mother displayed a talent to paint very early on, and by the time she was in her early teens it was quite obvious she was a prodigy. She was sent to art school and returned a successful artist, whose landscape paintings continue to sell for princely sums.
My mother does not, however, always manage her life successfully. In fact, she has struggled through most of it. Rose carries more than just her skill for painting. She’s also an empath. Put simply, she can feel and read another person’s emotions.
There is no such thing as a poker face around an empath; they possess X-ray vision into your soul. Rose can read people, feel their nervousness, sense their hesitation to do something, detect their anger or sadness. She refers to it as “picking up on the energy of the universe.” My mother, grandmother and her mother before her were all empathic. All of the women on our side of the family carry the skill, including me. They call it the Gift, but I have never seen it that way.
From an early age, what I saw was my mother drinking herself to sleep at night to avoid feeling anything. She swallowed too many pills with her friends in order to maintain a barrier between the energy of the universe and herself. And then, when she did focus on her painting, she would remain sequestered in her studio for weeks, inevitably collapsing in her bed for several days afterwards.
As I grew older, I worried that my mother would kill herself, either through her excesses or through exhaustion. Now, at 32, I understand my mother’s moods and simply try to avoid her when she is on the dark side of the universe.
As I pulled to the end of the drive, my mother walked out of her house to greet me, her wavy brown hair trailing in the breeze behind her. This is another trait the women in my family are known for: long, lustrous brown hair streaked with red and gold. I could see from her bright, brown eyes that she was sober and happy, a rare thing in the year since my grandmother had died, leaving her with no other woman beside me to confide in. As I got out of the car and began to walk toward her, she smiled.
“So you’ve come to bury your anger out here in the country, have you?”
I knew she would read my emotions—she always did—but I had nowhere else to go.
“I have,” I said. “But if you could wait a bit to finish reading my mood, I’d like to come in and rest.”
Rose nodded and escorted me into the house.
After settling down for a much-needed nap on the couch, I awoke forty minutes later and went to look for my mother. She was not in the house. I slipped on a pair of her shoes that were sitting by the door and walked over to her studio, following a path illuminated by small lights set along the paving stones. Maintaining an old habit I’d been taught as a child, I knocked once before entering.
“Come,” she called, and I opened the door. She was sitting in front of a canvas with a brush suspended in her fingers. In front of her was the view from the edge of our property. I had seen the same scene a million times growing up, but somehow in her painting she had made the sea seem alive. The deep green blades featured in the grassy cliff that marks the end of our land appeared to be moving. For a moment, I thought I could hear the crickets in the grass, too.
“It’s beautiful, Mom.”
“Thank you, my dear,” she said in a soft, low voice that was reserved for me. “Now why don’t you tell me why you decided to come in the middle of the week for a visit? You haven’t done that since gran was alive.”
When my grandmother Bella Rose was alive, I often visited during the week. After she died, I stopped coming as frequently, not only because I wanted to escape my mother’s grief, but also to avoid my own.
“I’m not sure why I’m here, Mom. I have been feeling a little unsettled lately.”
My mother nodded. “I can feel your unease. What’s happened? Have you seen Lily? She usually makes you feel better.”
“Things are not going as well at work as I would like. I got fired from a job recently, and I managed to blow an interview for a big