Love: A Portrait

My nana stares at me from behind her tea. She tells me, "If you think a man is going to hit you, don't blink." I am sixteen and wildly in love with a boy who tells me he is wildly in love with me. A few months later my mother will take me to file a restraining order against this same boy.

My nana's advice and the summer that led up to it came before all of that, though. Sitting in her living room on a hot summer night after everyone was asleep, she opened up to me about her life.

In a lot of ways, my nana raised me. When my parents had to deal with their own adult life, and after I'd had too many 'bad' experiences with too many bad-faith babysitters, my nana was the superhero they'd called in to save the day.

I don't think I ever tasted my nana's baking, only ever heard about it. She wasn't that kind of nana. Not the kind to whip up cookies or fuss over you, no - she had a different way of showing her love. At the time, I was confused by it. Now I remember it as something akin to a stoic, playful kind of love where most of the playfulness came out in private.

We'd spend hours with her teaching me how to paint, using her old watercolours. She always loved to paint roses. Layers and layers of petals painted in pale colours would bloom from rough, heavy paper as afternoon sunlight splayed across her dining room table.

As I grew up, I became interested in anime and my wee British nana decided to try her hand at it too. In her seventies, she bought a book on how to draw manga and would marvel over the characters' big eyes and adorableness of the chibi drawings.

Even in my teens, during my Twilight obsession, my nana went out, bought, and read through every book in the Twilight series with me. She was staunchly team Jacob.

(Side note: Yes, she also read 50 Shades of Grey. Prim and proper, meanwhile, she was the same woman who, only a few hours before she passed away in the hospital, was giggling and flirting with her male doctor. She was a hard one to keep up with, that Norah!)

My nana immigrated from England to escape her abusive father in her twenties. She believed unironically and wholeheartedly that God is a woman way before Ariana Grande came out with a song about it. Saying grace at dinner, He was always She and no one dared try to convince my nana otherwise.

My Irishtown, Irish Catholic papa always just chuckled and smiled at her in awe between sips of a clear liquid we all knew wasn't the water he tried to convince us it was (nor had it been for decades.)

I often wonder what kind of woman my nana would have been if she had been born when I was, in 1996. What would her interests be? Would she still be in England? Who would she have ended up with? Would she have also been diagnosed with bipolar disorder?

Would she still have married an alcoholic?

Would my mother still have married an alcoholic?

It's fascinating to think of being an egg within my mother, inside her mother.

In a way, all of our grandmothers partially raised us, whether we ever had the opportunity to know them or not. Their bodies kept us safe before we were even dreams to conjure.

My nana grew up in a time where, as she put it: "the only way to leave your father's home was to get married or immigrate." So to Canada, she came.

Then she married an Irish-Canadian.

It's ironic that my papa's ancestors survived the British only for him to be swooned by a British woman; or that that British woman would marry an Irishman because he wasn't like those, "rough British boys." Or that later on, their home together would be adorned by photos of William and Kate before, during, and after the Royal wedding.

A tightly woven fabric of vibrant contradictions, my nana was.

In her living room, with a cup of tea and the fading sunlight, she reminds me that love, hate, and fear are similar colours with different textures. That despite this, homesickness is the emotion that can muddy them all, or that the desire to cure said homesickness can leave all your colours bleeding down the page.

My papa was a gentleman at the same time that he was an alcoholic. He was kind, hard-working, reliable, and unreliable, all at once. He was the smartest person I've known and had integrity in everything he did, yes, but he also had a disease and his own set of traumas. He had watched his father beat his mother and knew he would never follow in those footsteps. He taught himself how to drive at age 14, changed his name to his father's, forged a counterfeit birth certificate at 16, and ran away from home to join the navy all before his eighteenth birthday.

My papa looked at his circumstances and said, "No way."

Kind of like my nana did.

No matter how far we travel, though, we still carry our past with us. We carry our trauma right down to our DNA. We yearn for unhealthy familiarities and to combat them at the same time. We fall in hate and call it love, or fall in love and call it hate.

My nana loved my papa and my papa loved my nana. Their love, respect, and loyalty to each other were vibrant. My nana was traumatized and unpredictable, though, as fiercely loving as she could be terrifying. Tense and oversensitive one moment, then wickedly clever and silly the next.

After my papa passed, my nana told me, "I think I was too hard on him."

Sometimes I wonder if she had been more carefree with my papa and her children if she would have been happier; sometimes I wonder if she could have been happier and more carefree if she could have relied on my papa to be sober.

I wonder if my papa could have been sober if he hadn't had to go through his own trauma as a child and teen.

Yet if they didn't go through any of that, they never would have found each other or fallen in love. My mother wouldn't be here, and neither would I.

Between my maternal grandparents, my parents, and my aunts and uncles, the painting of love I inherited was coloured with a delicate combination of wonder, homesickness, and chaotic hope. It is a lesson in wondering what might have been, of missing what wasn't, and of the burning desire to paint a different portrait of love, despite what the photographic references may be.

When I think of my nana's father being too hard on her and her mother being too soft on him, I can begin to understand the painting she inherited of love, once too. I understand how she might have resented it and tried to paint her own version, or how the brush couldn't come clean no matter how hard she tried.

As of 2024, I'm 28 years old. My nana passed away almost ten years ago. I'm still learning what love looks like; I'm still learning how to paint on my own. Still, I wish I could show her my progress. If I could, I would paint a picture of her with her eyes closed.

I would paint a portrait of love that shows her it's safe to blink.