My mother was a painting, something to be analyzed, and my father was a library. The two of them combined made me think in music videos. My mother was a socialite, whose parents liberal pocketbook allowed for her to live a life as an artist in Chelsea. She got sober from heroin when she was 19. Studied art at St.Martins College. She used to shoot up in her toes and fingers, and to this day, can’t fully straighten her index. But she is mighty good with a paintbrush.
She carried an air of mystery about her, a secrecy that I still cant quite read. I think it was a silent strength, a charismatic resilience. Her uniform was a messy bun, a haphazard updo, held up with the aid of a paintbrush or two. She had sad doe eyes and a wide smile. She was beautiful, but in a pained way. Like someone who kept forgetting they were beautiful. Categorically covered in paint, in baggy jeans, on the brink of sliding off, elevated by a cashmere cardigan that I loved to pick at. Even in her dissociative clumsiness, she was beautiful. Her nonchalance, magnetic. She always managed to procure a wide range of eccentric admirers, and lived with an old actor who was in love with her, rent free.
She refuted my fathers persistent advances, which extended as far as him showing up to her flat, unannounced.
Eventually they compromised, and she agreed to paint his portrait, her infatuation growing steadily, with the passage of hours and brushstrokes. She immortalized him on canvas in a leather jacket and earring, a blue button down that matched his bright eyes. He knew how to make her laugh.
I was an “accident” but not the first “accident.”
The first “accident” was conceived a year earlier, and subsequently incited my Dad's second manic breakdown. My mother had been told it would be very hard for her to conceive, so when she heard the news, she was uncertain about keeping it. After all, they had only known each other for a few years.
Upon hearing the good news, my Dad went into a full psychotic episode. He became convinced that he was being gangstalked by police men, and that my mothers parents were Satanists who a la Rosemarys Baby, were planning to sacrifice his next of kin. On the day enough people intervened, he was finally admitted to the psych ward of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, my Mother put her hands over the “accident” and prayed.
“Not now, come back later.” she said.
A Doctor came to the psych ward my Dad was being held in to tell him the news. My Mother had miscarried.
Within less than a year, I was conceived, and whether it was the pain from losing one baby, or the exhilarating thrill of co-parenting with a recently redeemed madman, I was carried to term.
I was born at 4:30pm, August 18th, 1995 in Chelsea and Westmister Hospital, mere floors away from the ward that had so recently diagnosed and treated my fathers colorful delusions.
I was underweight, probably as a result of the fact that my mother ripped cigarettes during every trimester, and immediately transferred from the womb to incubator.
Panicked nurses hurried around me, prodding me with gloves, whispering amongst each other. My Dad said he was scared, until he reached out his finger, and I grabbed it with the willpower and force of a tiny titan.
My Grandparents were there, both drunk, my Uncle, Aunt, and Godmother Marilyn, a former Playmate and bond girl. Marilyn inspected my translucent skin and ligaments, before announcing to my parents, “This baby has a beautiful vagina.”
After the theatrics had passed and it was clear I was going to live, my parents were given the OK to leave. When my Dad carried me in his arms through the hospital doors, he locked eyes with the security guard, who recognized him from the psych ward, and panickedly stopped him to ask what he was doing with a baby.
My parents union was a reluctant necessity, kept alive by my dad's dark humor and my mothers ability to completely surrender to whatever was happening around her. She suffered from post-partum depression, perhaps brought on by the sinking realisation that she was now stuck in an 18 year commitment with a recently committed man. In all the photos of her and I taken from my first year of life, she looks down at me with an eerie disdain, hesitant to hold me at all, as if she was holding a burlap skin sack that smelled offensive. I had swallowed her spontaneity, destroyed her social plans, absorbed her nutrients and now sought to destroy her sleep cycle. She was eager to reclaim her freedom and get back to painting, and left me in the care of a racist Nanny found by my wealthy Grandmother. The Nanny used to coo at me from the corner of our dingy council flat, “You’re not a regular baby, you're an upperclass baby. ” and scold at my parents for having me in the bed “-Thats what makes them grow up gay”. The Nanny was fired after my Dad came back and saw me crying in a stroller that had been pushed into a corner.
My Dad was quicker to adjust to parenthood. It gave him a sense of purpose. He was protective, and funny, funny in the way that people who have been through too much are funny. His glaswegian humor was a survival mechanism that had outlasted the original threats of poverty and madness. Now it just lived in him, loose and ready to provoke pharmacists, neighbors, cashiers and family members. He could make anyone laugh. When he would look back on these early years of my life, he would say that we were almost “too close”, enmeshed, and that the absent-mindedness and uncertainty that my mother had displayed about their relationship caused him to treat me like an emotional equal, rather than a child. He took me everywhere, but primarily to movies, thrift stores, and book shops, even when I was too young to understand that you can’t unceremonially pull down your pants and pee on the floor of the fiction section.
He didn't so much raise me as include me. I was a plus one to his life rather than a project he was managing. Other parents waited to discuss the harsher elements of life, and resorted to baby-talk. He talked at full volume with a full vocabulary, and walked at full speed, assuming I would catch up, which I did, and then some.
I was a “busy” baby, whose rebellious curiosity meant that I needed to be constantly watched, which was unfortunate, given that the two people responsible for watching me were, respectively, a man who had only recently been discharged from a psychiatric ward, and a woman who treated motherhood the way she treated most things, as something happening slightly to the side of her.
But I could amuse myself quite easily. I made pirate maps of fairy villages, castles and mermaid coves. I speculated on imaginary love-triangles about the pigeons on our balcony. I drew drawings of women with impossible, gargantuan breasts. I chewed on the backs of pens till they exploded in my mouth.
I took to stealing forms from the post office just to fill them out, as if I had appointed myself some kind of baby receptionist, processing an enormous and urgent backlog of imaginary packages. I drew on everything. The walls of my bedroom. The walls of my parents' bedroom. The good, freshly painted walls. As soon as I learned a few words of the english language, it got worse. Thoughts had to be recorded immediately, wherever I was standing , as soon as they arrived. On walls, armchairs, the margins of things that weren't mine. Spelling attempts. Half-finished math equations. Little declarations that must have seemed extremely pressing at the time.
This, along with my habit of spilling every cup of liquid that had ever been put in front of me, infuriated my Dad. In moments where I was messy and disobedient, a much darker dimension of my fathers personality would emerge. It was a cruel joke, the child named Grace, whose clumsiness had procured a trail of strange stains on the carpet floor. He could be shaming, volatile, rough and insane. He fought in the same fashion he parented in, as if I was a psychological equal, rather than a growing girl.
My mother, meanwhile, floated in an unreachable elsewhere. Not physically (she was there, technically, handling all the more important but invisible logistics of my childhood ) but her attention had the quality of a radio signal that kept cutting out. You could feel her tuning in and tuning out. She loved me, I think, the way someone loves a piece of art they find difficult to fully get into. With admiration and a kind of baffled exhaustion.
I felt closest to her when she took me to paint in her studio. It was an old car warehouse that had been converted into over 400 artist studios, bearing a resemblance to the sort of architecture you only really get to see in dreams. Each studio belonged to a different universe, a sculptor's chaos of plaster and wire next to a glittering renderings of alien mountains, next to a studio for someone who appeared to only paint depictions of emaciated Kenyans under mosquito nets. Her studio smelled of linseed oil, turpentine and cold tea.. mineral and faintly electrical. Her studio mate, Lady Liza Campbell, was an heiress to the Cawdors, and the last child to be born in MacBeths castle, who dropped the “Lady” from her name, and now spent the majority of her days constructing Playmobil Dioramas that depicted vignettes of her childhood trauma. Canvases leaned against every wall, some finished, some abandoned midway through in favor of something more interesting. She set me up a miniature easel and ink, so I could paint along side her. I enjoyed following her hands, which appeared to know exactly what they were doing, even though the rest of her seemed uncertain about everything else. While her focus usually had a short radius, she was different here. Assured. This is where her vagueness distilled and I felt I could truly see her.
Her love was displayed through action, action I wouldn't fully appreciate til adulthood. She painted our living room a soft, warm, yellow, added mosaic tiles to the kitchen and ate one weetabix with agave in the morning. She drove me to school in a Blue Peagot Car, listening to cassettes of Moby, Zero-7 and Dido. Ambient and alien, like her. She was annoyingly tolerant of my tricks and tantrums, even when I would announce at the school gates I wasn’t wearing underwear to get out of class, cross my arms and protest to walking anywhere ,instead stomping my mary janes petulantly, demanding to be lifted and held. I would come home to cheese on toast, or potato smiley faces and fish fingers.
My Mom smelled like cashmere and silk cut cigarettes, which I found broken at the bottom of her bag, when I was brave enough to rummage through it. I braced myself, fumbling past the dense layer of receipts and other miscellaneous treasures. Sometimes I’d find a brown lipstick. Certainly some pens. I liked scavenging through her things, because she was so mysterious, and felt almost beyond reach. I went through her bag was like I was hunting for clues. I sometimes found glassy kodak photos of her in Greece or India, scribbled prayers and charcoal sketches. Bottles of ink. I would hide in her closet, brushing through the long silks and polka dots with my baby hands, attempting to uncover something hidden.