For a long time, I wanted nothing more than to draw like the normal kids, my illustrations depicting green meadows, happy families and rainbows.
However, my impatience, coupled with my natural inability to imitate any life form with crayons and paper, kept the stickers off my star chart in art class and my name off the fridge for the majority of my childhood.
I realized early on that no matter how hard I tried, my horses would always look like Chinese symbols, and my landscapes would tend to resemble the Armageddon.
Consequently, I developed the one-color rule, which stated that to reduce lost time, any school art project would only require the use of the first color available. For years I collected green self-portraits, brown sunsets and mauve holiday feasts.
The trend continued as I got older. When I was 14, I once heard my housekeeper expressing concern over my 3-year-old sister's development when she thought my sister made the clay tomato that I had actually created.
Oh don't worry, it's Kiera's tomato, not Perri's,"" my mom assured her.
""Thank goodness,"" my housekeeper replied. ""I'll make a call and have her deinstitutionalized right away.""
However, over the next few years, we began to worry that Perri had inherited my inconceivable lack of artistic talent.
For my birthday, she eagerly handed me a wooden block glued to a carpet square. To occupy a rainy Saturday, she drew a witch flying through the night sky atop a gigantic phallus.
But eventually, she crossed over to the artistic side of the family where my brother and mom awaited her arrival, leaving my dad and I to contemplate the philosophical meaning of glitter glue and the savage inconvenience of two-sided tape.
By the time I reached high school, both my parents had pretty much given up on rearing the next Michelangelo and accepted me for who I was.
Whenever I had homework that involved some sort of artistic element, my mom was quick to volunteer her services, not wanting me to lose several hours to what would take my peers no more than 15 minutes.
In early November of my senior year, I asked my mom to make two puppets out of cans for a presentation I was doing to promote my school's food drive.
She returned with one can sporting yarn hair, a witch's pointy black hat and black cape, and the other can boasting a tiny, but very real, carved pumpkin glued to the top.
""Umm, Mom,"" I told her. ""This is a Thanksgiving food drive.""
I adjusted my presentation accordingly.
College did not fare much better for me in the artistic area. While I avoided the drawing classes like Chadbourne's shepherd's pie, my artistic failures managed to reinvent themselves through Power Point presentations, illegible blue books and interpretive redecorating strategies.
But after all these years, I've finally come to terms with the talent I'll never procure.
I am ready to spend the rest of my life reassuring my parents that the doodles I drew on the message pad are flowers and not people having sex, promising my boyfriend that cupid is not carrying a chainsaw on the Valentine's card I made him and explaining to my future children that the picture I helped them draw will not spring to life and eat them after bedtime.
If you can draw asexual flowers, e-mail Kiera at wiatrak@wisc.edu.
