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Three pencil drawings.  That’s it.  That’s probably all I will ever find of my mother’s childhood artwork.   There was one other drawing, well framed and carried from place to place with every move of my childhood.  When I get the family slide shots down from Alaska, I think there’s one that actually has THAT drawing showing as it hung on a wall.

THAT is the one my mother bragged about to me when I was the age she was when she did the ones included in this link below.  THAT one was done when she was 13 and took an art class.  She was proud of it, and well she should have been — but leave it to my mother to be mean about it.

One time when I was about 9 or 10 I drew a picture of her, the very best that I could do.  I was so proud of it, but when I showed it to her she said it was the ugliest picture she had ever seen, and I better never show her another one like it.  She pointed to THAT picture on the wall — a picture of a young child’s angelic face that looked like it was copied from one by a ‘great master’ — and told me that THAT was what good drawing looked like.  Certainly not what I had carried in my small hands to show her.

She hurt me, and I never did show her anything I drew again after that, but fortunately I didn’t stop drawing.  I did it in secret, in private — the same way she did these three drawings you will see when you follow this link.  And they are NOT masterpieces!  But they are fascinating little forensic clues in my search for evidence that who my mother turned out to be was already visible in her childhood.

At the same time I find a little comfort, nearly 50 years after her nasty criticism of MY drawing to see these ones of hers.  They are no better than mine was!

*Fascinating – Three Childhood Drawings of My Mother’s

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I also thought it might be interesting to actually show mother’s child handwriting from her childhood stories — they were written just before to just after her 10th birthday (Dec. 1935 – Jan. 1936).  It is interesting to note that my mother’s grandfather, the same one that died right after the stock market crash in 1929 (when my mother was 4) that so devastated her family and right before her parents divorced, is buried in Wyoming Cemetery.  WYOMING, as you can see in these original pages, is very noticeable:

*Mother’s Childhood Stories — A Few Scanned Pages from Original

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