Permission to be bad at painting

My first watercolor pear looked like a potato with a difficult past. I considered turning the paper over before the instructor reached my table.

I used to draw all the time. Then there was work, marriage, children, and a series of houses where my art supplies lived in a box marked “miscellaneous.” Eventually, I started saying I used to be creative, as though it were a language I no longer spoke.

I found the class while looking for an activity for my daughter. It met on Wednesday evenings. I checked the family calendar, arranged the logistics, and signed myself up. Then I spent a week wondering if that was selfish.

The first night, I wanted to be good immediately. I compared brushes. I looked at the woman beside me, who appeared to understand shadows. Mine looked like bruises. I began calculating how many classes I’d need before this counted as a worthwhile investment.

The instructor stopped beside my pear. She asked whether I’d enjoyed mixing the green. I had. For ten whole minutes, I had been interested in nothing except what happened when blue touched yellow.

I went back the next week. I painted an uneven bowl, then a window that leaned. Some of it was awful. Some of it made me curious enough to keep going. I didn’t open a shop or announce a new creative business.

My paints now live on a shelf I can reach. The pear is on the refrigerator. My daughter thinks it’s a mango. We have agreed that fruit is open to interpretation.