Painting Mountains

Who knew how much painting a nursery could be an allegory for life, love, loss, and change?

It’s late November. You find out you’re having a baby boy, and your mind immediately starts swimming with thoughts - not the least of which is: “What will we make his nursery like?”

You decide on a color, and then agonize over decor. Wouldn’t it be great, you think, to cover one wall with a mural? A landscape of different colored mountains, dotted with snow-capped peaks? It takes time and effort, five shades of paint, three paint rollers, and a roll and a half of painter’s tape, but before you know it, you are standing back, gazing proudly at a gorgeous mountain range. It’s absolutely perfect. You’ve built something beautiful.

Then, you get news that you have to move. You walk around your empty house, and take one last picture of it - the wall that you put so much heart and soul into. And now you feel stupid for having done that. The next day, the house is filled with men dressed in all white. Spanish guitar music blares from a paint-splattered boom box in the corner. The room is empty, and the mural is gone.

“We’ll remake it.” Your husband tells you with a kind smile and a gentle shoulder rub. “You can paint it again. We still have everything we need.”

It starts on a Thursday. The painter you hired coats your little one’s new room in that unusual shade of pale gray/blue that you initially hated but that somehow, right now, seems like the perfect color. When he’s done, he calls you over. The room was hard to paint, he tells you. The walls are rough - they’ve been through a lot over the years. He used the same paint, but it won’t look the same. It’s okay, you shrug. It looks fine enough to you. No one will know the difference.

You immediately grab ahold of the painter’s tape and outline your mountains. A couple of hours later, you gently peel away the tape, but to your dismay, the paint comes right with it. “The walls are too rough.” You remember. “It’s not the same.” In between frustrated tears, you stand back to assess the damage. Huge patches of bare wall stare accusingly back at you. You couldn’t have just left the wall as it was? You HAD to try to make it what you had before?

You crawl the internet desperately, watching video after video and reading article after article on how to fix peeling paint. Using an Xacto knife, you cut away the bubbles and imperfections, grazing over them with ultra-fine sandpaper. You go buy a “gentler” painter’s tape and re-outline the mountains. You paint and repaint, tending to tiny, delicate imperfections with a small artist’s brush. What the first time took you two days now takes two months. You walk away in disappointment, only to return a week later, paint one mountain, shake your head and walk away again.

You don’t know when to stop. How many times should you touch up the same paint job? “It looks fine.” Your husband assures you. “The crib will cover it up anyway.”

When you’re finally convinced that you’ve done all you can do, you step back to look at it, but not with the same happiness and pride that you had before. The patches glare at you. The uneven lines, the unbalanced peaks... It’s a pale imitation of what you once had. Try as you might to recreate it, the rough, broken walls, patched and bleeding paint have made that impossible. Every little imperfection sticks out to you like a sore thumb.

You look at your son. He probably won’t even notice. And one day, when he does... When he comes home from school, having learned about Gauguin and Van Gogh, he’ll look at that wall and, laughing, tell you, “Mom, it’s not very good, is it?”

“Well, I was never a really great painter.” You’ll tell him. “But I did my best for you.”