On turning into my mother

By Genevieve Beyleveld

The earliest memories I have of my mother were of her sitting in her office working.  Her office was next to my bedroom and I would always feel at peace drifting off to sleep, with a slither of gold light peering tentatively through my door. Most nights I would fall asleep long before the light went off. These nights were my favorite. She would sit at her desk past midnight, humming to herself as she worked.  It was only when I was 11 years old that I realized my mother didn’t have a job.

Every house we lived in, my mother would carve out an office of some sort for herself. When the house did not have a designated room for her work, she created a small office on the mezzanine floor, dangling precariously above the family room. Each morning, after she dropped my sister and me at school she would come home and get ready for her day. She showered and washed her hair, most days curling it into a wild bush of coils. She would apply her make- up religiously and finish off the look with a bright red lipstick. She was in her forties and home alone with five dogs.

When I returned from school, I would find her sitting behind her desk, sometimes with a glue gun and mosaic tiles, other times with an easel and paintbrush, and on the odd occasion with a note pad and pen. She glued each tile with no less importance than the last; accurately and carefully, breathing a slight sigh of relief when it stuck perfectly to her canvas.

I had always meant to ask her what she did in her office until late at night, but I never did.  On a deeper level, I realized that this office was hers and that the work which she created within those four, butter colored walls, was for no one but herself. It was her room of creation, a room to which she could escape the mundaneness of suburban housewifery.  I don’t think it was that she believed in her art, as much as the fact that she believed in her self-worth. She knew that in order to survive twenty years of marriage, three children (one lost), five dogs and a parrot, she needed a place of her own in which to create.

As someone who wishes to be a writer, I am always asked the same frightening question, “how are you going to make money?”  Those words never cease to jolt me out of my creative security. In truth, I have no idea how I am going to earn a living, or whether the words I tussle with daily, shall find a place on someone’s bookshelf between Stein and Nabokov. Perhaps I will be a housewife, who spends her days reading her work to a Schnauzer, only to crumple it up and throw it in the bin numerous times before her children come home from school.

I am uncertain about many things regarding my career choice, except for one. Why I have chosen it.  I choose it because I cannot picture myself doing anything else with my days. It is important – going boldly in the direction of your dreams –  and for this reason, I created a writers chopping block for myself. My white desk stands in the corner of my room, piled high with books. A black and white photograph of Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” hangs on the wall above my desk, and a pristine white orchid finishes off the cleanly cluttered look. A dog’s bed is at my feet, in which Master Fifi, my Chihuahua snores loudly. This is where I sit and engage in a torrid love affair with words.

Many nights, long after the sun has set, one can find me, sitting at my desk with the night lamp burning. Sometimes I am reading, other times writing. If you had to stand and peer at me through the door, you would notice just how much I look like my mother.