Throwing my mother's artwork in the dumpster
And reclaiming my own life
Two years after my mother died, I made the heartbreaking (and liberating) decision to throw a small box of her artwork in the dumpster. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have. I had to. I miss every piece of it.
My mother was a painter, mostly - and a poet - but this box contained four works in fabric that I especially loved. After they were gone I found that, even though technically I’d discarded them, I couldn’t quite let them go. I missed them - in that way that I have (so often) of not appreciating something (or someone) until they’re no longer there. Grief is funny-not-funny that way.
I wanted to honor these works of art, now that I’d discarded them. So, I did some research to find out how, if they had been displayed in an art gallery, a curator might describe them. Perhaps, in this way, I can put back into the world something that I wish was still here - four pieces of artwork that I liked a lot and a mother I loved in a complicated way. Someone who managed, in spite of her own childhood, which broke her heart, to love me.
Was this really what “White Nightgown” was about? Who knows? I was a teenager and not paying attention at the time. Bitter and resentful and full of spite, I missed the opportunity to ask her. Of the four pieces in this collection, ‘White Nightgown’ was my favorite. I always wanted it. I had it. Then, I threw it away.
I wasn’t supposed to have these pieces of my mother’s work - they belonged to her art estate, which was managed by her executor, my mother’s best friend who was also her psychiatrist. As my mother’s will explains, even though my sisters and I inherited everything we couldn’t. . . have it. If there is a better metaphor for my relationship with the woman who brought me into this world and with whom I spent the next 60 years in a dance of approach-avoidance, I cannot imagine it.
The will allowed my sisters and me one piece each— one painting, one mono print, one sketch. Other than that, Mom’s executor-friend-psychiatrist told us, “You may not remove the artwork from the estate.” The reason for this? “Your mother was a genius. It’s a crime when a talent like this goes unrecognized. I promised I would make her famous.”
When we visited our mother’s apartment to sort through her belongings - one sister flying in from California, the other (who doesn’t drive) making the long commute from Brooklyn to White Plains by train and me, a 20-minute jump across the Hudson River - the best friend/psychiatrist/executor came with us. She sat there, on the uncomfortable green sofa, watching as we sorted through our mothers books and photo albums, tableware and bedding. She watched as we boxed up our mother’s paints and brushes, pastels and pencils; as we lay claim to the cigar boxes filled with tiny treasures: flattened watches, old coins, rusted keys. As we divided our mother’s office supplies and sorted through the CDs she listened to, as we stacked and tied up the magazines she’d read, the executor (or that one time when she couldn’t be there, her daughter) watched.
We packed our selections into cartons which the moving service we’d hired, delivered to our homes. On delivery day, I received my mother’s sewing box, several cartons of art supplies and housewares and the ‘kindergarten cabinet’, an 8-foot storage unit with 24 deep drawers, which my mother had purchased when my elementary school was turned into condos. It arrived fully stocked with my mother’s collections: a drawer of broken china, a drawer of china doll body parts.
We took everything we wanted — everything but the artwork, which we couldn’t have.
We couldn’t have the paintings, the small sculptures, the mono prints that lay stacked in flat files. We couldn’t have our mother’s journals, her sketchbooks, her letters. We couldn’t have the watercolor pads stuffed with images from our own childhoods.
We couldn’t have her poetry: cartons of metaphor and whispered meaning, typed on onion skin paper, marked with the bird tracks of our mother’s pencil marks.
That’s okay, I soothed myself. I have her handwriting on other things: the wildlife calendars she never discarded, the labels of her spice jars. I’m still finding her notes in the margins of books that I inherited from her shelves. Her handwriting was, and still is, everywhere.
Maybe. I don’t know. My mother was always sending messages this way: pulsations of whale song through the murky space between us. For years, I have tried to decode her language - the muttered musings by the sink, the complaints (hidden in her poetry) about how her life was and how it should have been. Now I have discovered, too late, that the key to her secret language was right there, hidden in plain sight, on the walls.
I took photos of the four fabric pieces, emailed my sisters, my daughter, my son. “Do you want these?”
“No, thank you,” they replied, politely but firmly, all of them better at setting boundaries than I. All of them more clear about the way that other people’s artwork can cleave onto the surface of our lives, endlessly generating coins of fragile, inexplicable meaning. All of them more cognizant of the way that things that appear to be dead and buried are still (very much) alive.
I think I get this one. It’s about marriage. It’s about acedia, the endless waiting for other people to finish speaking before you speak, to finish growing up before you can expand, to finish leaving home before you can finally arrive.
I imagine my mother making it. She is sitting by the fire. Embroidery hoop on her lap, stabbing her needle in and out of the canvas while my father watches football on television. It was such a special piece. It’s in a landfill now - a woman dancing in her favorite skirt, her bare feet stomping on a pile of jingle shells, her shoulders luminous under the full bright moon.
I had these pieces on a technicality, carried home long before she died, before we knew about the will, which made my having them a kind of crime. (Is it actually against the law for me to have this? I asked myself more than once. Should I bring it back to the apartment and, like, slip it in under the worktable beside the easel? )
I’d packed them into the trunk of my car along with two sets of bed linens Mom said I could have. This was back when I was staying overnight at her apartment. This was after the open heart surgery and the fall that cracked her thigh bone: the femur, a word that I learned while helping my mother get through the series of painful accidents and infections she endured after we saved her life.
I had the weekend shift. I’d arrive Friday afternoon and send her aide home til Sunday evening. Mom would sit at the kitchen table, sipping black coffee and chatting, as I prepared our meals. Later, we’d sit on the (uncomfortable) green sofa, reading or maybe watching a movie on Roku. She saved her movie watching for me - mostly because she couldn’t figure out how the TV clickers worked.
We slept in the same bed holding hands. She had nightmares then and finding me there, “Oh, Amy,” she’d sigh, and fall back to sleep.
When she moved to her psychiatrist-friend-executor’s house, after yet another aide resigned, I stayed in the apartment alone. There was her cat to take care of and her plants to water. I liked being there, surrounded by her things, her colors, her smells. Also, if I’m honest - and I’m wanting to be - I liked being away from my husband. We do better with a little break now and then, a change to the samey-same rhythms of a long marriage.
While there, I organized the photo albums and refolded the tablecloths. I washed the crystal goblets and realigned them in the new kitchen cabinets she’d had less than a year to enjoy. I did the laundry (in the cellar) and carried the trash to the incinerator chute at the end of the hall.
All of this I did in a kind of suspended animation, as if Mom had just stepped out for a moment. My children’s crayon drawings still hung from frig magnets. Their photos greeted me each time I reached for the butter: Max, holding his American Girl doll (upside down), Katie hugging my mother’s black and white cat, and their cousin Ceru in his sun hat, his bright eyes full of questions.
With her post-it notes affixed to the wall, her wine still in the rack, her orange marmalade, French lentils, artichoke hearts still on the pantry shelves, it was easy (at first) to imagine she’d be right back.
I drank her wine. I tried on all of her clothes. Nothing fit me, not really. In a strange, mirror image, I’d gained the weight - three dress sizes - that she’d lost since the surgery. I sorted through her jewelry. Ropes of pretty but worthless beads. Amber. Blue glass. Painted wood. There was a black case — lined in velvet, filled with clip on earrings, each pair in its own small square — which she must have purchased at a thrift store (magpie that she was) or perhaps, they were given to her by Esther, whose ears weren’t pierced like Mom’s. I took the case home along with her wedding ring and a single gold chain. That’s all that was left - if there was any more, it was missing by then. “Pinched by the help,” as Mom claimed or, more likely, lost down a drain or forgotten in a pocket.
Maybe I made this one. Maybe one of my sisters made it. Maybe it was a study of Mom’s. Who knows? It’s in the dumpster now. I’m sorry. I was angry. She is free. And I am letting her secret magic language go. I can’t care this much and also live my own life.
In the weeks before it was discarded, the red box had sat on the floor of the living room, part of the pile of my mother’s belongings that I was slowly sorting through. Though I hated the clutter, I noticed when any part of that stack was moved and one day, “Where’s the red box?” I asked my husband.
He pointed skyward, a gesture I could have interpreted as a reference to Heaven or the way that our parents hover over us, even after they’re gone but I knew what he meant and, exasperated, I unfolded the ladder and hauled the box down from the attic.
The box was tattered now, and covered in cello tape, but I could almost remember it shiny and new, beneath a Christmas tree, with a cuddly robe or bright jacket inside. Something my mother would have selected for herself and packed up for Dad to present on the holiday. It would have been magenta, teal or royal blue. Those were her colors - but also, acorn and nutmeg, cinnamon and that pale blue green that always reminds me of the ocean. She was an artist. Color was her way of saying what couldn’t be said.
I knew she was dying. I knew we’d be left to sort through it. Having already done this when she’d moved from our family home to this apartment, I knew how enormous this task would be. So, even though a part of me half-believed she would return, the larger part of me knew she wasn’t coming home.
Which is why I brought the red box home with me - along those bed linens she’d never sleep on again, the plants, which needed watering, a box of photos of my children that I’d never seen before and a Blue Dutch oven to replace the one of mine that had chipped.
Inside the box, the tapestries were divided by white tissue paper. I imagined my mother folding and placing them carefully. I imagined her carrying it to the bedroom closet, setting it beside the white Lord & Taylor gift box with a long stemmed red rose that contained her wedding dress.
The dress, which she’d sewn herself from a Simplicity or Butterick pattern, was a cap-sleeved, tea length confection of white cotton lace over pink satin. In the black and white photographs of the ceremony in my grandmother’s garden, the Queen Anne neckline framed her beautiful face. The elegant ballet skirt flared out around her — around me, when I, one day, tried it on. Had she saved it for my wedding? In the photo, her youthful beauty haunted, even then by something across the brow, in the eyes - she wore it with a white beaded cap and a short veil. She looked like Elizabeth Montgomery, the actress who played Samantha Stevens on “Bewitched”. Heart-shaped face, button nose, huge brown eyes. She was a lovely bride.
Those boxes were there whenever I ran in to borrow a purse or a pair of shoes (we wore the same size until my feet swelled during pregnancy). Alongside a third box - striped red, green and gold — that was filled with smaller treasures she’d made: the wool felt ornaments, the flat mother and father dolls in blue gingham overalls, their heads embroidered with yellow french knots. Where is that box? Where is that flat family? And where are the dollhouses our mother built for all three of us that Christmas? That’s the artwork I want now.
Years ago, when I was visiting the house in Great Neck with my children, Mom took me out to her studio in the garage and showed me how to make mono prints. On a large (11x17) plate of glass, she painted freehand, sticking to her usual themes: Five- sided houses, children with haunted eyes, symbols in boxes, bugs and birds.
When the image was ready, we transferred it. She let me choose between three paper colors: pearl white, smokey gray, lichen green. She showed me how to align the sheet of paper to the corners of the glass; how to press the two surfaces together with a black rubber roller. It was like ironing, pressing out the wrinkles. “Put a little more pressure there,” she instructed as the ink soaked into the porous paper.
As we peeled the print away, the glass released the paper with a wet slurp— the sound of a kiss. Mom always made a second print, she told me. There was enough ink still on the glass. She called the second print a shadow. For every print she made there were at least two shadows. I liked those more.
But I can’t have them. They’re in the flat files in her apartment. All the prints and their multiple shadows.
The tattered red box migrated for several months - from the corner of my living room to a dining room chair to the coffee table and back to the living room. Every time I noticed it, I felt a pinch. Love? Guilt? Memory? It landed, finally, on the table beneath the mirror where I look at myself every morning before I face the world.
I was looking into my own eyes when the pinch came. Love? Guilt? Memory? I picked up the box. I carried it out the back door. I walked to the dumpster, lifted the lid and dropped it in.
No one else would ever see this work. No one would else would know. This was between me and my mother - a gift she’d given only to me. Throwing it into the dumpster (finally) made it mine.
This was an incredibly written piece. And what a story. The beauty + dread of such a time. The emotional tugging into all the different spaces in time. The befores. The afters. Your siblings. Your description of each. I felt them all. I could smell and see those spaces clearly. So good. Beautiful, Amy.