The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually by Helen Cullen

Author:Helen Cullen [Cullen, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405935197
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

Photos of when they were just lovers; before they were parents.

They looked like people their children would want to be friends with.

As beautiful as only strangers can be.

Sive slipped away to her bedroom and returned with a manila envelope of her own photographs. Laying them out side by side on the kitchen counter, Maeve stood beside her daughter and absorbed the images of the seals. ‘Tell me their story,’ she said, and Sive began to explain her vision for the project: how people change to survive their environments, how love can trap you in a prison of your own making. And Maeve wondered where her daughter had learned these human truths.

It was after midnight when the mother and daughter followed the rest of the family to bed.

Sive was full of inspiration, with the new confidence in her work that Maeve had awarded her.

Maeve was acutely proud of her daughter’s ambition.

And when, two weeks later, they stood before Sive’s exhibition at the secondary school, it felt as if Sive had taken her first steps into the world as an artist.

With a little nudge from her mother, she saw what her purpose should be and she realised, with a deep sense of shame, how much Maeve had prepared her for this.

At last she saw Maeve as an inspiration, a creative woman with something to say, whose genius was so often hidden. She no longer saw her as just the mother who she’d longed to behave like all her friends’ mammies. She realised that whatever she had felt was missing in Maeve was made up for in ways that were much more important.

Instead of a burden, Maeve became a blessing. And though some days would come again when she found that hard to remember, she would never now unlearn that truth.

From a woman, a woman was born.

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