May 2022

Author’s note
 
It is never just this.
         When I worked as a psychologist the prevailing theory was that mental health disturbance was about some specific problem—it could be the misconstrued chemical imbalance (a notion that is good for pharmaceutical companies to sell drugs and put control in the hands of doctors), or errors of thought to be corrected by cognitive therapy, or some disorder of personality or emotional self-regulation.
         This monolithic perspective worked for the professional who had a protocol to dispense. Sometimes it helped, but often it totally missed the point.
         The intricacies of human functioning are not so easily reducible. A complex of factors, including present context and the past, invariably intertwine. What we subjectively experience and how we function arises from patterns of relationship that go way back in our lives.
         Let’s take a look, based on some characters you might already know.  

Leanne, unnoticed

Denny Armand comes through Leanne’s exhibition of family portraits. He’s juggling three apples. Leanne sits on the floor of the third alcove staring at one of her paintings, a tableau of the family when Stella was about twelve. He tosses one of the apples to her, catching the other two in his right hand. “No Estelle?” he asks.
         She fumbles the apple. It thuds to the floor.
         “Gordon went to pick her up. Estelle and Jemma are moving over to our place today. Nikki took their car.”
         “What’s up?”
         “Oh, Estelle and Nikki had a fight, a really bad one. They’re separating.”
         “That’s too bad.”
         Denny takes a bite. Leanne holds her now bruised apple.
         “So, are we going to open?” Denny asks.
         “How can you even think that? Here I sit, looking at a portrait of my family, two of them now dead. And all you can think of is opening the show in your gallery.”
         Denny sits beside her. “Eventually, eh?”
         “Eventually. But I don’t know how long. It’s all been too much. And now, Estelle and Nikki are breaking up. They’re together in that last portrait. How can I show that now?”
         “Well ... the cowboy, that guy going at it with your brother in the hospital room, he’s was pretty much gone when we set the show to open but you got his consent.” Denny takes another noisy bite.
         “Look Denny, if you want me to take all this down, make room for another exhibit, I will. But I just can’t open it to the public with all that’s happened in the last few weeks.”
         “Settle, my girl, settle. We can wait. This is a dynamic show. We’ll open when you are ready.”
         Denny looks at Leanne’s apple, she follows his eyes down to it.
         “Estelle and Jemma, you said. Jemma? That’s the little girl—she’s the one in the last portrait, eh? Leaping off the chair? Cute kid. They’re moving into your house?”
         “Yah, they lived there when Estelle came back from the States. Jemma was just two. I got pretty attached to her and now she’s coming back. She really likes Gordon and his music.”
         The two sit, both looking at their apples.
         “Let’s go look at her.” Denny sets his other apple aside, gets up, and reaches a hand to Leanne. It’s awkward for her, reaching up to him, holding the apple he’d tossed her way.
         As they walk through the show, Leanne stops for a moment at each of the paintings. Once again she tracks Stella becoming Estelle—rising up to greet the world as a teenager, bounding down the stairs to a waiting cowboy, on the birthing bed holding Jemma, finally holding Jemma on the wingback chair.
         She sighs. Her eyes automatically go to Estelle in each portrait—then slip off Estelle to how she has depicted herself, always in the background.
         She sighs again.
         “Three little girls raised in that house.”
         “Three?” Denny asks.
         “Three. Me too. I was raised there, too. Little Leanne with pencils and crayons, desperate to be noticed—but never really, never really noticed in the Horvath house on Durham Lane.”
         “Tell me.” Denny takes another bite of his apple, a look of curious engagement on his face.
         “So our father, Dr. Emmitt Horvath, had the front room, actually where the living room is now. That was his study. We had no living room in the house, no place where relaxed as a family. Father had taken it for his work. That’s what life was all about. Work. He was the second in the family line of Horvath doctors—then Jackson, the third. For father, as for them all, doctoring took precedence over family life. No living room to gather in, just an office for him with all his books and doctoring stuff.
         “There was a television in the basement—we were one of the first families on the block to get a coloured one. That’s where brother Jax spent most of his time, except for when father took him into the office, talked about medicine being in his future too. Mom had her dark room down in the basement. She was quite a photographer, took an interest in the Indians as we called them back then. Portraits of the elders were her specialty. Black and whites showing every wrinkle, every glint to the eye. Beautiful work. You can still see some of her portraits at the Fallen Feather Golf Club. Not that I ever go there. That’s Jax’s club.
         “Anyway, I used to sneak into his office, father’s office, at the front of the house. The walls were covered with anatomical drawings, the sort of drawings that show the musculature of the limbs, the organs of the torso, the fine features of the face. And I would slip in there, would sit silently and copy them. And he would look at me, perhaps when I’d sighed or shook my head when I had to erase what I was doing because I made a mistake …  
         “ … And, he would look at me.
         “ … And, that was the closest he got to really noticing me. He’d comment on what I’d gotten in the wrong place, or something that was the wrong size.”
         Denny goes after the apple, gnaws with his top teeth close to the core.
         “That’s where my interest in the human figure, in the human body, came from. Trying to corral my father’s attention. If I made a mistake he noticed, he noticed me. Eventually, I got to the point where as much as I wanted him to notice me, when he didn’t I felt good, that I was drawing things right.” Leanne pauses, “… always trying to get it right, to get it perfect even though now as an artist I know that it’s the imperfections that make it beautiful.”
         “And that is what you’ve done in the series of portraits, perfecting them with imperfections.”
         “I’ve painted them all as tableaus, showing the drama, the imperfections not only within each of them but also between family members as well. And that part doesn’t feel so beautiful to me, not anymore.”
         The two of them stand in front of the last portrait—Estelle trying to hold onto an emerging Jemma, Gordon and Leanne behind with proud smiles.
         “So, what about this third girl? She seems so full of life, so eager to leap into the world.” Denny comments, examining his apple core, seeing if there was any flesh left to scrape off.
         “Let’s hope for better for her. I survived that family, had a sense of myself through drawing. Estelle did so by reading. Let’s hope that Jemma can grow up cherished and empowered … ”
         Leanne settles into thought. Denny looks at her.
         “ … I just realized something. My mother had her photography, I had my drawing, Estelle had her reading. For Anna, it was dance, that’s where she took herself. The arts—the visual arts, performance arts, literary arts—all as an escape from the powerful axis of medicine that existed across the male generations of our family.”
         Leanne gets a text--We’re here. Jemma and me. At the front.  She rushes back through the alcoves containing her paintings to the front, rushes to catch Jemma before she can go through the gallery to see the history of her mom splayed out there. She, this little third generation girl, hasn’t yet seen all these imperfections. With what she has seen in the last day or two … well, that’s enough imperfection for a six-year-old girl on this day. She doesn’t need to know the whole history of it all, not yet anyway.
         Just inside the door, a bit off to the side, Estelle stands in a space removed from the hug Leanne gives to little Jemma. Separate. Estelle looks as though she has been crying. 
         Denny steps back, framing the image of the three generations forming itself into its own tableau.
​