The three bears’ porridge.
“I love it!” my father said, beaming at me. “Creative. I’ve got fifteen-year-old kids in this class who couldn’t think of that. Marilyn,” he said to my mother, “your ten-year-old daughter is writing better poetry than my class is.”
Melissa got into it as well:
Roses are red,
Violets are orange.
When it rained,
It was a storm.
“Brilliant!” My father applauded. I knew that mine was better. Of course, Melissa was only five, I could concede that. But I believed that my father thought me to be a genius, and it inspired me to start writing poems and stories. I kept many journals, which I never showed my parents despite my desire for their praise. I believed my diaries to be full of secrets that were mine alone, regardless of the irrelevance of the events they recorded.
But I always wrote them with the idea that someone would read them. I remember being in fifth grade and receiving my first diary as a birthday gift. It had a little lock on the outside that you could easily pick. I wanted to make a good impression on my phantom audience. I wanted my future readers to be intrigued by me, to marvel at how exciting a life I was leading, to be impressed by my intellect. If my family ever snooped, I wanted them to be surprised.
So I started making things up. Spicing up my existence. I would casually mention how a police officer had asked for my help to solve a crime and how he had admired my detective skills. I would write about how I had fought off a kidnapper who was attempting to abduct a little kid and how the kid’s parents offered me a reward that I graciously declined. My diary became filled with so much fantasy, which was more interesting to me than the dull normality I actually existed in.
My mother worked as a receptionist in a dental clinic, and she also loved art. When me and Melissa were babies, she created paintings for our rooms: watercolour scenes, flowers, portraits of us. Her stuff was all around the house, really. And her shelves were packed with books on art history. Big heavy books with thick glossy pages filled with paintings. Those books were really something special to me, almost magical.
I remember looking through the books with her, always focusing on the art with children. She’d talk to me about the paintings and the artists, pointing out the colours they used and why they worked well together, complementary colours — you could make blue look brighter by putting orange next to it, things like that. I didn’t really absorb much colour theory, but it was fun that Mom would do crayon drawings with us and let us use her fancy grown-up paints too. I didn’t know any other kids with moms who would do that.
Some of the pictures in the art books were pretty frightening to me when I was little. She’d skip by sections of the book to avoid them, but I’d see quick flashes: Christ being crucified, his haunted eyes and bloody hands. I didn’t like that.
One afternoon when I was about twelve, I was looking through one of her books by myself and I flipped to a page and froze.
The painting was of two women. One wore a blue dress and one wore a red dress. They had pinned a very large man down on a mattress and were obviously struggling with him, and winning. The woman in blue was cutting the man’s neck with a sword, and blood was spilling onto the bed.
I was transfixed. The women looked so calm, so focused. They were working together on this. The title of the painting was Judith Slaying Holofernes. I called my mother into the room.
“Mom, what’s this painting about?”
She looked at it thoughtfully. “I believe Holofernes was a cruel war captain, and Judith is the woman who was sent to kill him to save her village. You know, the artist of this painting is a woman. She’s remembered as sort of a feminist artist who did some very important things for women in her time.”