The grave digger carries a shovel. In my mind, she walks with hunched shoulders
against a grey sky. In my mind, she has
a heavy heart, so much so, perhaps, that her burdens have worn through its apex
and fallen to the grave digger’s feet. That
grey-blue heart is perforated and ragged, with gaping holes. I hear her heartbeats like gusts of defeat –
weak, loud, empty, and really only suggesting a course to the air that wanders
over graves, rather than compelling blood.
It’s a November sort of scene that I see when I visualize one who
routinely buries stiffened and mottled flesh, pushing aside ghostly, withered
leaves, and making a place to lay to rest long-loved dreams.
But another figure carries a shovel, too. Another person, less weary, but with just as
much reason to be, also carries a dry
and shriveled promise to be placed in the cold ground. She prepares a place as the grave digger has
done, presses and coaxes the earth to yield a resting place for it. The placement is quick and the burial site marked,
too, but she afterward looks up. The sun
is an April thing and leaves at her feet have been so long dead that they’ve
forgotten to look forlorn. Like the
other earth-mover, she turns away and leaves the receptacle of her hopes in the
cold and the dark of the ground, but she
will return. She will guard this place. She will wait. She will not forget, because she is a
gardener.
I’m learning this about adulthood: the dreams that I
cherished through my childhood, the vibrant ones to which I clung, and the
visions to which I promised my heart, have, of necessity, began to gather
dust. As I change diapers, scrape
dinners out of messy pantry shelves, and hurry between activities and
obligations, those hopes have begun to wither.
Last October, I stole away a time or two, seizing a sunny hour at nap-time
to harvest the beans that we had left out to dry for this year’s seed. The pods crackled delicately and the beans
had become white and hard. My hands feel
that way now, when I take up a pencil to sketch or open a blank word document
to write. My imagination and creativity
stiffen with disuse and sometimes it makes me feel a little disillusioned,
deadened.
I wonder, but speculate that I would feel much the same way,
even if these two precious girls hadn’t yet come into my life. This disillusionment, this period of
wandering is, I think, something most of us go through as we shed our
childhoods. If I wasn’t a mother, I
might be realizing that the career I had chosen was not as fulfilling as I had
hoped, that neither friends nor spouse nor busyness could completely stave off
loneliness all of the time – that time could not be stretched or compressed
enough to cradle my needs. It’s a period
when we all begin, probably never to cease, to realize that choosing the best
things often means choosing the hard things and sacrificing other desires along
the way. And we do it.
When people ask me how I’m liking life, I usually answer
wholeheartedly that I love it, that I’m working my dream job. It’s true.
I am probably one of the luckiest people I know, to have all of every day
to devote to two beautiful, healthy children who have more than enough energy
to drain me of mine. But there are
moments, now and then, when I feel the weight of where I am and of those
unanswered devotions to my teenaged ambitions.
There are times when, in spite of the work I do and the happiness it
generates, I feel like a shell, and I miss the pleasures that I knowingly
traded in for this hard-earned and mercifully granted joy. I miss the exercise – the physical, mental,
social stimuli and sculpting that I once thought comprised the path to becoming
who I’m meant to be. Sometimes, I feel
lonely. Sometimes I feel empty.
The despondency rested a little heavily over me this
week. That’s a part of life, I know, so
I pressed myself to move proactively through my routine. It’s planting season and my neighbor and I
have spent hours every morning in our garden plot, furiously digging trenches,
tilling in fertilizer, and laying down drip lines. Kneeling beside the row we’d designated for
corn, I pressed holes into the soil with my middle finger, dropped two gnarled
kernels into each, and pinched the loose dirt back over them. Burying
dreams, I thought.
It wasn’t exactly an epiphany for me, really. I’ve long thought of my extra-parental
aspirations as gathering dust. Atrophied,
maybe, dormant, but not dead. Still, as
I thought about those buried corns, in the damp, cold darkness, it added a new
color to my hope. Yes, I will take up
those dreams again someday. I will have
another chance to develop the God-given talents in my hands and body and mind,
and when I pick them up again, they will be slightly wasted and wan, but
perhaps they too will be changed from the last time I held them. Maybe something will have sprouted,
developed, that was not there before.
Something will be waiting to spring out of them that could not have come
from my inexperienced, youthful vigor.
Right now, motherhood, and the effort to do things right and
responsibly, has all but consumed me, like a hole in the earth; but I am not a
shell. I am a seed. The life and light inside of me and the dark
dampness around me, together, will do what pure sunshine and unbroken ease
could not have done. Even now, I am
germinating.
