In my mother’s beautiful brown eyes, I imagine the story of her past — a blurry, rose-colored image filled with sacrifice. I know she is more than a “mother” when our eyes meet, but her expression is hard to read.
When my sister and I reminisce, I notice that we represent different parts of our mother. My sister does not resemble her, except slightly in the face. Her curly red hair is unique and extraordinary in our family. I have my mother's face, almost exactly. I also have her work ethic and desire for a bright future to an exhaustive degree.
My sister holds something especially precious: her unfulfilled artistry. My mother never got to pursue her dreams of being an artist, but her color has motivated us in many ways. We argue life is unfair, but she tells us it is fine. She tells us to keep going. Self-taught, motivated and sensitive, my sister represents and highlights the various facets of our mother and her mother before her, evidenced by her acrylic piece entitled “Half of my Life” (2022).
The artwork shows the figure of a woman split, the right side of her face displaying a skeleton. The skeleton has a dark hole where the right eye should be. The left side has my mother’s eye. I know it anywhere. In the painting, life and death are face to face. There is a void of darkness around the represented woman, one which has cut her off from her body. Onlookers of this painting see her above her chest, without the rest of her body. She is not reduced to a female body, finally, but a female figure with a disappointed expression. Her eyes tell us she’s seen “this” before, whatever “this” is, and is not surprised. I can only imagine she is responding to how her life has become more difficult despite her sacrifice, but it’s hard to tell. She is frail but beautiful. She holds her dignity even though she is cut in half and vulnerable.
The void of darkness moves around the woman in the portrait, like ghosts of her past or heavy thoughts racing through her mind. She is plagued by black and red, likely representing heavy emotions of anger, despair or exhaustion. I wonder what she is thinking. I wonder what her relationship with her skeleton is and why I see her that way. Why is she cut in half?
My sister created this female representation from the role of “daughter.” She sees what I see and what my youngest sister will soon see: how life, not death, eats away at the woman. When I face her, I feel the color of my mother. My glasses are no longer rose-colored with youth — instead, they are dipped in blood red like those of our ancestral mothers’. The skeleton is the supporting pillar for my sister’s cracked-open woman. We, as daughters of an immigrant mother, have seen the woman in the painting’s expression in our mother’s eyes — even in her brightest, happiest moments. I see the expression faintly in my own eyes when our community is threatened by anti-immigrant policies. I have the desire for life to change and give us more opportunities for leisure. The expression pleads for peace and so do I. I realize I have seen my mother’s story through this woman in the painting.
On late nights I notice my eye bags mirroring my mother's. Suddenly, I see her in the mirror: a pillar of strength. I have balanced the expressions of her somber eyes through the lens of “mother” and woman. She reminds me that life requires strength. Some things will not change right away, but we cannot fall, not until it is our time to see the pillar of death.
