Mother Garden

Motherhood brought me to the garden. What is a garden but a womb, a space fecund with creative potential. After years adrift in the barren desert of craving the child who would not come, I lay awed by the vastness of the infinitesimally small miracle happening within me when pregnancy reached my awareness. A new life from the tiniest of seeds taking root within. The surreally visceral experience of growing another human blew my mind, as my familiar, socially programmed brain-led self shut down fuse by fuse, far more powerful bodily processes flickering steadily on as rising belly subsumed me. There was no choice but to surrender; still I fought it. I did not understand it, I had yet no blueprint for it. This was uncharted territory, I was an explorer unknowingly thrust onto pre-colonial lands. 

My first baby was not a “good” baby. I knew he was my perfect baby because he was so crystal clear in his needs, but they were not the ones I was taught to expect. The unrelenting nature of mothering, the messy physicality of it, my body and my self completely out of my control - the fierceness of it - undid me. I had this softly pastel, gently loving picture of motherhood in my mind, a gleaming Virgin Mary tenderly balancing the shining infant on her knee. Only to discover my purest rage, a bloody pagan flame to destroy anything around me that would harm my child. I leaked blood, milk, urine and sweat, and knelt in the dirt brought down before this milky sweet infant, innocent fingers across my face rose petals caressing my crown of thorns. I grew teeth and claws and finally understood that I was animal, and that all of nature around me was for me, was of me, and I was of it. I understood misogyny. The fear of those who retain this direct umbilical line to our true wild nature, the envy of that dark, mysterious, uncontrollably creative potential power. We were intertwined, interconnected in a profound way of which I had lost feeling over time.

I knew this as a child. I can remember my hiding places under Ixora bushes in my grandmother’s yard, sucking the nectar from the flowers with the bees. I remember our German Shepherd giving birth and giving me unique and unfettered access into her den with her newborn pups. I must have been so very young then, my daughter’s age now? To be able to crawl into her house in the backyard musty with the smell of new life. She must have been bigger than I was, stronger certainly, the trust between us beyond language. I watched her eat the runt of the litter and I understood something about life and death then that I have carried with me since. It is in the blood and guts and ugly, dirty parts of living from which we shy away and go to incredible lengths to avoid that the greatest transcendence is to be found. 

Transcendence. Why do we waste our time chasing mere happiness when there are so much more profound states of being to be experienced? Bliss, euphoria, sublime exaltation, all transformative, all accompanied by their own form of pain, but the more beautiful for being so. 

Gardening is transcendent. In the barren months I went out to the beds and plunged chafed fingers into the soil again and again, removing the most pernicious weeds that would stifle other life, nourishing the soil with rich organic matter, sowing seeds and placing young plants in hope. That is all I have done, and when I say that it feels like I have done nothing much at all. In the moment it was everything. Hours of work, hard toil bringing pain, but so pleasurable. So sustaining. Now in lush, fertile summer, she blooms in ecstatic response to my clumsy endeavours and all is transported.

Plunging my chafed hands unabashedly into the rich, fertile soil of motherhood is hard, messy, unrelenting toil with painfully beautiful harvests beyond measure. My children bloom and I kiss their muddy faces, brush leaves from their hair, wash grass stains from their feet. I am mother gardener, garden mother. I bear ripe fruit, nurture seedling lives in the fecund soil of me.