Tasha ChemelFINGER-PAINTING WITH GRIEF 1. I have this vision of myself painting. I'm using knives, not brushes, and the paint is as cold and glossy as
glaze on a Devonshire cream cake. My composition has an imperious serenity to it, except for patches here and there,
where the icing appears to be on fire. I don't even know if paint can look like icing. When I ask my mother about it,
a few days later, she tells me that my grandmother used to make paintings like that, and that she used big flat pallet
knives. "Probably," I say. "I just really want to paint the picture in my head." My mother tells me I should find another artist to collaborate with. (Another artist, not her). "You're the idea girl," she says, her dismissal blunt, like a bruise. But I ache for the tangibility of knife meeting canvas. I pinball back and forth, wondering if my mother is dimming my colors, or whether I'm doing the dimming all on my own.
2. I know pathetically little about my Granny Zip, which is sad, considering that my relatives are always exclaiming over how similar to her I am. Her name used to be Fay, but she changed it to Zipora. She loved potatoes and sheep's brains. She had two poodles, and she cooked for them every week, though she rarely cooked for herself. In one of my only memories of her, her dog swallowed my toy, and my loss stung for hours. She was prone to depression, and when my mother was growing up, she spent many of her days in bed, with the curtains drawn.
3. I spent most of my teenage and young adulthood summers bored and listless and drained from job-searching. Sometimes, when my mother found me in bed in the middle of the afternoon, her anger would rear up like a spooked horse. That anger was all the more shocking because it was so out of proportion to my crime.
4. When I was three months old, my father and mother realized that something was wrong with me. I didn't look at them. I didn't sit. I didn't reach for toys. I couldn't clap my hands. The trips to the specialists began, and so did the whispers. "Oh, shame. Poor Jocelyn. Her daughter might have brain damage." During those times, my father was largely absent. He was fighting different demons. My mother would take me to physical therapy at the hospital at the other end of Johannesburg, and then she would come home to her maid, Caroline, and they'd practice what they had learned. Granny Zip loved to spoil me. She was always shouting at my mother for pushing me too hard.
5. My mother must have grieved, like almost all parents of blind children do. South African Jewish culture is more cut-throat and catty and materialistic than that of Beverly Hills, and the whispers must have been difficult to stomach. She must have shed some tears for the unflawed daughter she did not have. She told me that she used to blame herself, that every day, she woke up and wondered if my blindness had somehow been her fault. Her great-grandparents had been cousins. She went to therapy, she said. The therapist must have dissolved her guilt, as if it was a sugar cube in a cup of tea. I bet he went to work on her grief as well, filing it down to shavings of itself. The shavings eventually blew away.
6. We emigrated to America, and I received my official diagnosis. Leber's Congenital Amaurosis. A name and two Latinate terms that meant nothing. At that time, gene therapy was a pipe dream. So my mother turned to books. The books told her that dependence, not blindness, was the true disability.
7. I took to blindness about as badly as a cat takes to water, or, more precisely, the way my artist mother would have taken to it, had she been the unlucky loser of the genetic lottery. Blindness demands a staid predictability that I never had; I have too much of my mother and grandmother's fire fizzing in my veins. When I was five, I told a family friend that I wished, most of all, to see my mommy's face. When I was eleven, I started telling people that my blindness was an administrative error. When I was twenty, I went around saying that if I couldn't see by the time I was thirty, I would end my life. When I was twenty-seven, I learned a new word, transabled, and I came out to myself. My mother was kind to my fire, but there was always a breaking point, and that's when she'd start lecturing me about my bad ati-chood. I came to hate the way she said that word, its dragged-out third syllable reminding me of food that had been swallowed, half-digested, and then spit back up.
8. On long car rides, at the dinner table, lying next to her in bed on Sunday mornings, I would try to force my mother into an encounter with our resemblance. I wanted her to understand that I'm not merely a blind person who wishes to see, but a sighted person in a blind body. "That's just a story," she said. "That's your choice. To look at it that way."
9. Last year, when my mother was cleaning out the basement, she found a book of poems she had written at university. Her poems were about masks and the destruction of those masks. She ripped at apartheid, as if it were a piece of cheap notebook paper. I asked her why she had stopped writing. She told me she had given up the urge to constantly question things. "Such a waste of energy," she said.
10. I think I am more angry at my mother's therapist than I am with her. He took away something we could have shared.
11. If I can't make paint harden like icing, I want to finger- paint with my mother's grief, warm and thick and familiar, because it is my grief as well.
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