Understanding is uncomfortable
Learning to honour this series honestly
Resistance
January was meant to be another month of painting progress at my new studio but I had no interest to turn my chair around & work on the next painting behind my desk. A setup i was so happy with & excited to have, but yet I just couldn’t do it. A day became a week, a week that led into 25th February, 2 months later.
Instead of sharing my progress with this series today, I’m sharing announcements & reflection. January became the month I got engaged (yes, yay!) & questioning the kind of woman I want to be. This leads me to the next thing that happened in January.
Resentment
I also went on a family trip with my parents, my partner and his mother. Rather than feeling rested, I felt drained and emotionally heavy. I kept wondering how time away with people you love could feel so difficult. Shouldn’t holidays make us feel relaxed and free to be ourselves?
Growing up, I always saw my mother as strength and grace in one person. She knew how to carry herself like a lady while being fully capable of getting her hands dirty when work demanded it. She owned a successful hawker stall, she worked her bones dry, did it all by herself, & she was never just a worker. People respected her deeply as they should. But its not the kind of experience most people around her had. My mother always knew who she was. She worked relentlessly for the life she built & treated every hardship as something that refined her, lifted her higher & grounded her deeper.
I admire her endlessly.
I felt pain from seeing her pain. I’ve always expected her to know who she was, because when she didnt, she’d admit it, but for the first time in my adult life, she didn’t.
I love her deeply, yet I am still angry. I admire her strength, yet I feel small beside it. When she poured her emotions into me, telling me how I had hurt her, it hurt even more because I was trying so hard. Trying to understand. Trying to do better. Make her proud. The four year old version of me still exists in moments like this.
Unresolved
Processing this alongside growing work commitments for the year ahead made it impossible to return to the canvas. Even with my new studio setup, I could not bring myself to paint. I kept asking how I could honour a series about her while sitting inside resentment & unresolved pain. Especially this piece. This piece sits too closely to what happened between us in Vietnam.
Spending ten days with family showed me how we all separately challenge a new love we want to share. Though we still share rituals from childhood, shared meals, errands, humour and sarcasm, we’re all obligated to learn how to understand one another again as adults if we want to stay close as a family.
On a long car ride, stretched across the back seats of our van, I tried to understand my mother fully. I analysed every word and gesture. I could tell she didnt know who she was in that moment. I thought about it for a long time. In the end, I gave up, because I only know her as my mother, not as the girl she was before being my mother, and if she wasn’t going to tell me, & i wasn’t going to ask or apologise.. Perhaps that is enough thinking for now.
Honesty
I guess I had been trying to paint motherhood as something perfect. Highlighting tenderness while hiding complexity. I was eager to show my reverence, but I can’t do it now without truth.
This post just forced me back into reflecting on the matter i’ve been avoiding through work, teaching me that understanding is a process that is painful until there is peace. The discomfort I feel right now only reveals where honesty has been lost. And maybe that honesty is where this series truly matters. Perhaps I should paint more truthfully.
In a way, no one is going to sit around waiting for me to feel ready. And it is not for anyone else anyway. This work is about my mother, my experiences & my voice. What does it matter if it takes time or looks like crap? its about my mother, my experience, me. What does it matter ? it’s just a bunch of paintings.
I could probably get back on it in April, & hopefully I succeed in understanding by then, or hopefully my emotions now carry onto the progress of my work & actually deepens it.
