My daughter is 22 years old and she hasn’t drawn a person since she was six.
Not a stick figure. Not a doodle in the margin of a notebook. Nothing. Sixteen years. I didn’t even notice for the first decade. That’s the part I have to live with.
Her name is Ellie. She’s at Virginia Tech now, architecture program. Thirty-eight thousand a year in tuition and the kid designs the most beautiful buildings you’ve ever seen. Curved glass, open courtyards, light pouring into these spaces she creates. Her professors love her work. But if you flip through her sketchbooks, her models, her plans, there’s not a single human being anywhere. Empty rooms. Playgrounds with no children. A park bench with nobody sitting on it. I thought it was just her style.
Before she turned six, she drew everything. Horses with wild manes. Our dog, Biscuit, with his tongue hanging out. Trees, flowers, the sun with a big smiley face. And people. Tons of people. Me and her and her dad, Craig, holding hands. Our family in front of our house. Her and her kindergarten friends lined up like a little army. She loved drawing people.
Then it just stopped. I noticed, sort of. I asked her once when she was maybe eight or nine. She was coloring at the kitchen table and everything was landscapes, buildings, animals. I said something like, “How come you never draw people anymore?” She didn’t even look up. “I just don’t want to.” And I let it go. I let it go because I was busy, because kids go through phases, because it didn’t seem like a big deal. I had a million things happening. Craig and I were in rough shape back then, fighting about money, about schedules, about nothing.
I wasn’t paying close attention to what my daughter wasn’t drawing. I was barely keeping the lights on emotionally.
Last Thanksgiving changed everything. Ellie was home for the long weekend and we were cleaning out the hall closet, finding stuff to donate. She pulled out this shoebox from the top shelf. Old drawings from kindergarten and first grade. The paper was that cheap newsprint kind, already yellowing. We sat on the hallway floor together and started going through them.
Most of them made us laugh. A purple horse with seven legs. Biscuit looking like a potato with ears. But then I found one near the bottom. A family. Stick figures, three of them, holding hands in front of a house. Crayons. Big wobbly smiles on everyone. Me, her, Craig. She’d written “MY FAMLY” across the top in backwards letters.
