How Georgia Became O'Keeffe Read Online Free PDF Page A

toddler, was homely. One hundred odd years ago parents did not automatically believe their children were the world’s most beautiful humans; Georgia was even deemed too unattractive to have on hand when company came to call. Whenever there was a knock on the door of the big white farmhouse, she was locked in a room (!) or told to go away and stay out of sight.
    Later in life Georgia admitted that being her mother’s least favorite had hurt her feelings, but she got over it when she realized that it allowed her the sort of freedom she would otherwise never have known. Elder daughters of yore were trained from a young age to be junior wives and mothers, but not so with Georgia. She developed a taste and a skill for entertaining herself, and Ida left her alone.
    For those of us raised in the Time Before Car Seats, or by slacker moms who lacked the necessary ambition/energy/discipline to make sure our lives were an endless whirl of activity, this kind of laissez-faire parenting is reassuring. ¶¶ It means that we still might amount to something, even though we had mothers who never managed our schedules or chauffeured us to daily theater rehearsals or stayed up until midnight helping us with our science fair projects. If we’re parents, it means our children might amount to something even if we never went to Gymboree or enrolled them in an elite soccer clinic or made a second career out of finding the right SAT-prep tutor.
    If we are where we came from, then the parenting style known as benign neglect needs to be reevaluated. If O’Keeffe’s epic life is any indication, it seems that the less your parents pay attention to you, the better. If you’re a girl, it’s even better if your mother doesn’t invest any stock in your looks, because then there will truly be no expectations placed upon your lovely beribboned head.
    Notice the term is benign neglect.
    Before I further extol the virtues of having been ignored as a kid/ignoring your kids, and before all you exhausted, overcommitted, overinvolved-by-necessity ** moms write me an e-mail thanking me for allowing you to tell your kids to revive that once-popular parental directive, Go play on the freeway , do consider this: Ida O’Keeffe did not completely ignore her future genius. There were the previously-noted drawing, painting, and music lessons; also, Ida neither encouraged nor discouraged her daughters, thereby teaching them that their art was their own, and that they should aim for excellence only because they wanted to.
    Ida may not have pushed Georgia, but she did place her daughter’s early drawings and paintings in ornate gilt frames that signified the importance of her efforts. Later, O’Keeffe the daughter, the modernist and minimalist, would snort with derision at those ridiculous fancy frames, calling them pretentious. They were pretentious. They were Ida pretending her daughter was already an artist who made paintings suitable for framing.

    And what, we may ask, did Georgia do with all this free time on her hands, this time when no one was paying attention to her? Given that at around age twelve she told a girl at school that she was going to become an artist, you might imagine that she spent hours in the shade of a sugar maple, her white-­stockinged legs tucked beneath her, sketching a purple coneflower or wild petunia. But O’Keeffe was no Picasso-style prodigy, who at age nine completed his first full-scale painting. I’m here to report that the nation’s greatest woman artist engaged in the most ordinary activity known to girls: She played with dolls. Yet more evidence that whatever our gifts might be, they need not reveal themselves before our fourteen-year molars.
    Georgia had a wooden dollhouse around which she fashioned a complex empire. A shingle in a dishpan was a boat on a lake. The apron of green lawn that surrounded the farmhouse was an endless pasture for her doll family’s imaginary