The spirit of Amah

As long as I could remember, I'd always wanted to be an artist. As a child, I was constantly drawing and my classmates would look at my drawings and ask me if I was going to be an artist when I grew up. Yes, I'd answer, over and over again, until it became woven into the fabric of my being. I spent my childhood convinced that I would spend my adulthood as an artist, even though I didn't know what that meant.

I suppose my parents thought it was a childish fantasy that I would outgrow, like girls' love for pink or boys' wanting to be firemen. But, at the age of twenty-six, after years of struggling to meet my parents' expectations, I finally pulled out my dream, dusted it off, and began the journey of giving it the attention it had always deserved.

So, I left the field of architecture and after a period of suffering as a starving artist, I managed to secure employment with a decorating/mural painting company in Toronto. I also recall having a conversation then with my mother where I was yet again trying to convince her that I was on the right path. Much to my shock, she agreed. In retrospect, I think she was still fully sceptical that I would be able to sustain a life as an artist, but she had finally recognized the fact that I was an adult with sufficient strength to go after dreams and to handle the disappointments. After years of looking out for me, she was able to let go. Her job was done.

A year later, she began her terrible descent into a mental illness that completely thrashed and destroyed the threads that held our family together. My father suffered the most, and yet, has remained steadfastly devoted to this day. When her paranoia began, he was almost sixty and was forced to take early retirement from his lifetime job as a schoolteacher, because it wasn't possible for him to continue working when there was a crazy woman at home calling his school everyday to ask the principal or other teachers if they had seen my father with his girlfriend.

My mother has been in a nursing home for the last 8 years. Her body is now rapidly deteriorating and who knows what the state of her mind is. She doesn't say anything anymore to my father when he visits her every day to spoon-feed her the homemade soup of soft seafood and vegetables. My father is trying to cope with his depression, as he sees his one remaining responsibility in his life slip away.

Throughout my youth, as we battled with opposing views, I never believed that my mother and I would ever see eye to eye on anything. She embodied the polar opposite of what I valued. She liked expensive, fancy clothes and jewelry, a big house in suburbia with a large master ensuite, a BMW, and vacations in casino resorts. She admired and respected people who were rich just because they were rich. She believed that the best careers were in medicine and engineering. I still don’t agree with or desire any of these things, but now that I am a mother myself, with my own hopes and dreams for my son, I can finally see where she was coming from. I also have to agree with my parents' view that it is very hard to make a living as an artist. And I did have the strength to handle the disappointment. It has been a journey and through the ups and downs, I developed skills, gained experience and I still have my talents. I know now what I am capable of, and I recognize my creative energy doesn't have to be limited to visual art. And from the years of holding onto a dream, I've cultivated determination and perseverance.

Along the way, I also found compassion for my mother. And sympathy for her dreams. And empathy for her disappointments. She too had been extremely creative and dexterous with her hands. She shared many of the talents and skills that I have, but she never tried to make a living from them, perhaps because she didn’t know how or because the barriers of language and foreign culture were just impossible for her to overcome or, perhaps because she didn't see the value in it. I realize now and completely identify with the fact that she did have a desire to make something of her own life and came up short of her expectations, and I can even see why she sometimes blamed my father for her own shortcomings. I can see all this, and for once, not let it cast a shadow over my own life.

-MO