Sleepy Mamas

The thing about not having enough sleep is that even when you want to write a post about the poetic symmetry between the springtime preparations within your parents beautiful cottage garden, and your own internal springtime period, you cant, or at least, its not the blog post it might have been if you’d had a full 8 hours.
Still, I’ll give it a good crack.

My mum has always enjoyed spending time in her garden. As a young child, teenager and young adult, I must admit I didn’t understand what the fuss was about. I enjoyed the garden as a space and was endlessly appreciative of the ability to run around in it, enjoy so many beautiful blooms, and listen to the birdsong on a late summers evening, but planting, weeding, digging, clearing then going down the dump was all rather arduous, and I couldn’t understand why my parents wanted to do that after working hard all week.
Since having two children and growing up a fair bit since my early adult years, my perspective on this garden-based toil has shifted a little, and I think I am starting to understand why my mum keeps returning to the garden. Perhaps she returns, or perhaps there’s a type of magic in the garden that gently pulls her; the jury is still out. I had always seen the garden as one clumpy entity, but it is in fact an orchestra of little beings. Her plants are as independent of one another and unique in needs and character as the children in her classrooms throughout her teaching career. In her springtime preparations, she creates a path for the plants to follow; prepares a way for them to grow and flourish. She sees them and hears them and listens to them and tends to them in a way I hadn’t properly noticed before. I have a vague childhood memory of leaning into my grandad’s greenhouse, a jungle of little tomatoes. I remember breathing in sweet, green, hot and heavy air and my grandad telling me, that tomatoes grow better if you talk to them nicely. Although there was always a hint of mishchief in everything he said and did (undetectable to the untrained eye) he spoke seriously. I thought at the time he must be being playful, but I think now he may have indeed meant it as seriously as he said it. Perhaps I’m low on sleep and high on creativity, but since this last visit to my mum and dads and watching them work in the garden, not only can I understand why you might quietly encourage a sickly-looking geranium under your breath, I understand what the plants are saying back. ‘I won’t be long’ ‘don’t give up on me’ ‘wait and see’. 
With two young children I find so much of my time is spent rushing through our daily routines, and a great deal of my headspace is spent thinking about the future, making plans I have no real certainty in, and worrying about circumstances I have no control over. Content around parenting is extremely focused on living in the present, feeling the now, practicing mindfulness, being in the moment, listening to your body, that I must admit I am left exhausted. Sentiments which carry this ideology are around the scarcity of time. ‘You have 18 summers with your child and then you don’t have them anymore. Don’t miss it.’  ‘Each day your children are the smallest they will ever be. Hold them close’ etc etc.  I find life angles my focus to observe the passing of time, like everything I am watching is the last of something. I watch moments slip away or run out before my very eyes. I find it hard to focus on the size and grandeur and presence of time and long to observe its immovable permanence. It’s like constantly watching the last few grains of sand slip through the pinch of an hourglass, rather than looking at it when it’s so full that you could almost believe it would never run out. That may be the residual damage of quite a hefty bout of post-natal anxiety, or it might just be because the world is changing so rapidly that reality feels very fragile, the future seems incredibly volatile, so we hang onto moments because were frightened of what’s to come. I believe that’s why we all seem to document our lives so manically. No sooner has a moment passed than were trying to relive it again through watching a photo or a video, sharing it with others to gain their validation and feeling somehow that helps us to maximise the joy of that moment when really, it removes a part of it.

In the garden, I saw the imbalance of time equalise. The physical action of planting provided the need to be present. The calming mindlessness of planting several pots provided the space to ruminate, reflect, reminisce, but all the while so hopeful were the new shoots and seeds and growing plants around you that your entire being is compelled to face forward. The three time-frames sung in harmony rather than shouting in dissonance. I am so used to anxiety gripping my chin and forcing me head to turn toward the future, that I always forget about hope; the sweetest scent which drifts into my attention and interupts my rush, it turns my head with the promise of joy, guiding my steps towards goodness, niceness, happiness. And that’s what I found in my parent’s garden. That sweet scent of hope, and the reminder my pace did not affect the future. The future of my parent’s garden will be bright and lovely and full of blooms regardless of whether the potting is rushed or done slowly.
I have felt a numbness or quietness within my character that appeared after my pregnancy and births. I wish I could explain it to you. I have tried many times to articulate it in words and I am reassured many other women experience it, but there has been such a period of grief over a part of me which feels gone. After my births my whole person felt fragmented, an internal  explosion had shattered something into inumerable peices. Slowly over time, I have seen various components float back together and reform, but there is still a kind of an absence of character  somewhere. It has been like losing a dear friend, and I’m just waiting for her to come home, but not sure if she ever will. Since this internal explosion I have found my inner clock naturally runs a lot faster than it used to. My body recognising somekind of emergency, has sped up in action, much like an ambulance speeding a person to care. It has lived in a mode designed to repair damage and return the body to normal. Still long after my birth and physical healing, my body remains in that heightened state, still sensing an emotional injury and continuing to try and repair. In the garden however, I was able to slow that pace down for a moment to my mum’s internal clock. Never rushing, but always moving, her internal rythum was closer to the lapping waves of an island beach than a bumblebees heart beat. ‘Where’s the fire?’ she often says with a smirk to my 4 year old, eager for a hundred activities and snacks simultaneously. Sitting still in the sun for a moment, and feeling very much like one of the withered looking stick plants in a row of teracotta pots, I was able to adjust my perspective a little, and instead of thinking a part of me might be gone and never coming back, I found hope that it could just be wintering. A plant can appear very much dead, but it is in fact just sleeping.
I’m not very green fingered so if left to garden unsupervised I probably would have thrown out that row of wintering plants in the terracotta pots having misinterpreted their apparent lack of life for death, when in fact they just need a little more time, for the right season to come, and a nuturing nudge from an experienced gardener.