Self portrait, imperfect
The child got off the bus, her eyes red and puffy.
“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” I asked. “Is everything OK?”
She nodded tightly. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
Well, OK. We walked up the street in silence. She kicked some rocks and bent down to study some flower petals that had fallen from a nearby tree. The dog peed on a bush. The sun shown. Somewhere in the distance a hawk screeched.
“OK. I’m ready to talk about it now,” she said.
I silently steeled myself for anything.
“We were making self-portraits,” she said, “and I couldn’t make it look the way I wanted.” She started sobbing again, kicking stones in the road. “I kept erasing and erasing and then my friends said that it looked really good and they wouldn’t let me finish erasing.”
I cringed. I do that to myself. She got that from me.
“Maybe,” I said, “you should listen to your friends. Maybe it was better than you thought.”
She shook her head furiously. “It wasn’t right! I couldn’t make it look the way I wanted!”
There were hugs when we got home and the sobs ended. I told her she could go into the back yard and chase the dog with the hose and suddenly all was right with her world again. The self-portrait was forgotten until yesterday (two days later) when I found this stuffed in her bag with some random other schoolwork.
All of her previous self-portraits were stick figures, their arms thrown up in the air in exuberant joy. This one is more melancholy… more thoughtful… more imperfect.
