LuLu; non-catholic saint of the rose-colored glasses

'Thank goodness love is blind,' my Mom would say while standing over the stove and stirring over some friend's family situation or romantic relationship in her mind. Chuckling, she would refrain from sharing what she meant. I badly wanted to tread the line of gossiping but she would rarely go there. It's taken me a little time to realize how soft to the tongue old proverbs and wives-tales can be. They speak through centuries from women standing over their own stoves, mildly contemplating their own situations.

I want to make a portrait of my family before Anna marries Michael and the family begins to expand. Just the ten of us. Simple. Well, maybe not so simple as I hoped. For starters, I'm not a practiced artist and the project grows before my eyes from a simple piece of canvas to this giant canvas monster with pencil teeth. Scary; not really. Daunting? Yes, it is that. Here's where the 'Love is blind' part comes into play. The harder I try to make the woman that is my mother look like the image that is to me 'Mom' and to herself 'Joyce', the more frustrated I become. I can get the curve of the arm and the eyes, ears, nose down but it just looks like a fairly two dimentional standard person to me. I want to draw my family and have everyone who sees the drawing see it through a sort of rose-colored lense of bias. My translation of reality is skewed by my chosen perception. We'll see how this drawing turns out in the end. I will predict it to be passable, but much cherished because of the same rose-colored glasses my parents wear. Banish the scary pencil-toothed monster, I'm off to puzzle my family onto paper.