A journal prompt read in a zoom room that feels like a sacred space just after 7a.m. on a Tuesday morning included a reading from an essay by Molly Peacock in which she talked about her grandmother's garden. That garden, she said, was a place of grace, a place where the dangerously buried 'true self' could be excavated and replace the 'robot self' of fulfilling the tasks assigned to us by others, that we may not even fully understand. It's not the tasks we don't understand, but why we are fulfilling them, like robots, while there is much more important work to be done in the gardens of our own soul.
Molly spoke of a recalcitrant lilac that insisted on blooming in September, no matter that the world said it should be otherwise.
I was reminded of the lilac tree that lived at the end of the privet hedge separating the front garden of my childhood home from our neighbours'. It overhung both gardens and the path. One summer while we were away on holiday the neighbours cut it down, up-rooted it, removed it. They said it was stealing all the water and nutrients from the hedge – but then the next year or one soon after, they uprooted that too.
Capturing my mood of the moment, I felt that this was something else and someone else I need to forgive. I think of that tree a lot. So far as I know my parents simply accepted its demise as they did the missing hedge. Keeping the peace. But I was sad to come back and find it gone.
I was already sad, of course, at coming home at the end of Summer, no longer free to wander beaches and streams, but forced back into socks and shoes and Autumn clothes and school, where I loved the learning but didn't feel liked, loved or supported. Perhaps I felt I'd lost a friend when the tree was taken away.
Today I look out of my home-office window and see the wisteria blooming for the first time in years. I wonder if her re-blooming is the spirit of the lilac returning to me, a different plant but dripping the pale lilac-&-white blossom in similar style. Perhaps it is also a symbol of my own life starting to bloom again, in my own Autumn, after a similarly brutal pruning.
I am thinking a lot about forgiveness at the moment. The flowering of the Wisteria speaks of forgiveness. It had been left to grow any which way and leafed magnificently, and grew over walls and sheds, expansive, green, vibrant, like a wayward teenager, but it didn't flower. I took a lot of coaxing to be brutal with it, to really go for it and not just token-trim here and there, but to really hack it back. Having done so, I wondered if it would survive, if it would forgive me enough to even leaf again and here it is in flower. It is tentative to be sure, but it is blooming. I feel forgiven, and encouraged.
When we find ourselves stuck, and however many shoots we're putting out, however green our shrubbery, if we're not blooming then we are stuck and we need to think about pruning back. We need to look at the weight we're carrying, the energy we're using for leafage that might go into blossom.
I think of this kind of psychological pruning in the same vein as decluttering, creating space for growth, freeing up energy for growth. It involves letting go whatever it is we're holding on to that's holding us back – and we need to forgive ourselves, both for having held on this long, and for whatever our part in the original 'drama' might have been. Then as part of the process we also forgive everyone else involved.
I forgive myself for all the tears I shed at the end of every Summer. I was a child, and one who loved the freedom of the park and the pool and the woods, the romance of the beaches (even in the rain), the being in her own elemental water in swimming pools and seas and lochs, all the scents and smells of long days spent outdoors from fresh-cut grass and salt-water to creosote and after-sun lotion. I was a child who felt loved at home and in the family, who felt at home in solitude, and I was one who didn't know that she felt un-loved in the classroom. No matter how hard she worked, she felt unliked, disrespected, though she didn't have the words for it. Indeed it seemed that the harder she worked, the "better" she became, the less she was valued.
I was a child. I did not understand. And so I wept tears that I tried to keep silent and hidden but were noticed anyway – and made Mam angry.
I forgive my mother for her anger. She did not understand either, so how could she comfort me, and in not knowing retreated into anger, frustrated by her own failure. I forgive her for that, for the failure, for the anger, for the not knowing. I forgive her for all the other times she fretted about how "touchy" I am, how sensitive. She could not know that this sensitivity, this touchiness, would be the foundation of the greatest joys in my life – this ability not only to think deeply but to feel things keenly as well.
Which brings us to the telephone incident…a teeny tiny moment that was a massive rock in a huge lake, its ripples echoing down half a century in my head. It has taken me a full 54 years to understand why I have been so uncomfortable using the telephone, why in particular I have struggled to announce myself by name, hated the name even – and yes, I know 'hate' is a very strong word.
The details of the incident don't need to be rehearsed here. I have already put them outside my self, shared what happened and the impact it had, I have lain it on the altar and started to understand all of the perspectives and to forgive all involved, including my four-year-old self and my growing-up self, getting older self who didn't know that she'd clung on to that tiny moment and buried it and allowed it to influence so much.
The important thing to understand here is that at soul-level, heart-level, personality-forming level, every moment has the potential to be felt keenly and cut deeply. Don't let anyone tell you, you have had it easy (we know how easy we have it, and the ways in which maybe we don't). Don't disown your pain, whatever its source – even if that source was an everyday incident that no-one else will remember, even if you can't believe that you let it get to you that much, if you did then you did, forgive yourself and then you can make whatever switches are needed.
I am not remotely suggesting that such events are traumatic in the sense we understand that word. I am not suggesting that they cause the kind of damage inflicted by physical, sexual, verbal, or emotional abuse. I am simply saying that hurt comes in all shapes, sizes and energy levels and it may be things that we don't realise we're holding that define the parameters of aspects of ourselves that we are uncomfortable with. Discovering them, joining the dots, understanding, compassion, forgiveness are our diverging points away from those aspects, so we can move more towards who we want to be.
Sitting in that old moment and others similar ones I have come to a better understanding of my mother and why, for all the love I know was there, the relationship was never what I would call 'close'. Other family members have said that Mam was always the strong one. Strength, I now see, for her, meant holding your emotions in check. Doing what needed to be done. Keeping it together for the sale of the greater harmony. Keeping the peace. Least said, soonest mended. Those were two of her mantras.
So when sadness took a hold of her, when her compassion was too much, she would direct some of the power of it into anger. Anger is easier to control than heart-feelings. Anger she could restrain.
I came from a different time and was born in a different mould. She was a child of the 30s & 40s when stoicism was perhaps more needed, certainly more valued. I was a child of the 60s and70s, when self-expression was the thing. She couldn't possibly have even considered the notion that what she saw as a weakness in her daughter would prove to be just a different kind of strength.
Does anyof this matter? Maybe only to me – but for me very much so. I now understand where two facets of my personality originate and I can reframe them. And as a result, I can raise my voice and reclaim my name. And after all, my mother gave me this name because she liked it.
