Listen to Your Own Opinion
In February 2020, just weeks prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, my husband and I spent several days at my parent’s home as a late Christmas gift to them, the gift of time. We live a couple of hours away and decided collectively that mom needed some help organizing and setting up her craft room that had gone unused for years. She’d been cranking out handmade goods for every charity under the sun for years, all while using other spaces in the house and at their church. It seemed like the perfect way to spend some quality time with mom, working on what she loves doing the most. She loves making beautiful, useful things for other people, and frankly has been giving Mother Theresa a fair run on sainthoods for quite some time now. The MacGyver of crafts, the Maria Von Trapp of good will unto others, mom is a lean, mean crafting machine. I, on the other hand, love making my surroundings and environment beautiful and useful in order to attempt to be creative enough to actually create something somewhat beautiful and perhaps useful.
Mom and I both got excited about the potential of the project, and began planning how we would spend our time when I got there. As I had worked several years in the interior design industry in a prior career, I figured I was the business end of this horse. Every minute I spent there needed to count. We had to be efficient, thoughtful, and organized. We needed a plan of attack complete with a checklist, Pinterest board, paint supplies, meal plans to sustain us, and ways to put my dad and husband to work. But most importantly… we needed “the before pictures” of the war room!
And then mom sent the before pictures of the war room…s. War rooms. Plural rooms. Did you know Churchill had war rooms? The irony is that their rooms are both located in a basement, both store historical materials and both had eventually been abandoned. I felt like I had just been handed the assignment of single-handedly decoding Enigma to win the war. I had four days.
We arrived late on a Wednesday night to get an early start the next morning. First order of business before bed was a brief tour of the debris field… war rooms, I meant war rooms! The intention was to assess where to start and how well it fit into our neat and tidy checklist. Fifteen minutes later the checklist was carelessly tossed aside and I went to bed, rocking myself into a restless sleep as my brain played Tetris, Craft Edition all night.
The following morning, coffee in hand, I headed down to the basement in camo pants and a tank top that looked like it had been dragged down the road under a horse trailer. The original fashion statement I had intended was headed in the direction of an Instagram worthy #Get’rDone #DirtyGirl #KickingAssandTakingNames. But with my confidence rattled during the previous night’s debrief, at least now I figured I could just blend in and hide. But no one in the history of mankind has ever successfully hidden from their mother so it was time to get down to business. I was tempted, at first, to get a little revenge on my mom by doing to her what she did to us kids when we hadn’t cleaned our rooms. While we were in school, she would put every last thing we owned into a huge pile in the middle of our bedroom, and we couldn’t go anywhere until we picked it all up and put it away properly. Except mom had already made a huge pile in the middle of her room and had unwittingly punished herself.
We got to work, set up donation boxes for various charities and spent all day sorting, stacking, tossing, and trying to establish some semblance of organization. Typically sorting by “like” item (the Marie Kondo way) makes sense. But do you know how many different craft types there are? Something like 127,526,588,732,925 (yes, that’s trillion) items that are all DIFFERENT! And every single one of them has glitter on them. Which is then on you, the great glitter bearer, the giver and taker, the herpes of craft supplies that you’ll never, ever be rid of – and here’s where you call in the husband, “hey hon-sweetie-pie, can you help me for a minute? It involves power equipment!” Boom, boom, boom, instant stampede down the stairs. “Here, step outside with me. I want you to blow me off… with the leaf blower… okay power that baby up! Okay, go up a notch, give me all you’ve got! Um, yeah, okay wait, let’s try the pressure washer. Yeah, I know it’s like 38 degrees out but really, just go for it, crank it up, pink skin is healthy skin! Hey mom, are your neighbors always this nosey?” And then the sun hits your skin just right and your husband screams in a pitch you’ve never heard before, “OH MY GOD!!! IS THAT GLITTER?!?!”
Okay, so that didn’t actually happen but yeah, my mom is a bona fide glitter fairy. We’re all scared that when she dies, she will leave something in the house, rigged up with glitter to get the last laugh. She’ll request glitter in her ashes. And many, many years later, while having Thanksgiving dinner and reminiscing about the old days, someone will lean across the table and say to a grandchild, “hey, you uh, you’ve got like glitter on your eyelid.” And with a small tear in their eye they’ll say, “yeah, that’s a little bit of grandma, the scattering of the ashes didn’t quite go as planned so we keep finding little bits and pieces of her every now and then.”
You really have to give older women a lot of credit because they’ve truly developed their sense of self and a zest for life. They know what it means to live a full life, and their happiness relies upon no one except their own ingenuity and desire to create it for themselves. During our four days of cleaning, painting walls and organizing, mom faced some hard questions when deciding what to keep and what to donate or toss. It was obvious that everything had a plan or purpose. “Grandma MacGyver” knew she could make something beautiful out of almost anything. But the reality was there was more than she could get to in a lifetime and the old girl is pushing 80 years old. As we have both gotten older there are occasions when our roles start to reverse and I become the scolding parent and she, the misbehaving child. While she was supposed to be sorting through a box I instead found her wearing a rainbow colored tinsel wig which I promptly told her to donate and she insisted she was keeping, and it’s pretty hard to argue with someone her age who is clearly enjoying herself still playing dress-up. Home team – 1, Visitor – 0.
On day four of the hostage situation I was evaluating a stack of craft supplies in her sunroom and noticed a fairly large framed picture facing backwards. Curious, I picked it up and turned it around. It was a picture I remembered from my childhood that had hung on the living room wall. It was of a little girl, sitting on a black spindle chair and I had always thought it was a picture of me at around six years of age. I had never once looked at it closer or asked about it, I had just assumed it was me. Years passed and I never noticed or considered it again until now. I knelt down and saw it was a signed print 93/100 by an F. Gild. I called to my mom in the other room, “hey mom, this picture of the little girl, who is the artist, F. Gild?” She called back, “it’s Gilot, Françoise Gilot, she was Pablo Picasso’s mistress and she did that painting of their daughter.” I was in complete shock – first, hold on a minute, all this time, that’s not ME?! AND you have a print done by Picasso’s mistress and their bastard child???? This was awesome! My mother, the baptist christian who has never said a swear word in her life and would still be a virgin if immaculate conception had been a real option, was stashing the art of a wanton woman! Mom came into the room and told me that when she was in college in the early 60’s, there was an art show, and she had bought it for $25 and paid another $25 to have it framed. I must have an odd sense of curiosity because, although I started Googling to see what it might be worth, I instead found myself more fascinated by who the child was and to know more about this tawdry mistress!
After a little, actually a lot, of research I found out that while Françoise Gilot had a son and daughter with Picasso during their ten-year relationship, the lithograph was actually of her second daughter, Aurelia with Luc Simon, her husband after Picasso. Not a bastard child of an eccentric artist after all, but the legitimate daughter of a woman who had enough backbone and grit to leave Picasso and make her own fate when no other woman had ever dared to leave him. She took their two children and walked out, never looking back and wrote her memoir in 1964, “Life with Picasso.” Well, hello summer reading List – I’ll be buying this soon!
A recent article in “The Cut” published December 12, 2019, Gilot was interviewed in her New York City apartment where, at 98, she still paints every day. She was quoted “I paint for myself, basically. If people like it, bravo; if they don’t, I don’t care. I don’t really care at all. Sometimes it’s better because then I get to keep it.” I love her tenacity to do what she loves and love what she does.
I’ve learned that the only opinion that really matters about what you do, is your own. My mom is no different in her approach to how she lives her life. We finished cleaning, painting and organizing her craft room that long weekend, had some really good laughs and I think I learned a lot more about my mom in those four days than I thought I knew about her.
As I continue to work on my writing, sewing, gardening, photos, and pursuing all things that embrace the hygge lifestyle, I’m listening to my own opinion. You should listen to yours. No one else knows your story better than you. You uniquely understand what went into the making up of you. Without our rich diversity and owning who we are, the world would not have the beauty it does today. Why wait? Go ahead, make your mark and listen to your own opinion.
Source:
https://www.thecut.com/2019/12/inside-artist-franoise-gilots-apartment-and-art-studio.html
