Once

Jay DeFeo's The Rose with the author's daughter

I was going to write about how much going back to work after maternity leave sucks. About how grueling the getting-out-of-the-house-in-the-morning is, about putting my daughter to bed and continuing to grade for the next three to four hours, about pumping while driving, pumping while peeing, pumping with nothing but a curtain to separate me from my students as they talk about whatever upcoming sport event is around the corner. I was going to complain about how utterly exhausting and unfair and short the days can sometimes seem when I have needy students at work and a daughter who truly needs me at home and I have to lug so much crap around that it literally takes five trips to the car when I am having to wrangle it all myself. Not to mention how much the quality of life my dog has had to suffer.

But then I took my daughter to see Jay Defeo's The Rose on the very last day of its exhibition. And even stealthily procured a snap of her beside it. And faith was restored. Life sustenance was nourished. A spiritual experience occurred. And I...

I then had a very different outlook on life.

As she looked up at the weighty paintings in the room, their density somehow felt in my own arms as I held her close, she was quiet and contemplative. Taking in the expansiveness of, really, DeFeo's four monumental works of art, I lingered in the room, moving in close to each as my daughter's chin lifted up, her breath exhaled and her embrace tightened.

An artist only gets one chance at a work like The Rose in her lifetime. I certainly felt the immensity of that undertaking in its presence and the reward of its spectacular success.  It was a priviliedge to bear witness to such a story. More so with my own flesh and blood clinging to me.