How I Became a Cartoonist by Katherine Arnoldi

How I Became a Cartoonist

by Katherine Arnoldi

When I started The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom, I wasn't thinking of a book at all. All I wanted to do was learn how to become a cartoonist. I took out a blank sheet of paper and decided to concentrate first on the drawing. I'll just tell the story of my life, I thought, and that way I won't have to think about the words. After a while, I hoped, I would teach myself to draw good enough that I might be accepted by World War 3, to me the coolest cartoon venue around.

I had been publishing stories and reading around New York for years. In 1991 I was the Grand Slam second place winner at the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe, reading short fiction about single moms, about being a Mennonite and living in the world, about the housing crises, and about the dangers of multi-nationals and their impact on the poor of the world. My big slam winner was a poem about my landlord taking over the world. The pieces that were the least favorite of the slam audiences were the ones I was most fervent about, the teenage single mom pieces. Gordon Lish at The Quarterly was one of the few brave editors who would publish them.

So, when I began the cartoon book, I started with the most life-changing event of my life, the moment my daughter was born, and told my day-to-day life one panel at a time. I didn't think anyone would ever see these drawings, so I felt free to experiment with different styles and assuage my fears about drawing by making elaborate borders. One thing I noticed right away: as I drew the pictures of my past, the memories came barreling back in a different way than when I had written about these experiences. It was as though the memory came through my arm and then appeared before me, like on a movie screen.

Often I would find myself at my drawing table, my body racked with sobs at seeing images of myself as a young teenage mom: on my way to work at the factory carrying a baby, a diaper bag, a purse, and my lunch out to the car in the dead of night, having to leave my daughter at a day care center and then being overwhelmed all day by her cries when I left her. Seeing myself being battered by a boyfriend and realizing, when I drew her in the next room, a prisoner in her high chair, the horrible instability that my child was being subjected to. As I was drawing, I was seeing more deeply the truth of my memories, and, I realized, the truth of other single moms and their children. As I worked I had sympathy for the character of myself. I saw how I had struggled with such a limited knowledge of the world. How, at a time when many teenagers are thinking about what they want to be when they grow up and how they will accomplish that, I was thinking about if I had enough money to buy the number of baby food jars I needed to last until the next paycheck, and then living with the realization that I did not.

Time and again I was shocked to see the reality of my life there before me, irrefutability stark. I started one drawing with the words, "I tiptoed down the stairs." As I drew my feet on the stairs, the memory came back to me, as though bursting through my arm. When I was finished, I saw the exact steps, the exact house that was a suppressed and forgotten nightmare. I drew my arms holding up a chair, ready to hit my brother-in-law over the back. I drew myself on the floor of the room which was mine while I lived with my brother-in-law and my sister, drawing a chair propped against the doorknob to keep my brother-in-law out, and remembered that the room was only as wide as the door. As I kept drawing panel after panel, I suddenly realized: this is the story of my struggle to go to college; this is the story of how I found Jackie, another single mom, who told me about financial aid and the possibility that even I could go to college.

At the time that I began the cartoon I was running a program at Charas Community Center on 9th and Avenue B called The Single Mom College Program, where I would hand out financial aid and college applications. I was trying to do for others what Jackie had done for me. I also would go to GED programs where I was shocked to learn that single moms graduated without ever being told about the process of applying and the advantages of going to college. For many years, Pat Gowens at The Welfare Mother's Voice, had been publishing articles of mine like "College is Fun," and "The Single Mother's Bill of Rights." I wrote that single mothers were denied equal rights to education, to fairness in the courts, to employment and housing.

On my trips to the GED programs, I began to notice a disturbing fact. Just because single moms had the application, and even though they told me they wanted to go to college, most did not fill out the applications right there with me, as I hoped. Instead, they politely excused themselves, said they had to run to pick up their children, and, often forgetting their applications, ran out the door, waving to me, repeatedly thanking me for coming.

Something was wrong.

I realized that the problem was not just having the information. The problem was the same problem I had had: feeling worthy to use it. Even though it was the 1990's I shockingly realized that these single moms felt that they, too, had made their bed and had to lie in it, that they had made a "mistake" that in turn made them ineligible to participate in the world. In fact, the problem of feeling worthy was even more severe in the 1990's. These women had been bombarded with anti-welfare rhetoric, with propaganda poised to discourage teen pregnancy by attacking teen moms themselves. I felt I could discern on their faces the same feeling I had had as a teen mom, the feeling that I had ruined my life, but there was more there: These women had the added burden of being made scapegoats for the economic difficulties of the early 1990's. It was they, not Desert Storm or the Savings and Loan bail-out, or global changes, that had caused the nation's economic problems.

All they wanted, after having the applications in hand, was to disappear. How well I understood that! All you would have to do to see this is to go to a GED graduation like the one I attended last summer at the community room at a housing project in the Bronx. Everything was in place to make this an official event: the long table at the front of the room, a podium, a microphone and a sound system, rows of folding chairs. It should have been an afternoon of pride, hope, honor, congratulations, and accolades. After all, these young women and men had, against great obstacles, and purely on their own internal motivation, succeeded at passing their high school equivalency exams. As the event progressed, however, the complexities of the difficulties these young people faced emerged and overtook the decorum. The audience became quickly bored with the speakers and began talking among themselves, leaving the room and then shouting back to others still inside. Babies cried. Children ran around. Drinks spilled. Chairs overturned.

When it came time for the young people to come to the front of the room, the single moms tugged on clothes too small for their post-delivery bodies, as though ashamed of revealing something, exposing themselves. One woman, 17 years old and the mother of three children, looked down at the floor the entire time, except for a brief moment when her name was called and she looked up, trying to smile, her eyes darting fearfully.

This is when I realized: the distance between having a pen in hand and putting it to the application form for these women is an epic journey, filled with as many demons, monsters, temptations and obstacles as any Ulysses in any Odyssey, as any superhero in literature. That was when I realized I was making a cartoon book about my own struggles to feel worthy, to put the pen to paper, to move from a life of limitations, of wanting to be invisible, to a life of possibilities.

It was my friend Jackie Ward, a single mom with two children, who helped me traverse the great divide, who somehow convinced me that not only was I worthy, but it was a right which I was being denied and that I had to fight for. Jackie had empowered me enough that when I got to the University of Arkansas and they denied me financial aid, I marched over to the Legal Aid office and returned with my lawyer. The BEOG grant that I was told there was "no way" I could get suddenly became available. But how many had been turned away?

I began to see my cartoon book as a way to do for single moms what Jackie had done for me. I Xeroxed copies of it, stapled them together and handed them out at GED programs and at my downtown readings. The perfect gift for the single mom in YOUR family, I ranted. I showed one to my friends Steve Cannon and Mia Hansford. "This should be in the BAD GIRLS SHOW at the New Museum," Mia said.

The show was already up, but I was there the next day and, to my surprise, Felix, Marcia Tucker's assistant, exclaimed with intakes of breath, "Oh, we love it! Of course we'll put it in!" My art career, now only four months old, was coming along nicely. Already I was in a museum show.

As time passed, though, I became discouraged. Several friends made fun of my interest in single moms, telling me I needed "to wake up and smell the _____," that I should get on with my life, or, actually, "get a life." I was a writer. What I needed was a novel, they said. I kept working on the cartoon book, kept going to GED programs, kept my dream. I just stopped talking about it as much. Feelings of unworthiness again overwhelmed me. In a positive moment, I took out the cartoon book and used it to apply to the Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondack mountains.

Once there, I was surrounded by support. Harriet Barlow welcomed us to the Center, describing how the Blue Mountain Center believed that social change emanated from the culture, and that artists, writers and poets were at the heart of cultural change. That was why we were here, she told us, because they believed in our mission, our power to make significant cultural and social change.

First Jackie Ward had empowered me with the belief that I could go to college, then the Blue Mountain Center empowered me with the belief that I could do for others what Jackie had done for me. After leaving there I put the little Xeroxed book in the mail for a New York Foundation of the Arts Award in Drawing. To my surprise, I won. That helped me to add to the book. It was now 170 pages. In a burst of motivation I took it to my agent, Jennifer Hengen, at Sterling, Lord, Literistic. She had called me many years before and wanted to represent me after reading a piece in FICTION, and had always believed in and supported my writing. She had been patiently waiting for a novel. Instead I gave her the cartoon book.

She sent it out. Within an hour she had an offer. Others jumped in. It looked like The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom might have a chance to reach not only those I could take Xeroxed copies to, but truly the single mom in YOUR family.

I sent a letter to Jackie to tell her the good news. I did not hear back. Finally I called. Her husband answered the phone. Jackie had been killed in a car accident several months before. Although she had seen the little Xeroxed copy of the book and knew of my gratitude, of how she changed my life, she would never know how her acts of generosity in giving me information that would change my life, her patience toward my feelings of unworthiness, and her insistence that I had an equal right to education would, like a ripple, or better yet, like some divine pyramid scheme for good, effect first me, then maybe more than either of us could have possibly dreamed.

Maybe there'll be a national-bring-your-child-to-class day to protest no day care. Maybe there'll be a bring-your-children-to-the-dorms day. Maybe single moms will go en masse to college.

My daughter, the little girl imprisoned in the high chair, traumatized in the beginning of the book, did not grow up to be a teen mom, battered by boyfriends. Instead she chooses the images at the end of the book. She chooses to see herself on the back of the bike, in paroxysms of giggles and laughter, while her mother speeds off to college classes. She chooses to wonder, too, what her purpose might be, what contribution she might make. After graduating magna cum laude, she is spending the summer taking the MCAT, applying to med school. She is hoping to serve, to give the right of health care to communities where single moms now often go with minimal or no care. She is hoping to find the happiness of a meaningful life, the significance of the gift of healing. She wants to give her own child not beds to lie in, but like all children in the world should have, footsteps and the feeling of worthiness to step into and then out of, going as far as their potential will allow, as far as their purpose might lead them.