Monday: Tension over breakfast, tears over lunch, but all was made well with chendol.
Tuesday: Coldplay and our first night out without kids. A view of a thousand stars and being content with half a show. Babysitters put our firstborn to sleep.
Wednesday: A day I don't even remember. Shopping.
Thursday: Reia had her second seizure just as Theo and I were playing "fainting." Dinner cancellation and the start of 24 hours of...
Friday: ...trying to manage an active post-seizure toddler in hospital and starting to compare whose tiredness is more tired.
Saturday: A wedding with spicy food, big talks at Astons, putting angry kids to bed.
Sunday: Realising that being told I dress young does not make me feel young; in fact I feel old, very old, especially this week.
When I'm not collapsing from exhaustion at night, I stay up with my portrait sketches and music playing from my inferior phone speakers. It's good enough a combi to remind me of those late university nights being "in the zone".
Strangely these portraits seem to be the thing God has touched. I've tried my hardest to be every other kind of artist but nobody would have me. Yet these many family portraits have brought me to an Eric Liddell-level of performance, where "I feel God's pleasure" as the faces appear on my paper at will. When I was at Louis Vuitton underneath those throbbing speakers, churning out portraits in a very different kind of frenzied zone, this was the single thought that emerged through the chaos. That all my years of fashion illustration and reluctant family portrait practice have brought me to this point, where I can do twenty odd portraits with the subjects peering over my shoulder, and feel absolutely flying. This is what I wanted years ago, but I wasn't ready till now. Not without those portraits of grandparents, babies, pets and nieces.
It's been a rollercoaster of a week, and yet my concluding thought is of portraits.
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