The Secrets in Her Garden
By Rachel Nevergall
@rachelnevergall
I watch my mom wipe sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, dirt smudged in its wake. For a moment I feel guilty—she’s in the sun sweating while I recline on the couch popping grapes into my mouth, air conditioner blowing on my goose-bumped skin. But the bowl of grapes balances on my belly shelf, and I remember why she is here. I’m eight months pregnant with my third baby. She is in town to help. Which is to say she is spending much of her time in our garden.
Garden is a generous word. From my perspective, all I saw upon moving in last year was weedy grass and misplaced plants—with little potential. My mom saw it differently.
“There’s so much you could do with this!” she told me, carrying a moving box from the truck to the house.
“Really? I feel like it’s more jungle than garden.”
She shrugged, “Yeah, maybe now. But if you rip out the plants over there and shift some over here, oh and I could bring you some of my… ” She continued, gesturing wide, her volume animated while describing the possibilities, but, honestly, I tuned her out. The garden is my mom’s domain, not mine.
When she called to say she wanted to come to help before the new baby arrived, I could have asked her to prepare the nursery, maybe stock the freezer, or at the very least play with the older siblings while I take a nap. If I asked, she would have said yes.
But I also understand a mother’s need to do for her children that which she feels most capable. For my mom, her confidence lies in the garden.
***
I don’t remember my mom gardening much when I was a child. Who can blame her, though, a busy mother of three? Who has time to putz around with flowers?
But as the home slowly emptied of children, the garden slowly filled with blooms. From May to October now, you’ll find my mom in her yard. Weeding, pruning, replanting, feeding. She is Mary Lennox, and this is her secret garden.
Recently, I stumbled upon a picture of her house shortly after they moved in twenty years ago. “Wow! Mom, I don’t even recognize your yard! Look how different it looks!”
“I know,” she said, looking over my shoulder to peek at the photos. “I’ve put a lot of work into it.”
Her face beamed as she spoke, like one looking back at baby pictures on their child’s graduation day, pride radiating from the memory.
It was, as Mary said in The Secret Garden, “as if she had found a world all her own.”
***
My mom arrived the week before Mother’s Day with her grubbiest clothes, her favorite gardening gloves, and a determination to unearth the garden she believed it to be.
The first day she devoted exclusively to weeding. On hands and knees she moved around the unkempt yard, identifying which plants would stay and which would go with the confidence of a director auditioning the cast in a play. Then she began reforming the shape of the beds.
“You never want straight lines in your garden,” she told me as she dug up rocks and repositioned them into wavy paths. “Curves are so much better.” I and my protruding belly agreed.
Today on the last day of her visit, while I lounge on the couch with my snack, I watch her at work putting the final touches on her garden plan. Soil freckles her face and arms and knees like a child just in from the playground. She stands up straight, places her hands on her hips, and scans the yard. I can almost hear her thinking “and it was good.” Her face turns toward mine, she is smiling. The work is not a chore for her. She is good in the garden, she understands it. Confidence shines like joy on her face.
I try to remember when I last felt that confident about anything.
***
I don’t go to my mom for parenting advice.
On paper, she is the most logical person to offer advice. She parented three children, spent 35 years teaching a classroom of teenagers. Hand her a fussy baby and she will bounce and shush better than any baby swing ever could.
Yet ask my mom a simple question about sleep or feeding or potty training, and she’ll look at you blankly saying, “Oh gosh, I don’t remember. We just did it, I guess.” Not particularly helpful to an anxious mother like me.
I don’t share that effortless approach to parenting. Where my mom seemingly just “did,” I worry. About sleep, feeding, behavior, emotions. I question every decision and consult with Google far too much. I want to feel about any part of parenting the way my mom feels about gardening—confident and reassured. But those are her strengths, not mine.
***
On the last day, my mom walks me around the yard introducing me to the new garden. The potential she realized has come to life in the new space. I walk along the curving paths, speechless, staring in wonder. She describes each plant and what it needs but I struggle to listen, preoccupied by the garden’s transformation.
Something she says interrupts my state of awe. “You can expect the lilies to bloom in July.”
July. As if right on cue, the baby growing inside me moves, reminding me who else is expected in July. My mom continues with the garden tour, but I’m distracted. All I see now is the weight of responsibility ahead for me, not just the new garden entrusted to my care but for the growing family. While she talks me through how to deadhead blossoms or when to fertilize the plants, I want to interrupt her and say, “Ok, that’s great, but what about the new baby? How do I share my attention with three? How do I balance their needs with my own? Tell me, Mom, please, how did you do it?”
But I don’t. Instead, I choke back the tears—and the fears—and hug her goodbye.
“I’ll see you soon when we come back in July!” she squeals. It’s unclear if she means me and the new baby or the garden.
“Oh, one more thing,” my mom turns to me just before walking out of the gate. “When I planted the Baptisia plant, a little piece broke off so I just stuck it in this corner here by the fence.” She points to a pathetic little stalk with a few papery thin leaves dangling from it. “Maybe it will grow. Maybe it won’t. You can always move it if it doesn’t seem happy,” she shrugs. I must not be hiding my skepticism any longer because she replies quickly with, “You can’t kill this one. It will grow like crazy here. Lots of sun, drought tolerant. And the prettiest blue blooms in the spring. It probably won’t grow much this year but be patient.” I nod and smile, already working out my excuse for when she visits in a year, and the plant is crushed to the ground.
“How do you know how to do all of this?” I ask, stalling her exit. It’s my fumbled effort to tell her I’m scared—about the garden, the baby, all the changes and the unknowns. My insides feel as helpless as the drooping transplant I pity in the corner.
“Oh I don’t know. Overtime, you just figure it out, I guess.” I almost roll my eyes. I should have known she would respond with this. But she continues. “You try things, plant something in one place, see how it does. When that doesn’t work, you try a different way. Eventually you learn what the plants need and where they grow best. Remember, I’ve been doing this for almost twenty years. You’ll learn. Give it time.”
It is so simple, I almost miss it. All along my mom has shared her secrets to motherhood, just in her own way—in the garden.
Confidence in motherhood takes time. You don’t figure it out overnight the same way a garden doesn’t transform all at once. It takes patience and effort and failure and, yes, beautiful wins, too. Wins that look like Baptisia growing into what my mom always believed it to be, who she believes me to be, too.
I walk over to the broken Baptisia transplant, place a hand on my belly and whisper as confidently as I can, “I can’t wait to watch us grow.”
Guest essay written by Exhale member Rachel Nevergall. Rachel shares her home in Minnesota with her husband and three children. She is the curator of family adventures, lover of all of the library books, mixer of fancy cocktails, and writer in the in-between. She shares about the confluence of her child development background and the realities of parenting in her monthly Raise & Shine Letter, on her blog, and Instagram.
Photo by Lottie Caiella.