View From ThE Apple House

History has a way of repeating itself, a fact of which I am mostly glad.

It’s a good way to relive some parts of your life from the past, as well as perhaps correct something you might have overlooked.  When we are in the middle of things, its hard to see exactly what is going on until we are able to step back and view it with our full attention.

All my life I have been creative, but not in the ways of my mother.  My earliest memories are of her sitting at the kitchen table, sharp exacto knife in hand and the smell of glue wafting around her head.  Back then it was plastic models that had captured her attention, but by the time I was ten she had moved on to ceramics.

The house of my childhood was framed with all things ceramic, anything from green Christmas trees, to bunnies at Easter time, to small jewelry cases.  She did statutes that rested precariously on ceramic podiums (not a good idea in the house of a clumsy 10 year old), most often placed in corners of honor to avoid my elbows.   Pretty soon the house would become cluttered and she would have to give them away, only to start all over again.  People became asking my dad if she could paint something for them, as she was too shy to approach anyone herself.  It soon became apparent that she could make money doing this, and my father encouraged her to venture out of the kitchen and into the business world.

When I was eighteen years old, my mother opened her first ceramic shop.   It was a lucrative business and it served her well, providing much needed additional income, as well as an outlet for the social interaction she craved.  The customers she worked with soon became her friends, and her students were always attentive and eager to pay for her expertise and knowledge.   Soon she was featured in magazines, her latest creation or her face smiling back at me from the cover haphazardly thrown across the kitchen table.   She wasn’t in it for the fame or the glory – she was artist and would have done it all for free.

She created different genres of painting and firing, hot gluing fabric dresses and adorning the necklines of ceramic women with pearls or diamond studs.   The money kept rolling in and my father soon joined her when he retired.  They worked together without event for twenty years.

She worked every day of her life until a year before she died, when a stroke forced her to sell her beloved enterprise.  I’m sure it was like losing one of her children, and she was never really the same after that.

I think one of her biggest disappointments was that I did not share her love of ceramics and painting.  My talents were in other areas, but it didn’t stop her from trying to win me over.  I couldn’t care less.

From the time I was 16, she would make me sit at the kitchen table with her while she would try for the umpteen time to teach me how to hold a paintbrush.  I would rather have pushed the paintbrush through my eye and into my brain, but she was relentless.

Standing behind me as I sat in the chair, she would talk slowly and try to guide my hand with the paintbrush held tightly.

“See?” she would say, like she had murmured to students countless times before.

“You can do it.  Just take it slow. You’ll appreciate it when it’s finished.”

Humoring her the best I could, I would (at the bare minimum) be able to paint a tea cup.   You would have thought I was Picasso to hear her tell it, but I knew I just didn’t have what she wanted in me. I had no patience and had the attention span of a flea.  Riddled with ADD before it was ever something to be diagnosed, I could barely sit still.

Finally she gave up, but still wanted me to sit there with her.  I realize now that she merely wanted to spend time with me, but I was too preoccupied with boys and clothes and the next story I was writing in my head.  I did it with resentment, and thought of ways to be released from this prison I felt she kept me trapped in.

One time my vivid imagination freaked her out and she told me to go to bed, freeing me from the torture of having to sit still.

“Hey, ma!”  I said suddenly.  She looked at me with one eye but said nothing, while the other was still fixed on the ceramic piece in her hand. She was painting the hand of yet another small female figurine, something to be part of a display of Romanesque women, with fabric draped across their bosom.

“Ma…” my voice now dropping to a whisper.  “Wouldn’t it be cool if you were painting those fingers of that lady….and all of a sudden…the fingers started moving?”

I fluttered my hands to demonstrate, laughing maniacally.

She put the brush down, looked at the figurine, and then put it down.

She wouldn’t pick it up for a month, and never asked me to join her at the table again.

We laughed about it for many years after, her telling everyone how “Eileen has such a vivid imagination” and how I “…freaked her out.”  It’s a memory I so grateful to have, now that she’s gone.  I’d give anything to be able to sit at the kitchen table again and just watch her paint.

Many years have passed and I now have creative children – two are exactly how she wanted me to be, and I appreciate their talent, knowing full well they have gotten it from her.

So it was with a full heart and a much wiser mind that I was able to sit with my daughter at my own kitchen table last week, even though it was the paintbrush in my eyes to my brain scenario all over again.

“Hey ma” she asked, despite knowing my short patience and even shorter attention span.

“How would you like to sit and string some beads with me?  I am making some bracelets and necklaces for charity and can use the extra hand.  Plus, I haven’t seen you in a while, it would be nice to sit and visit.”

So there we sat, with bead mats covered with different color beads before us. She strung confidently and with purpose, jabbering away and catching up between glasses of wine  while I struggled to not jump up from the table to do something else, anything but that.

With my mother’s guiding hand and her words echoing in the back of my mind, I knew she was coaching me on to finish. I could hear just the hint of laughter and a smile in her voice.

“See? You can do it.  Just take it slow.  You’ll appreciate it when it’s done.”

I did.

History has repeated itself, only this time, I was glad that it did.

My necklace looks hideous, but I wear it proudly.

Because I finished it.