Sown Up

Hello, friend. Thank you for joining me here!

At bedtime, I give my six year old a dream. I describe some epic adventure, often pertaining to unicorns, fairies or mermaids, and (hopefully) captivating her enough that she will close her eyes to seek the thread. In the morning, she inevitably reports back that she not only had the dream, but can now give me further details which I so neglectfully left out. I’m not entirely sure she ever actually dreams of the tales I tell, but it’s become a sweet end to the evening’s routine and a silly morning ritual. Kids love repetition and structure, and they especially love stories. About two weeks ago, I gave her a dream that was a bit run of the mill around here, following a structure I often use. We had been to the plant nursery up the road that day and we’d ordered six new trees, including apple, pear and crabapple, to be planted mid-May when the fear of frost subsides. This was a thrill for me. I was so sad to leave behind the flowering trees and shrubs we had in our yard back east: pink dogwood, cherry blossom, wisteria, forsythia and two varieties of apple. We also left blueberry bushes, peonies, honeysuckle and strawberries. Much of this was planted on progressive Mother’s Days throughout my girl’s early childhood; we trekked out to a local nursery on those special Sundays to pick out a tree or shrub to celebrate at my request. So, choosing new trees for the farmhouse was very exciting for me—so much so that I couldn’t wait until May 9th to select this year’s additions. After the joy of the choice, I wanted to incorporate them into Finley’s dream that night. It began with a tap on her window. It was a large petal—pink, of course—asking her to come outside. In the dream, she slipped out of bed, through the curtains, onto the petal and into the night sky. I told her that the blossom would fly her all around the farm, over the new trees and all of our land. Then, the flight path would widen to include the plant nursery where we’d been that day, along with her school, and our town’s tiny Main Street with gazebo and General Store. I was kind of ready to swoop her back home at that point in the dream and get downstairs to Netflix, but she asked if she would fly over her grandparents’ houses. Well, of course, I replied. I described her flower flight up to the North Shore and down into western farmland, soaring across Minnesota to see the people she loves. Finally, I flew her home. I described her return to bed, her deep sleep, and how she would wake up in the morning believing it was all a dream. She would open her eyes, turn back her covers and swing her feet to the floor. But, wait…under her feet she would feel something. What was that? Could it be? Pink petals…Was it a dream?? “You decide,” I ended. (This was how most of these stories concluded—inspired by our favorite Wish books that feature a little girl who is never quite sure if her fantastic adventures are just a dream.) I kissed her forehead and started to make my escape, but she stopped me. “What about our old house?,” she asked. “Will I go there?” Hmmm. “Ok, sure,” I answered. “Why can’t…I want…,” she started to cry. What in the world? “What’s the matter?,” I asked. She could barely respond the tears came so fast. In starts and fits, she gaspingly blurted out that what she wanted was to fly back to where we used to live. At first, I though she missed the trees we’d left behind as much as I did, but then she sobbed, “That house where we had all of our things, and it was nice, and you didn’t have to work on it all the time, and I didn’t have to help.” Ahhh. That house. Oh, my dear…

It was that moment when I realized that my sunny little girl was not taking this all in stride. We talk about the resilience of children, and that is a thing—I hope—eventually. But along the way, they see and feel everything that’s happening. Of course she misses aspects of our old life, as we do, but what I heard in her confession was that the stress of our current life is hurting her. My baby is hurting…I’m struggling to type right now. Have to keep wiping tears. You know, you think you’re managing ok…You get through the days…And then, from the mouths of babes…

**I have to pause right here and talk about privilege for a minute. Friend, I know these are high class problems. I am LUCKY to have had one home, let alone two, in which to shelter this child. Her biggest worry is emotional, not physical. She is responding to anxieties, and while I am very concerned for her wellbeing, I don’t have to worry about her being shot if she gets pulled over for a traffic violation one day. Because of her whiteness, my child will not be victimized by systematic racism. She will be given unearned advantages. She will be protected while other mother’s children are persecuted. I know this, and I will continue to re-examine my part in it and work towards change. I am teaching my child about injustice and raising her to speak up, stand up and vote. As I share what we are going through, I have ever-present awareness that our problems and challenges don’t even register on the same scale as those of our neighbors of color. Minneapolis is bleeding. I feel uncomfortable writing about my struggles in the face of the tragedies which have occurred. My guilt is not important; my actions are. I know this. At the same time, I am a mother whose child is crying. Regardless of why she is hurting, and without belittling it, I must try find a way to help her. That is what all mothers want do…

So, back to that night, the night of the petal dream: I tried to figure out where her pain was coming from. The only other time since moving that she had a similar outburst was on Halloween. It started as tears over missing trick-or-treating, but was rooted in the revelation that, having had a stomach bug the week before NYC shut down, she believed she was the entire cause of Covid. Isn't it funny how these moments of sorrow are never about what they’re about? The deeper, underlying stuff only surfaces once the floodgates have been loosened by smaller upsets. It wasn’t the isolation on All Hallow’s Eve, but the self-blame that haunted my girl. It isn’t that she wants to move back to our yellow cottage in Maplewood, it is that she wants this new life to stop being so hard. And, so do I.

Utter and complete privilege acknowledged, this whole “Let’s move during a global pandemic, and change our whole life, and live in a ramshackle old house WHILE we renovate and cannot hire help until we get vaccines, and keep telling ourselves it’s a dream come true” thing has worn a bit thin. You may not have made quite as many changes as we have, but I’m betting you get what I mean. No one could have known how long this virus would be with us, controlling every aspect of daily life. If we had known, would we have still moved? I think so?? What has happened, though, is that nothing looks the way I thought it would. Isn’t that one of the biggest take-aways from Covid? So many dashed expectations and changed plans. A completely altered reality that no one saw coming. I recognize that staying stuck in the loss doesn’t help improve things. It’s important to understand why you’re crying (see: six-year-old and underlying upsets), but once you have given grace to whatever that is, you probably ought to figure out how to move forward so that you aren’t as sad anymore. I think a big reason that this season has been so challenging for all of us is that there is no distinct finish line. We don’t know when (or if) the world will truly be safe again. And because we can’t pinpoint the “when,” it’s tough to zero in on the how. You know how personal development coaches ask you to work backwards from your goal in order to schedule the proper steps toward it? Well, how can we do that when we aren’t sure about whether herd immunity will work, or if enough people will get vaccinated to even make that possible, or if the variants are going to wipe out every step forward that we’re trying to take? How can we make a plan that is efficient and safe when safe doesn’t exist yet? You can’t get somewhere that isn’t on the map.

Here is what my child wants: clean living spaces filled with the things she has seen her whole life, in a house that has rooms which function as intended, where she and her parents live their life. That life, for her, would probably include the best aspects of what life was before—before our move and before Covid. Mommy and Daddy alternated acting jobs that gave them purpose, income and fulfillment. Finley had friends that she saw and hugged. We went on adventures, traveled, gathered with loved ones, and engaged in the world. On its best days, that life was filled with color and light. It shone. 

There are good days here. Good moments, for sure. But it is different. It is mostly hard. We don’t really have any new friends because we don’t go to places where people might gather. There is no socialization except for some masked and distanced school days for Finley. She got in trouble for touching another kid’s foot under the table at lunch, and cried to the teacher that she just wants to hug her friends. That about broke my heart, her yearning. Like my child, this house is not at peace. There are several rooms that are still filled with half emptied boxes (emptied on top of other boxes) and no furniture. There are rooms whose walls are down to the studs, with cracks of light leading the way in for bugs and critters. There is no kitchen counter space because there are actually no counters. The bathtub is outside, which isn’t so fun (or workable) in winter and bleak, early spring. On top of all the interior unrest, the land has been in awkward transition, too.

There is a span of two to three weeks in Minnesota when the clean, white snow finally melts, but green is yet to come . It is particularly bleak and exceedingly ugly and seems to last longer here than in other places. It sort of coincides with Spring Break, which somehow feels cruel. During that muddy stretch, I actually had a visit from a childhood friend whom I hadn’t seen since age 10. She lives in the Twin Cities and wanted to connect. We agreed to have an outdoor visit so she could see the farm. I was excited for the reunion, but nervous, too. To be honest, I had sort of put her off out of embarrassment. As she looked around, my gazed followed hers, and I really saw how bad our place looked. It was a gray and brown day, the snow melt having revealed all the random crap that moving and renovating had strewn about our world just prior to winter’s onslaught. I wish she had come this week, when things are finally blooming and there is grass again. It was not the best first impression of our new life. I found myself dancing as fast as I could to explain what we’d be putting where and how we envisioned the farm’s future. I don’t know if she heard my desperation, but she asked if all our New York friends thought we were crazy. Maybe. Sometimes I think that. April in Minnesota is not the best time to take stock of anything. 

I would really like life to speed up a little. I want to be fully vaccinated already. I want you to be, too. And I want those vaccinations to work. I want this house to work also. Yes, the bathroom is almost done, but it took A YEAR. Now that it’s warming up at last, we can move ahead with the roofing and siding on the new porch addition. That will help me feel less like this is a temporary life; long-standing, visible Tyvek exteriors are a prescription for low-grade depression. It’s coming, the change. We eek forward. But I severely underestimated the time both the renovation and pandemic would take. I think that’s one of the things that has been hardest on all of us. My daughter is one of the sunniest people I’ve ever met, but even her seemingly irrepressible joy has its limits. 

Again, just a couple of nights ago she fell apart. This time, she lamented the loss of our NJ cherry blossom tree and the playground down the street from the old house. It got so bad that I had to leave her room and ask David to try to console her. That tree, with it’s perfect pink blossoms, had been her tree. It was old and cracked, on it’s last legs according to the arborist we consulted. But it continued to bloom with a defiant profusion of petals each of the six springs we saw there. From age five months to five years, we took a picture of Finley amongst the flowers. When she was tiny, David held her up inside the canopy of branches with one arm, to my new-mom dismay. As she got bigger, she stood on various step stools and chairs. She often plucked a perfect blossom from the tree to hold. I called her my Cherry Blossom Girl, like the song. That tree was kind of like a living growth chart. Our daughter and her relationship to it showed the years progressing. Of course she misses it, especially right now when it must be filled with flowers so far away. I know that the new trees we have ordered will bloom, too. I know they will become special, in time. But I can’t speed up their growth and give them the character and history of that cherry blossom. For that we have to wait, too. 

As I take stock of how to help my girl, I know that I can only control a few things. I can hear her and hold her. I can get the new trees in the ground. I can encourage and support the work on the house that I cannot do myself, trying not to complain about the process—something that isn’t helpful to any of us and will only increase our stress. I can use the 45 “free” minutes during (most) days that I am not parenting/cleaning/cooking/managing our household to unpack and arrange the parts of our life that can be restored. So many areas of the farmhouse cannot yet accommodate furniture, let alone photos or mementoes. But I can ramp up the creation of small pockets of beauty in hopes that my child will see them and trust in what we are building. Chaos is no good for anyone, but it’s especially hard for children. The mess and disorder that I’ve accepted with defeat must be seen anew—no matter how uncomfortable that makes me—so that I can refocus enough to make change. As each room evolves, I must find fresh motivation to meet it with energy and joy. Those are qualities that Covid has hijacked. But, I try to remind myself that humans have an endless capacity to reinvent their lives, if they chose to do so. I’ve done it many times, sometimes by necessity and sometimes by choice. It’s hard AF, but it’s non-negotiable for growth. I must comfort my child. I must help her through this season. I myself am exhausted and sad and overwhelmed, but I am her grown up, and I have no choice but to grow up myself.

Yesterday, when I picked Finley up from school, I told her I had a special surprise. At home, I pointed to a white magnolia tree near the barn. One of the earliest signs of spring, it had been in bloom for about ten days and was actually starting to lose its flowers. Somehow, I had overlooked it up to that point. I took her to her room and searched through the closet for something white. I pulled out a dress with beads and feathers and a tutu skirt, a confection of a thing that was supposed to have been worn for an event that the virus cancelled. I said, “This is your White Magnolia Dress.” She lit up. Once dressed, she started dancing Swan Lake, and I promised that after visiting the tree I would be her audience for a reenactment of Act four. We made our way outside, and I grabbed a ladder from the construction area. The blossoms that remained were pretty high up, and I was a little worried that she’d be too scared to climb. When I asked her if she’d be ok, she replied, “Mama, I’m six now, and I’m not really afraid of heights anymore.” Indeed, once I set the ladder beneath the fullest branch, she walked up with only a tiny waiver of concern and turned around at the top. My sweet, sweet baby, so little and so big. She stood fearless, surrounded by the soft, white magnolias, and showed me the way. 

Climb up to where life blooms, just past the scary spots. Keep going. Step higher into yourself, beyond weariness, and frustration, and disappointment. Because you can’t see the blossoms from the weeds. My little girl, so fresh from despair, fixed herself upon the top rung of that banged up ladder and gathered a bouquet of new memories. As I looked up at her, suddenly, everything felt possible. 

Spring had come at last.