A month after I came out, my mom left her job to attend beauty school. We weren’t on good terms at the time. I was hurt because she refused to acknowledge my queerness. She was hurt because she had a gay son. Unwilling to accept my sexuality, she started shifting her focus toward her ambitions. Her goal was to create art within her means, and she was interested in nails as a canvas. And even though we weren’t friendly with each other, one night she asked if she could practice on my hands. I said yes. It was during those practice sessions that we started talking about my identity. It was during those practice sessions that we learned to be friends. The first session was 12 years ago, and it started in the kitchen. Soup was simmering on the stove, and the air was dense with chicken powder. We didn’t have a living room then, nor did we have central heat. Our main source of light was a large fluorescent bulb, glaring down at the table. That was where I sat while mom prepared herself to paint. She kept her supplies in a pencil box labeled “May” (the English name she'd chosen for herself), and her lacquers were all from the drugstore: Essie and OPI and Sally Hansen. I remember being surprised, watching as she set these items on the table. There was an elegance to her movements; a gravity, like when athletes prepare for a race. At 15, I’d never seen her act so seriously before. Until then, Mom was just Mom—a quiet, sometimes moody woman whose entire world revolved around her family. I didn’t consider that she’d lived a life before mine, or that that life involved dreams and artistic ambitions; things that she wanted so badly, she trembled at the thought of having them. Her hands shook that first time. I thought she was nervous because we hadn’t spoken in a while. After I told her I liked boys, and she said all the things parents of gay kids aren’t supposed to say (“It’s just a phase,” followed by, “What am I supposed to tell your father?”), we mutually dropped the subject; Mom because it was convenient for her, me because I hated conflict. But my anger remained, and for weeks I couldn’t stay in the same room as her. Asking to paint my nails was my mom’s version of an olive branch, and I wondered if she saw the irony in wanting me—the son whose sexuality she rejected—to be her canvas. Sure, it was under the guise of helping her master her art, but my belief at the time was that she was trying to make amends, and show that she was OK with my queerness by painting flowers on my thumbs—even though they were ugly as sin. The petals looked strange and messy, and Mom couldn’t keep their stems from bleeding onto my skin. This annoyed her. She’d been working on her brush strokes all morning, painting abstract patterns onto dollar store swatch sticks. She showed them to me in a fit of frustration: a plastic bag filled with nails that resembled jewels. It was at this moment—staring at her hours and hours of hard work—that I understood why her hands shook while she painted my nails. It wasn’t just anxiety over our recent conflict. No; my mom was nervous because, for the first time in her life, she had the agency to pursue something she cared about: Her art. Mom didn’t talk much when she first started painting my nails. She was the youngest…
