When my daughter and I sat down beside each other to paint on Mother’s Day, it felt familiar in a way I hadn’t expected. We had done this at least a dozen times before. We knew what it was to sit together with our own canvases and paint, but it had been a very long time since we’d had the chance. I held back tears more than once that day.
I had lost my daughter for three years. She came back, and we’d had a Mother’s Day or two together since then, but this was something we used to do. She wanted to do it again, and she wanted to do it on Mother’s Day. In my head, that felt like a little victory. After the years when I had not been allowed to be her mother, here she was choosing to spend that day beside me.
When she was younger, we sometimes painted canvases that belonged together. We each worked on one, and when we put them side by side, they made a larger picture. When I saw the mommy and baby giraffe painting, I knew that was the one I wanted us to do. One canvas held the baby and one held the mommy. We would each paint our own, and then bring them together.
Eleven years earlier, she had covered our Mother’s Day LOVE painting in dots while I sat beside her worrying that she was ruining it. Those dots became my favorite part. Now we were sitting beside each other again, and for the first time in all our years of painting together, hers was better than mine. I can admit that. Apparently, she had been growing up while I was waiting to get back to this.
We laughed and we cried. We made a candle, too, and named it Hugs. I kept finding myself back in that familiar feeling of being next to her, doing something we had done so many times before. During those three years apart, I would not have believed someone who told me we would have another day like this. I wanted it, of course. But wanting something and believing it will happen are very different things.
I kept reaching out anyway. I texted and called, and I never stopped loving her, even when I didn’t know whether any of it was reaching her. She has since told me it was. My continuing to be there made a difference, even when she couldn’t acknowledge it. I know that now. While it was happening, I had no way of knowing.
The giraffes hang on my bedroom wall beside the painting with her little hand, her little feet, and all those dots. They are my favorite thing about those walls. I see the child she was when we made the first painting, and I remember sitting beside the daughter who chose to paint with me again.
We each painted our own giraffe. Together, they make one picture.
