Burnaway

[cont.]
It wasn’t just the technique which was strong. The content was also pretty disturbing. Brendan, seeing the first batch, apologized for pushing her to have the twins, promised to get a vasectomy. She agreed to his offer but was already pregnant again. When he started to apologize again, she grabbed his hands and kissed them. She explained to him that she wasn’t actually angry about the pregnancies: it’s just that art is a way of taking any irritants in her life and turning them into beauty. He of course didn’t really see the images of puking pooping babies as exercises in beauty. “Brendan, you know I love the girls and I have no regrets about having them. I can’t imagine life without them. But remember how you said you didn’t like to talk at length about problems because that had a tendency to make them bigger, more important sounding than they actually are? Art is like that. I take one aspect and analyze it under a magnifying glass, making it monstrous when in reality it isn’t. All of this is exaggeration, like fiction.” And indeed these retching babies did not look like her adorable little gullywugs, although a few of them looked a lot like her mother.
She was so incredibly relieved when the drawings sold, in part because she could avoid asking her parents for financial help. Since her uncle died, she had not really been in contact with them. They didn’t even know she was married, much less that they had grandkids. That news would have them descending like locusts. She sent them what she had always sent them: show announcements, Christmas cards and birthday cards with nothing personal included, just enough they wouldn’t bother her. Brendan’s parents were a little shocked about that. His mother in particular wanted to facilitate a reconciliation. Lori told them they were the parents she had always wanted and begged them to leave it be. She simply couldn’t withstand any more stress in her life. There were too many nights as it was spent staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep because of financial problems. Her parents would make her life harder.
She was so lucky. Look at all these good pieces taped up on the wall. Everyone seemed surprised at how much work she was producing. All of the other women artists she knew who had kids basically couldn’t work for the first few years. Too much to do, too exhausted, too many hormones. They didn’t have Brendan and his mother to help. But then they also didn’t have collection agencies calling every night threatening them about abandoned mortgages. Besides, while she was in the studio drawing, the real world and all its worries were held at bay.
She would take some time off once these three pieces were done. The baby was due in just under five weeks. She kept pushing because once the baby was born, she would be worthless for three or four months. Nursing was exhausting. No getting around that. And besides, she wanted to make sure the girls still felt special and properly adored and she also needed time to bond with the new baby. Yeah, she’d take a break after these three were finished. If Brendan got the job he just interviewed for, she might even take off a bit more time afterward. She laughed at herself for pretending she could actually choose when to stop working. Here she was, big, as big as she had been with the twins. Maybe not as wide, but she stuck out in front as much. How could she possibly continue when she couldn’t get close to draw anymore? Another half inch around the middle and she practically wouldn’t be able to reach the wall. That’s an exaggeration, but look at the studio floor, totally littered with pencils and erasers she had dropped and couldn’t pick up. She could only wear her clogs now because she couldn’t even see her feet any more, much less tie shoe laces. Another half inch around the middle and she would be pretty much worthless in the studio whether she wanted to be there or not. And every time she dropped a pencil, every single time, damned if it didn’t break the lead. Brendan would come out in the evening and pick everything up, help her sharpen the pencils. He was such a mother hen, suggesting that she should go to a doctor and make sure everything was ok, but they would need every bit of their credit line just to pay for the delivery. Even that was based on help from his parents and selling at least some of these pieces. She had nightmares of herself in labor, standing at the window in the hospital with the receptionist telling her that her credit cards were maxed out and they couldn’t admit her.
She waddled over to one of the three drawings taped to a “dirty” wall and stopped her mad scribbling after a few minutes. Drawing at arm’s length exhausted her shoulders and focusing on the tight parts had started giving her a headache. She’d never had headaches before last month. But it figured. On top of everything else, she probably needed glasses. It would have to wait. After the baby was born and paid for. After Brendan found a job. After these drawings sold. After replacing the bald tires on the van. That had to happen before the rainy season started up. Stop worrying, she told herself, focus on the drawings.
When she stood up to resume work, she was light headed. This had been going on for most of the week. She figured it was her blood sugar level. Her appetite had dropped off but then she’d been eating non stop for months. That was probably why she’d gotten so big. She was eating less these last couple of weeks because whenever she ate, she got heartburn. It was easier if she didn’t eat. And she needed to pee every half hour. This one kicked more than the other two combined. She held on to the back of the chair until the dizziness passed and promised herself she could take a break and eat some of the cookies Brendan’s mom had brought over as soon as she finished this one little section of the drawing. She had momentum going. Best not to quit quite yet.
Brendan and his parents had taken her little rug rats out to run and cavort on the beach to give her the uninterrupted time she needed to complete the work. Cavort, that was one of Brendan’s words. He knew she needed the uninterrupted time. When they were older, she’d get them to help her start pieces but right now they were a double dose of distraction, tall enough to get into everything but not old enough to heed warnings. She’d found out the hard way a couple of months ago that some of these pencils were small enough to go into little mouths. Fortunately, she’d gotten there in the nick of time. Now that she was too big to rush anywhere, they had to stay out of the studio.