Carolyn Jack

Anne Nipper Phillips had a lot going on at the time her mother phoned her.

 

A visual artist, she was recently married and managing a fitness center as a way to take a break from what she calls the "-enes" – the dangerous inks, solvents and other chemicals she had to make use of in the silkscreen printing process with which she produced her art. She and her husband, Ward, had a house outside Atlanta, a big dog and busy, demanding lives. But everything seemed to stop when Phillips heard her mother say that she'd been diagnosed with a terminal form of leukemia. She had maybe three years to live.

 

Her mother also told her the disease wasn't heritable. "She made sure right up front, like in the first 30 seconds, that I knew that," Phillips said through the tears that the memory brought with it. "Even at that moment, she was thinking of me."

 

Phillips did some thinking about her mother, too. What she and her husband decided was that they should start a family and give Phillips's mother her first grandchild while there was still time. Though nature didn't entirely cooperate, and Mrs. Nipper lived only long enough to see the baby's sonogram, the birth of the tiny girl did much more than ease Phillips's pain at losing her parent.

 

"Having Madison, having my first child – that changes you in every sense of the word," she said. "And you have no way of knowing, going in."

 

Unlike many prospective mothers, Phillips hadn't been conflicted by the prospect of having and raising a child. "It's the most joyful thing in the world and a fearsome task, as well.  I just did it day by day," she recalled. "And I loved loved loved being a mom."

 

But the changes – the big ones – started right away: Along with the physical alterations of pregnancy and the round-the-clock schedule of caring for a newborn came a profound difference of outlook. Phillips had always been task driven, she said, taking an exacting approach to her work. She wanted and expected to do it just right, to make it the best. She kept lists.

 

Well, "once you have a child, just throw that out the window," she admitted with a laugh. "In the beginning, it drove me crazy that I couldn't achieve the level of perfection I was used to."

 

Yet it wasn't long until her little daughter taught her something about that perfectionism. As Madison grew and played, Phillips became fascinated and charmed with what this miniature human of hers was thinking about. Once, when the child was still very young, she invented a magic act using lined-up red Solo cups and a magic wand from some kit or game, and entertained her mom with "these strange and bizarre things she'd concocted in her head," Phillips recalled. "I began to realize that there were many, many things in life that were more important than what I had written on my lists. And Madison was so wonderful that we said, 'We are definitely doing this again.'"

 

Their second child, Michael, was born three years after Madison. "I really embraced motherhood," Phillips said.

 

It wasn't like the rest of her life just stopped, though. Determined by both her nature and her sense of responsibility to keep contributing in all ways, Phillips continued to hold down paying jobs and to make art, which are often two different activities. She had long demonstrated a sunny flexibility about her occupations, matter-of-factly turning her hand to whatever new challenge or opportunity presented itself. Over the years, she had learned guitar and cooking; made the National Honor Society; begun fencing at 19 and risen to be the captain of her college women's team; tended bar. Eventually, she would teach herself double-entry accounting and learn to operate a backhoe, among many other things.

 

So when she became too pregnant to keep teaching aerobics and managing the fitness center, she found a work-from-home situation retouching photographs, first for schools and then, as her reputation spread, for top professional photographers. The process took a microscope, an extremely tiny brush and a steady hand. Sometimes, Phillips noted, the baby would kick "and the little brush would go whooooaah!"

 

Things were good. And then her husband was offered a job in England.

 

Phillips, a North Carolina native who had grown up in Raleigh, Asheville and Greensboro, had never lived outside the United States, but – game as always – flew over with Ward to see the Cheshire area where they would be living and to rent a house. "I fell in love with it – I was on board with it totally," she said of the "unbelievably beautiful" part of northern England where the Phillips family ended up living for over eight years. "Everything about it was a huge change."

 

Being an ex-pat anywhere, no matter where you come from or go, isn't easy, even if the language is technically the same. From the food and the left-side-of-the-road driving to the entirely different school, money and social systems, living in England took a lot of adjustment, but the whole family came to love the place so deeply, Phillips said, that she wept when it was time to return to the States. She still misses her English friends and neighborhood.

 

But her history makes clear that Phillips has something change has only enhanced over the years – a capacity for happiness that comes from instinctively focusing on the positive and trusting herself to handle the big risks she has taken in her personal life and as an artist.

 

Just before she and Ward were married, for instance, she had decided to pursue a graduate degree in art at North Carolina State University, where department leaders were so impressed with her portfolio of silkscreen works that they offered her a teaching position, as well. On the morning Phillips was to leave the Georgia house she and Ward shared for Raleigh, she had the car all packed and was walking out the door, when he suddenly said, "You wanna get married?"

 

She walked back into the house.

 

Like the children and international moves that came later, "That changed everything," declared Phillips, still amused more than 40 years later that she didn't get a proposal in Paris or Italy, but on her own front steps from a guy in a bathrobe. "I took the career path off the table. I never regretted it."         

 

Walking away from a full-time profession, centering life on family and children while juggling a serendipitous collection of pursuits and jobs – these are choices that might unnerve a lot of other modern women. The judge-y, high-pressure business world can be quick to disparage people who step away, calling them "mommy-trackers" or worse, "just a housewife."

 

Phillips has never felt belittled. "I don't remember anybody implying that. The friends I had in Atlanta had made the same choice. I was very lucky." But also, she added with some humor, "I have a very bad memory, which I think is on purpose."          

 

These three things – her good-natured optimism; her simple belief in herself; and this willingness to forget, or to choose not to hear, malice from others – have given Phillips an ability that goes beyond coping with change. It helps her enjoy it and thrive on it.

 

Especially the having-children part. "I went into it with zero expectations," she said. "I was entering the great unknown. It turned out to be the best thing I ever did, the best job I ever had."

 

Does she ever get down? Well, yes, there was a day during her time in England when she felt a bit depressed. She was looking out her kitchen window – one of the windows that a not-very-skilled worker had just painted shut, along with failing to clean the gutters of debris and the moss that tends to grow on English roofs – gazing at the neighbor's house from the frame of these sealed windows and fuzzy, dirt-black gutters and giving herself what she called "a mental slap in the face."

 

She said she asked herself, "What's wrong with you?" and ordered herself to find something beautiful to enjoy that minute. And at that minute, a ray of light shone from over the top of the neighbor's house onto the leaves of a nearby copper beech tree and made the leaves sparkle like copper sequins. She'd found her moment of beauty. Two minutes later, she heard the sustained hum of a motor outside and returned to the window. Change was coming her way again.

 

"And I look, and my beech tree gently falls to the left. They cut that sucker down!" Phillips laughed in still-outraged disbelief, before adding dryly, "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away." Still, she said after a pause, "I'm glad I had that little moment."

"Lacewater," by Anne Nipper Phillips

 

"Frozen Silence" by Anne Nipper Phillips

 

"IOP Egret" by Anne Nipper Phillips

 

All photos courtesy of Anne Nipper Phillips