I commissioned some artwork for the first time for my MC, Hazel! Seeing the character come to life, absolutely is something that makes me proud and want to keep working. I feel like this is a tattoo or a Pringle. Once you get one, you never want to stop! LOL!
I wanted to emphasize both the freckles and have the character looking towards the fox, the animal they shift into, because they are both something that they had to grow to love and have trauma because of it due to how they were raised. Their dead name is Talia, meaning soft dew from heaven, due to the fact that they share the same scatter of freckles as their father who passed when they were young. He was also a shifter and was killed in his form while rushing back home to see his child and wife after being away for work. A hunter mistook him for a fox, and the father never made it home.
Due to this reasoning, Hazel's mother knows that Hazel hates their dead name, but connects the trauma of the death of her husband, her mate, and took it out on her child. Refusing to call Hazel by their name, forbidding them to shift due to the fear that she would also lose them too. Their mother is human by the way.
So, this is the context that I wanted to go with before sharing the snippet and to have them looking at their counterpart. They love it, even in the present, but there is so much trauma surrounding their animal counterpart that they have anxiety and sometimes the fox side takes over in high stress situations whenever they are in a panic.
And so with that, I give you the snippet of their backstory. An interaction with their mom:
Splash, scrub, rinse, repeat.
Poked, cinched, and then we eat.
This was the way of a young lady… blah, blah….
“Talia, is everything alright, darling? You are spacing out.”
The clang of the knife shook me, bringing me from the routinely haze and back to the present. Set with the familiar precision, both plates were nestled between silverware that we couldn’t afford, distracting from the worn out table cloth everything was placed upon. Chipped platers mocked the pristine effort of the table setting, and the seat cushions were modest. Refinement was what she always sought after, even though our home remained modest. It was all about presentation.
Searching my face, silently questioning my non answer, she shook her head before lifting her knife back up.
“Sit up straight, Talia. A young lady never slouches.”
My jaw clenched harder at the sound of that name, so sure my teeth would crush beneath the pressure. I hated it. I didn’t care whatever great person held that moniker before me. It wasn’t mine. It wasn’t me. I didn’t feel like a lady. I didn’t want to be a young lady, but my mother refused to hear it. I wasn’t sure of what I was, but it wasn’t this. As loving as she was in other facets of my life, and she tried, we never saw eye to eye on this. The part of me that mattered the most.
“That’s not my name,” I mumbled, not even trying to adjust my posture.
She let out a constrained breath, lowering her knife once more before addressing me. “I believed you mentioned it is not ladylike—” That word dripping with a sardonic tone as it left my lips. “—to eat and speak.”
Taking a moment to collect myself, I closed my eyes garnering whatever strength I had left. While I didn’t wish my words to be what drove the wedge between us deeper, causing a further rift between me and the only family I had, I knew that the more I let this slide, the more it caused me pain. Restless nights where I stared at my reflection and hated the body that stared back at me. It was never my words that truly divided us. Hers did.
“Am I allowed to speak plainly, mother?” The label holding little of the affection that should be held when speaking to someone who you shared your life with.
“Of course. You are safe here to speak freely, my darling.”
“That’s not my name.” I repeated, biting back before I could stop the aggressive tone. My posture straightened, only as a defensive barrier, hoping that the action would portray the seriousness of my words. Hoping that it would finally be hammered into her brain. “A fact of which, I remind you daily.”
Her wrinkles harshened, gazing at me with a bewildered expression. As if I were the one who offended her.
“What?”
“It is not my name.” Enunciating every word, my eyes locked on my mother. There was no backing down from this.
“Of course, dear. I just…”
Here it comes…
“I just don’t understand the desire for such changes. You have such a beautiful name…” A soft hand reached to caress my cheek. The print of her thumb lightly traced along each etched marking of my freckles as if she was following a celestial path. “And these remind me of your father. We must do everything to keep his memory alive.”
I hated when she did that. Whenever I would bring it up my discomfort with that name, she would constantly remind me of my father and the connection we shared. The fact that it was he who chose it for me. That it reminded her of the dew drops scattered across the forest, beaming in the sunlight after my birth, and that my freckles were the constant reminded of when she was happy. I was young when my father passed and my mother, bless her attempts, wanted me to understand the man who loved me.
But how could she herself claim to love me when she didn’t even acknowledge the truth about her child?
How was I to tell her, after she ranted and raved about a man whose face was as hazy to me as a dream, that the name that connected us was as dead to me as he was? “Talia” was fire on my skin and I burned at each utterance, and her using it to honor, further divided us. I was alive, I was here. What loyalty did I have to a ghost?
“I understand the love and adoration that you have for my father.” Finding my voice, the tone was strange to my ears even if the origin of my feeling was not. Shaky, trembling, yet clear and concise, I knew that this conversation, my words, would be the thing to break us. She wasn’t a horrible mother. In all the ways that an outsider to our relationship would view it, she was wonderful. In the moments that mattered to me though, while the pain that she delivered might not carry physical bruises, I carried the scars with me each day. Knowing that, on some unconscious level, I would never be the child that my mother wanted me to be. “But if you’d like for me to honor my father by using a name that I do not recognize, why, with all the things you’ve told me about him, would I believe that he would be on your side on this? I think he would have preferred to call me Hazel. Also, I think that, maybe, he would have wanted his child to run free in their animal form, rather than sheltering it.”
The words hung in the silence, my mother blinked as if she were trying to gather her response but couldn’t. This wasn’t par the course, I hardly ever spoke up against her. Which also saddened me with the truth that, even if I wished it never came to this point, it ultimately had to. If she could use my father as a tool for guilt, why couldn’t I.
Trying and failing to find the words, she shook her head and looked back at the plate. Gathering the cutlery in her hands, she reverted back to propriety, which was her safety net.
Why can’t you just act normal?” she quietly, but even if she tried to hide it, she also knew that my ears would pick it up. The words were thrown in my direction, careless in their delivery but precise in their impact. They had jilted my resolve and caused my body to go cold.
“What’s normal?” I asked, my voice small but steady.
“Normal,” she said, emphasizing the word in a bit of a condescending tone as if I were a younger child learning phrases for the first time. “The way you’re supposed to be. The way I raised you.”
My throat tightened as I felt the tears threatening to spill over. Not here, not yet, I tried to remind myself, but I knew my eyes were burning at the effort to stall my emotions. I refused to look away. “You raised me to be honest,” my voice shakily responded. “And this is who I am.”
“You’re a child. You don’t know who you are.” Her hand reached out to grab mine, my other one digging into the wooden leg of the table. Nails etching over previous indents, tracing over them in order to ground myself as my mother’s words hung in the air. Reaching out with her free hand, she brushed a curl from my face, her touch so gentle, it made my heart ache. “
“You make it so hard for me to protect you,”her voice soft, trembling with something that was masked as love, but also looked like fear.
Splash, scrub, rinse, repeat
Poked, cinched, and then we eat
Such is the way of a lady fair.
Not a hair out of place,
Nor dirt on my face
Stay sweet, normal, and debonair….
