Lionhearted

on dreading mother's day and a surprise visit

May brings an uneven spring to the Colorado Rockies. The aspen trees are incandescent green, the hills flecked with white service berry blossoms, and the first wildflowers resurface the moment the snow recedes. Wildlife is visibly on the move, filling our meadows with fox, coyote, elk, deer, and the odd bobcat. Birdsong returns, as do the cries of eagles, Cooper’s hawks, and redtails. I love the promise of May and the start of our garden season. And I’d always looked foward to Mother’s Day and my birthday, since they fall in close proximity. Every May our kids would complain that I was getting too spoiled, that it was all too much about MOM. There was breakfast in bed, homemade cards, and then a day in the garden with reluctant weeding help. I’m well aware that Mother’s Day is a Hallmark holiday, but truth be told I loved being “la reina” for those two days.

This second Mother’s Day without Bailey was much more challenging than I anticipated. The first year after loss, you push through the calendar year, marking birthdays, holidays, and other special dates. The anticipation and fear of these milestones are a distraction in their own right. Those days are still brutal, but you expect them to be. The second year generates less buzz yet more complexity. It’s just another year, but it’s still very much not. This year, I felt the melancholy drift in ahead of my birthday, and then the sadness dropped like a monsoon for Mother’s Day.

Our daughter Fiona has been on a walkabout, backpacking through Thailand, Indonesia, and Australia, taking the trip she planned after her college graduation two years ago. A trip she abandoned to help us in the wake of Bailey’s death. She’s been living thirty minutes away from home, so I grew to rely on her company. Her two-and-a-half-month absence has been surprisingly difficult for me, spurring anxiety as she often travelled alone from country to country, hostel to hostel. When I was footloose and travelling on my own in my twenties, I checked in once a week with my parents from a payphone, if that. Now I keep my phone close, which I rarely do, and track her location and make sure never to miss a call or text. I know this is karmic payback for all the angst I caused my parents.

On Mother’s Day, Fi sent the photo above from Australia’s Gold Coast. Days earlier, I’d found a torn photo of my mother, just a handful of years older than our daughter, pulling on gloves for a white tie White House dinner. I put the two photos side by side—different worlds, of course—but the genetic repeat was eerie. Right before my mother died, when our daughter was only seven, she insisted that Fi would resemble her. She was right. She usually was.

When the kids were tiny, I would feel an almost physical pain, a tightening in my chest, when I left them for a few hours. I couldn’t wait to get home to hold them. When you lose someone you love, you also lose access to touch, to a constant, comforting physicality we all take for granted. This acute physical yearning is an often underestimated aspect of loss. For me, that longing still hasn’t waned, maybe it never will. As this birthday and Mother’s Day approached, I ached to hold both my children with an intensity that blindsided me.

But one child was physically gone from this world, one on the other side of it.

On Mother’s Day, my husband, Daniel, and I were looking for a movie to watch, anything to distract me, when our dog Rose started barking hysterically—like an entire pack of wild dogs. Daniel is recovering from a complicated shoulder surgery and has been tethered to an ice machine in our TV room, so I was the one to spring off the couch. Rose only barks when trouble is brewing, usually at a bear or coyote, so we knew something was afoot. It was something indeed: a pair of mountain lions, mother and cub. The lioness and her cub were drinking from our back fountain, then moved to our front garden.

I’ve had a foothold in Colorado all my life and have lived here full-time for more than twenty-two years. I’ve sensed lions, stumbled on the carcasses of their prey, heard them (they have bird-like calls), smelled their spray (like house cats, they mark their territory), spotted their tracks, but have never seen one. I know they have certainly seen me. And then on this Mother’s Day, of all days, there were two on our terrace. The lioness was huge. The next morning, I traced the area where she stood from her black tail tip to her head, and she measured roughly seven feet.

I decided to put the phone down to watch her from behind our glass door. She drank from the fountain like a tame housecat, unhurried, her coat duskier than her cub’s, her musculature emphasizing her sovereignty. Then she sensed my presence and turned around, five feet away. Her head was small, almost delicate, her eyes were astonishing, amber, lit from within and outlined with black eye markings, like she was wearing kabuki makeup. We were both mothers, one a seasoned killer, one heartbroken, both ferocious about their kin. Her level gaze reminded me who was in charge, who reigned supreme. I was grateful to be behind glass. She moved off slowly because she could.

My husband and I were astonished, in awe, stunned by the symbolism and timing of this visit. I don’t believe in coincidences, not anymore, and this visit was a reckoning for me. It was time to flip the script. Mother’s Day may be a cliché, but it’s still a worthy prompt. It’s a day to genuinely celebrate motherhood in all its forms, a day to honor my own mother, Jessica, a day to remember that it’s a privilege to be a mother to two children, one here on this earth, one in my heart.

on horseback in Colorado with my mother in the seventies

Another lion video—the cub drinking from our “bird bath” fountain.

Interested in learning more about color?

Read my first class post below and join us.

Living in Color

Supply Side

Supply List for Living in Color

$$$

Art supplies are flat-out expensive, so I have broken this list down to basics and beyond basics. Past students have stretched their dollars by finding art supplies on eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and thrift stores, or by asking friends for unused, unwanted paints, untouched watercolor paper, and brushes. Otherwise, there’s a shortlist of vendors at the bottom of this post, including a beginner’s kit assembled in my studio.

Basic

Watercolor Paints

Each brand has student-grade watercolor lines, so if you’re a rank beginner and anxious about investing too much money, start with a kit. Daniel Smith has a nice one. Pan paint kits are handy, but I strongly urge students to get a selection of watercolor paint in tubes — particularly the primary colors —since it’s easier to mix colors from tubes. That said, pan watercolor kits are great for traveling, and my shop carries my favorite one to date. If you want to experiment with a color that you are unsure of, buy the 5ml size first before you invest in a bigger tube.

Watercolor Brushes

For this class you will need a minimum of three brushes.

1. A 1” wash brush,

2. At least one of these: size 6 , 8, or 10, 12 watercolor rounds

3. At least one of these: size 8, 10, and 12, 14 watercolor flats

Watercolor Paper

I will give a video paper primer when I launch the class on the 30th. For this class, you can choose loose-leaf cold-press paper or use watercolor blocks. I use Arches, but there are cheaper brands available. You will need to tear or cut down your paper to these sizes:
6 x 9 inches @ 25
9 x 11 inches @10
3 x 3 inches - optional for creating a color swatch set @ 25

Here’s a great tutorial on how to tear paper from Dragonfly Spirit Studio.

Starter Kits

My studio store has two starter kits with paint, paper, and brushes for this class. Other supplies not included.