Pia also has a wonderful relationship with her father and his family, who see her all the time. She brought her children’s nanny of 20 years to help Pia and me to settle into our new life together, and Nana has been central to our household ever since. My sister, who had made it possible for Pia to enter my life by navigating with charm and persistence all the pitfalls as they arose, came over to the US for a week. Those feelings of isolation are still raw, and I will remain forever indebted to the friends who checked in with me daily to see how I was managing my transition into motherhood, and how Pia was managing her first months of being in the world. It felt as though we were the only people alive. I remember singing to Pia at 3am, in an unsuccessful endeavour to comfort her. There was much nail-biting worry about the wellbeing of this tiny soul, who had been born prematurely and was in intensive care for a week. But every day I would sit down after bedtime (hers) and supper (mine) to make a list of what Pia and I had done over the past 24 hours. I had no idea whether I would be able to bring Pia’s world to life in the pictures I would draw each evening once she’d gone to bed. Yet, on 1 January 2020, I started the diary, resolving to post what I did each day as an Instagram story the following morning.
I’ve always greatly admired artists who are committed enough to go into the studio at the end of their salaried working day I never imagined for one moment that I would ever count myself among their number. The answer would be that not only was I drawing her, I was going to make a visual diary of our life together. And so it was, at the end of 2019, that I decided my assignment would be an answer to all those people who knew I’d gone to art school, and who asked me regularly whether I was drawing my daughter, Pia. One year I quit smoking (40 cigarettes a day), on another occasion I stopped drinking alcohol, and once I gave up caffeine. I love the Christmas and the New Year holidays, and each January for the past decade, I’ve chosen to set out on a project that will challenge me.
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