seeing the painting and knowing what it meant. But as I matured the painting started to look different, I could finally draw the image in my head correctly: I saw my father in a different light. Realizing after all these years, my had mom painted shadows on the good times we had with him. Writing insults with sharpies on our brains about him, only to write compliments about herself next to them. I know the truth now. After peeling away the dried layers of paint caked on the palette, you see the colors that have always been there, tainting the new paint you place on top of it.

It’s funny how as an adult your views are quite different from when you were a child, how you can learn to hate a food you once loved, or love a parent you once hated. It was my mother in the end who would have been better off leaving and having my father stay. She cheated and kicked him out, the fight I heard as a child was him catching her in the act, but I didn’t find this out until I asked my dad myself. People show their true colors eventually, might as well try and paint a nice picture of yourself instead of a bad one.