Cut From the Same Cloth

I am really pleased to have had my first illustrated essay published on Longreads – see it in situ here.

Illustrations for this were created in the same way as the drawings I’ve been doing for my graphic memoir-in-progress, Satin and Tat – a pencil crayon sketch, scanned in and then coloured digitally. Still really loving my Surfacebook laptop and the option to draw directly onto the screen in this way.

Longreads

Myfanwy Tristram | Longreads | September 2019 | 14 minutes (3,863 words)

A clatter at the door. A small package plops through our letterbox.

It’s come a long way. I can see that by the sticky labels, foreign postmarks, and scrawled scripts of postal workers around the world.

I text my daughter: 'Your wig has arrived from Japan.' After a moment, I text again: 'A phrase I never thought I’d find myself typing.'

This was never in the parenting manual.

But back to the housework.

I enter my bedroom to find the area around the mirror overrun with her makeup, her dirty laundry in pools on the floor. That girl leaves a trail of destruction.

Admittedly, this is not a remarkable complaint for any mother of a teen. Where mine differs from the grumbles of parents through the ages is that among the detritus to be picked up and put away are:

Wig caps, tossed aside and draped wherever they may land fake eyelashes, like furry caterpillars on the bathroom sink and the endless, infuriating, discarded colored Band-Aids that I seem to find everywhere - stuck to my work clothes, on the soles of my shoes, under the sofa... even deep in my own bed Trouble is...I can’t really complain, because at age 14, I was also breaking the school rules.