The Lessons of Being a Parent and Being a Parent

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A few nights ago I was chatting I told a friend about summer plans, and she mentioned that her first priority was trying to schedule time to visit her mother, who lives in another country. I remembered that she had recently made the long trip for her mother’s birthday and asked her if everything was alright with her elderly father. Yes, my friend explained, but after the long period of confinement in which no one could travel, she now felt an urgent need to see her mother more. And since her mother didn’t want to move, my friend simply had to take more long-haul flights, even though she didn’t like the constant travel and her life was busy between her own job and raising her own children here in New York. York, thousands of miles away.

I could relate to that. My own mother lives just a train ride away, but over the past year, I, too, have felt the need to visit her more and more, even if, during those visits, it only takes a casual comment from her to make me feel. like an annoying teenager again. As I get older, I am reminded more and more that she is getting older too, and despite the sometimes challenging dynamics of our relationship, I have an internal compulsion to spend more time with her. She made me think about how delicate and complicated the relationship between parent and child can be, and how it changes throughout life.

In the double portrait of David Hockney “My Parents” (1977), the British artist paints a domestic scene that one imagines reflects his vision of the central aspects of his parents’ personalities, and how he understood the relationship between them. The artist’s father, head bent over a magazine in his lap, is slightly more in the foreground of the canvas, though his attention is clearly diverted from the artist, the viewer, and his own wife sitting next to him in the image. . His feet aren’t completely on the ground, as if he’s restless and impatient to be released. This is a person completely in her own world, despite being in the presence of her family.

Hockney’s mother sits erect to the left of the canvas, feet together on the floor, hands folded in her lap, intent on her son, the painter. Her expression is obedient and complacent, as if she is used to this role. A green sideboard on wheels stands between them. On its surface there is a tray with a vase of flowers and a desktop mirror. In the reflection we can see a partial view of a small replica of a painting on the opposite wall, the “Baptism of Christ” by Piero della Francesca. On the bottom shelf is a stack of books, including one on the 18th-century artist Jean-Siméon Chardin, famous for his own seemingly simple paintings of domestic scenes that were nonetheless charged with emotional energy.

This image shows a couple together in a way that has proven to be tenable but also perhaps distant, with a hint of dissatisfaction or unspoken sadness. Hockney, born in 1937, painted this when he was 40 years old. But he had begun a portrait two years earlier called My Parents and Myself, which included his own mirror image. He abandoned that painting, which upset both parents.

The image speaks to a courageous aspect of parenting: you must release your child into a world where you don’t have the means to protect him.

I wonder how Hockney might have painted his parents when he was 20, barely a man, learning to experience the ups and downs of adulthood, or in his 60s. For most of us, the way we view our parents, their relationship With between us and for us, it changes as we go through our own life experiences.

When I turned 31 or 32, I remember realizing that I was the same age my mother was when she made the decision to take her life and ours in a new direction, eventually moving to a new country. I had a completely different perspective on my mother and this situation than I had before. As children, we believe that our parents have all the power and unlimited options in the remote adult world they occupy. Now there was room for a little more compassion in my assessment, because by then I had experienced what it was like to be an adult who was not in full control of life’s circumstances.

How could any of us paint portraits of our own parents at our current stage of our lives compared to when we were younger? What would we include? How would we illustrate the way we imagine them in relation to ourselves?

I was struck by the dazzling work. “Melanie and Me Swimming” (1978-79) by British painter Michael Andrews. Based on a photograph of the artist and his daughter, the image shows a father waist-deep in a river teaching his youngest son to swim. The father’s attention is focused on her daughter as he grasps her arms, steadying her as she splashes all over her little legs. Thick locks of brown hair fall over her face as she smiles, terrified and delighted at the same time. The water is dark and we can barely see what is below.

There is so much metaphor in this painting of how we make it through life. Even though this girl could probably stand at such a shallow depth, she still looks to her father for guidance, as he will in the future when she is far from dry land. But she may not always have that support. She sometimes she will have to depend on herself. This is a swimming lesson, but it’s also a survival lesson.

What’s so terrifying and moving about this image, though, is how it speaks to another courageous aspect of parenting. Over and over again, she must release her son into an unknown world where she simply doesn’t have the means or control to protect him. This can happen at any time in a child’s life, even for adult children who, due to developmental problems or life choices, may still need active support and nurturing. And some parents face this terror more consistently because of how the world is socialized to see and treat children who look just like their own.

“Smile II” by Shaina McCoy, A 30-year-old artist based in Minneapolis, it’s a small painting at 5 inches by 7 inches, but I was immediately drawn to it as I walked through her current exhibition in New York, The look. Two little girls are facing each other. One girl is dressed in a colorful polka dot tank top and mauve shorts, her braided hair held up by a pink barrette. She holds a camera up to her eyes and kneels in front of the other child, a little boy dressed in a white dress that falls off one shoulder and takes a picture of her.

McCoy doesn’t paint faces on his figures, but we still get the sense of an intimate scene of both play and training for life. There is something beautiful about both children watching and being watched at this moment. The mutual gaze contains an acknowledgment of belonging, of security, of feeling valued enough to be looked at with interest and care.

No matter how we raise our children to value themselves or to see the beauty in the world, the world will not always return a similar loving gaze.

There are no parents in this painting, but parenting is hinted at by the careful way the girl is dressed, the camera someone taught her to use, and the little boy she knows how to take care of even when playing. We can hint that someone has passed on to this little photographer something about her own worth, about finding beauty in faces like hers and her sister’s, and about taking the time to look and see another person.

But there is also something poignant and heartbreaking about fatherhood in this image. The feeling that no matter how we raise our children to value themselves or to see the beauty in the world, the world will not always return a similar loving gaze. This will be true for many father figures, but even more so for many parents of black children, especially in the US, where we are regularly reminded by the news that we live in a society that does not always treat our children with the consideration that we see them. or we have trained them to see themselves.

I love the fact that McCoy keeps his figures faceless. Discipline would be imagining seeing any child as valuable and being able to give them care no matter what they look like or who they belong to.

This painting also makes me think about the fact that we are all someone’s children. And there are ways in which we still carry within us the children we were, the ways in which we were taught to be in the world, and the lessons we learned, for better and for worse, from parents as human as ours. adult selves to be.

What we do with those teachings and lessons is the upbringing that we all have to learn to do with ourselves. Sometimes this means reviewing the ways we were raised and acknowledging which of the lessons we learned from our parents prevent us from having life-giving patterns and relationships now. Sometimes it means remembering and reclaiming the powerful and positive teachings that remind us of who we can be in the world, despite what the world suggests or demands of us.

Follow Enuma on Twitter @EnumaOkoro or send an email to enuma.okoro@ft.com

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