No. 101 - The girl in pigtails

Dearest readers

I was born in 1960, which even to me seems increasingly quaint. What does it mean… who can even imagine it? It can’t have been real. No computers, no internet, no cell phones, no apps, no piped-in music everywhere you went, unless a store happened to have the radio on. People were known to sit in silence, and usually had to wait till they got home before they could call someone. They didn’t know the movements of others if those people were out of sight. It wasn’t uncommon to find yourself bored and left alone with your own thoughts.

Your.

Own.

Thoughts.

I don’t have many specific memories from that time. I remember sitting at my open bedroom window and listening to the birds. I remember Rocky, the big black Lab with the big black mouth who lived up the street. I remember begging to be taken to the lake. I remember getting dressed up and going to church. I remember the closeness with my grandmother. I remember staying overnight at my cousin Sylvia’s house. I remember Christmas morning(s). I remember my dolls.

I don’t have access to a lot from those days but I know that little girl, and this may sound crazy but I really love her. She was happy to be alive, and she arrived without a mean bone in her body. I love her so much.

Since my Life’s Work: A Visual Memoir project of 2022 and thinking often of that little girl and her story, I’ve experienced moments where I’ve understood in a visceral way that I am she. I recognize the ways in which that girl is looking out from behind my eyes, responding to the world just as she would have at the age of six. I am that very same person—the nucleus is unchanged.

However when thinking about The Mother Lode, my story in graphic memoir form, I’ve always conceptualized it as me at my present age looking back and recounting the things that happened.

In 1970 I turned ten and asked to have my hair styled in a pixie cut à la Twiggy, the then-famous model. Until that point I’d had long hair that my grandmother often braided into pigtails, or else she’d pin a braid in a ring or a bun on top of my head.

I wanted to remain close to that girl, so I decided I should find a photo of myself at that age to keep in my studio like I would any other loved one. I felt it had to be a photo of me in pigtails, but I never seemed to be able to find one. I’d forget about it for a while, then remember, then forget. As one does.

Until something happened that made it imperative.

A couple of months back I read Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls, an awe-inspiring graphic memoir about the author, her Chinese mother and grandmother, and the trickle-down effect of family trauma. It’s a very dense, detailed, intelligent and thoughtful memoir. Hulls leaves no stone unturned when it comes to teasing out how her grandmother’s experiences impacted her mother, and in turn impacted her. It was Hull’s first book and took almost ten years to write and draw. It won the Pulitzer Prize, among other awards.

In the memoir, Hull is both a character in the story and also “breaks the fourth wall” at times by depicting herself turning to address the reader directly. I was struck by this, thinking about my own graphic memoir The Mother Lode. I put the concept on hold in the back of my mind—to be considered at a later date. I wasn’t set on doing the same thing, but I was intrigued because it was something I hadn’t thought of.

Fast forward a couple of months to a day last week when I was in the kitchen doing dishes. I was listening to Andy J. Pizza’s podcast Creative Pep Talk, and he was talking about Jungian symbolism and Internal Family Systems, a form of psychotherapy that posits that there are different parts to the self that play roles such as keeping one safe, or holding heavy emotions.

Something he said—I don’t remember what—brought me a thought that came like a thunderbolt: THE GIRL WITH PIGTAILS! The girl with pigtails would guide and narrate the graphic memoir The Mother Lode! I got full-body shivers as I stopped and stared into the centre of the room absorbing the certitude of this moment.

It was going to happen.

It dawned on me how I’d unconsciously drawn girls with pigtails in my sketchbook, like the one I used for my Taking Note newsletter posts:

Or the ones I drew in How to Stay Safe as a Child:

I had to find a photo of myself in pigtails!

I remembered/realized that if there were any such photos to be had, they’d probably be in the box of slides I’d brought home after my mother went into care in 2014. That’s how long those slides had sat on the shelf without me looking at them.

Et voilà. There she was.

That girl in pigtails is really the only choice to narrate the graphic memoir because she is at once ground zero and the apex. She is the throughline, the reason, and the result. She is the original witness and the OG of the story.

Bye for now, little girl. LOVE YOU 👀

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