The Mum at the Art Class

Have I met her before?

I went to a life drawing class on Wednesday night and I met someone, someone I thought I recognised but not completely. You know that feeling when their name is on the tip of your tongue but you struggle to find it. You search the alphabet A, Anna, no. Abby, no. Beatrice.. I couldn’t place her at first but she was so familiar to me.

She answers to Mum but that isn’t her real name because that can not be all she is. Although, five minutes in and she has mentioned her two kids already. Two under 5 and I feel her pain. It was waiting for her partner to handover that caused her to be late after staying in with them all day. It is half term, she sighs.

This is the same place she attended a baby group, she said, although that was in the entrance foyer, a place I recognised too when I had walked through moments earlier when searching for the class. And perhaps I know her from there except that mum was anxious and fidgeting, seemingly stressed even when her kids behaved like angels. They aren’t always like this, she would say, but this mum is so relaxed; it can’t be her. 

Perhaps she is just feeling confident. She knows the place well, she says, she went to that baby group every week so much so it began to feel like a second home, but we are not the same group of people and yet she seems at home too with us, six women standing together our pieces of charcoal poised in front of a naked man.

As we draw the quiet is punctuated by her long gliding strokes, the kind with a definite beginning and end; calculated and thought through. Perhaps I know her from my year in Bournemouth’s art college in my early twenties but the girl I am thinking of there was so timid she hid behind the easel, afraid to put anything on the paper, terrified she might look the model in the eye.

Sprinklings of a bright purple dust fall onto the grey carpet tiled floor beneath her easel - the brightest colour in the box. I doubt it would be the woman I knew from University either where I studied Graphic Design as she was afraid to stand out despite knowing that was exactly what was needed to get ahead. She was told by the tutor then she was simply too safe and too boring to be remembered and that she may as well forget a career in advertising; that wasn’t going to happen. She would never have chosen a colour to draw with, let alone a purple pastel in a room full of strangers knowing it wouldn’t go unnoticed.

Later when the class facilitator, brimming with warmth and enthusiasm compliments her work she exclaims, “thank you, I’m pleased with that one” and  when I hear the voice I realise that I know exactly who she is, except she has changed since I last knew her as an art student and a graphic design student and then a mum. Changed since those years before children and changed without them clinging to her legs.

The children have taken over her life, she says but it is those same children made her more confident talking to strangers and inspire her everyday to grab hold of life, to not be shy and to take up space in this world. Standing tall while everyone else sits down, proud of a body that birthed them, although still hiding beneath baggy layers.

She would have brushed off a compliment years ago, hiding behind an easel hoping no one would look at her drawing, and yet she acknowledged the compliment with a confidence I didn’t know she had until the words came out of my mouth.

That person was me.

I have changed. When I am alone I feel like a different person both without and because of my children. That felt so clear to me drawing at that easel that evening. It’s funny how going back to something you enjoyed years ago can show you how far you have come.

Go on, I dare you to do the same.

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