Mother Nature

An ode to the mother of them all.

It’s Mother’s Day here today in the US. The Brits celebrated their mums back in March. I’m not sure why our days are so far apart. Maybe it has something to do with connecting mothers, the givers of life and the arrival of spring, and for that we have had to wait for another two months.

It’s been so long since a) I’ve lived in England and b) had a mother and nor was I ever a mother while living there, that I don’t know quite how those celebrations go back there these days. Back in the day, it was a card, a bunch of hand-picked flowers and breakfast in bed at a real push. Perhaps like Halloween, which was always a second-tier event to Bonfire Night, things are slightly different there now. The scourge of Hallmark no doubt.

Here it has always seemed a much bigger deal. More of an all-day event than just a lie-in. As a new mother, I remember being flummoxed about the big deal everyone made about their Mother’s Day brunch. Like Thanksgiving (sorry, sorry, but still can’t quite get on board – I know and I do try so hard), I’ve never quite got to grips with the fuss – even as a mother of three.

All I ever wanted for Mother’s Day was a day off from all mothering/childcare/offspring interaction so I could garden all day in total peace. The last thing I wanted to do was get dressed up and spend a couple of precious May hours wrangling three small hooligans in a restaurant and not getting on with things in the garden, just at the point when there were so many good things to do out there.

As a daughter, my own experience of Mother’s Day was cut short. My mother died ten days after my 22^ndbirthday. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer 14 months before. Like wildfire, it had whipped through her body and just like that, she was gone. She was 48.

As a family it was not our first rodeo at grief. Nineteen years earlier, almost to the day, my father, a super fit 35-year-old had gone out for a run and never come home. He had been felled by an undiagnosed heart condition. My mother found herself a widow at the age of 28 with two very small children.

Perhaps, in what was to be for me at least, the world’s greatest example of a silver lining, two years later she married my stepfather, a dear friend of my father. Hands down the most wonderful man, he too was not unfamiliar with the tragedies of life. His first wife and twelve-year-old daughter had been killed in a car crash a few months after my father died. In another case of utterly selfish serendipity for me, his nine-year-old son survived and would go on to become the seemingly impossible miracle I had always longed for - an instant elder brother.

Decades later and with the wisdom of therapy, thought and now sobriety, it is clear that what felt to me aged six and onwards that we were the English version of the Brady Bunch, was not perhaps wholly accurate. Not even close. But as a child, it all seemed pretty idyllic. Kudos indeed then to who I now see as two utterly shocked, grief-stricken, as close to broken as could be, amazing people who did their incredible best in brutal circumstances.

With two children from her first marriage and another from her second, my mother was a powerhouse in mine and my sisters’ lives. She went from being the naive 19-year-old bride, who had never had a job, written a check, read a bank statement or actually owned anything in her own name, to pretty much Gloria Steinem overnight. Not for her girls the fate that had befallen her through marriage and widowhood. Whatever life was going to throw at us, be it a burnt-out light bulb or signing a mortgage, we were going to be prepped, ready and running the show.

And then she got cancer. And went from being the absolute central foundation to my life, the sun around which I navigated, the generator that powered everything I did, to gone. Just gone.

By the time she drew her last breath in the early hours of January 10, we knew she was going to die. Some of us at her bedside literally by just hours, others for weeks or in my case, months. In the time since her cancer had been diagnosed, she had spent a total of six weeks cancer free. Every step back was never just that, it was always a furlong in the wrong direction. There had never been good news.

There is almost a relief in accepting that someone is going to die. It puts an end to the overwhelming fear that they might. Tick that one of the list and, for an interlude in the nightmare, it’s as if a sense of peace and normality has returned.

Oh, but what cruel trickery. Nothing, NOTHING could have prepared me for the moment she was gone. I can still viscerally feel the emptiness of walking out of her hospital room. Absolutely incredulous that I was still alive. Physically how was I even standing when all my insides had been ripped out. Hollowed out is the only way to describe it. Instantly a literal shell of a human with no strength, no will and certainly no idea as to how to live. And why would I live, my life, as I knew it, had just ended too.

And yet, and yet, live we did.

It’s been so long since she’s gone, I don’t ever now imagine her walking through the door, knowing my children, my husband, having any part in my life, in our lives. She has no place in the last three decades of my life’s memories. I can’t remember her voice. I can’t remember her touch. The most I have of her is from opening the now 50-year-old bottle of her Shocking by Schiaparelli perfume and being reminded of the most glamourous woman in the world kissing me goodnight before heading out to some 1970s dinner party of duck a la orange and black forest gateau. That and her recipe file of eccentric and strangely Northern European recipes – Norwegian Crème, Danish Apple Pudding, Jura Chicken.

Mostly I don’t think about this. Sometimes if I do in passing, it’s “well of course not, it’s been 34 years.” Other days, when I actually stop and recognize all of this, it is so deeply and utterly shocking that I have allowed this to come to pass that that I almost can’t breathe. I wonder how I went from that hollow shell to who and how I am today. All without her.

My mother died at the beginning of January. It’s a good time of year to die for those left behind. The world is bleak, frozen and grey. It’s the perfect backdrop to match that catatonic weighted blanket of early grief. Color, sunshine and vibrancy would be an absolute affront. Darkness cold and ice are far more appropriate. The whole world was in mourning with us. Like Queen Victoria, I wanted every soul still alive to don a black dress and never take it off.

In January, with its 980 days, time stands still anyway. No need to stop all the clocks. We were all frozen in place. Exactly as it should be.

Eight weeks later, ironically - or not – just before England’s Mother’s Day, I was sitting on the top deck of a bus travelling up Park Lane when I looked out of the window across Hyde Park. There, to my absolute horror were a sea of daffodils blowing in the London breeze. Bright yellow, cheery, bobbing-about fucking daffodils.

The outrage, the shock, the utter betrayal – the absolute insanity of it! What the actual fuck!

Volcanic rage started seething through my veins. I wanted to jump off that bus and like a mad woman smash down every one of those jaunty bloody bobbing heads. (Sidebar: this should serve as the ultimate example of the power of a Brit’s absolute fear of making a fuss trumping all else.) This just could NOT be true. The absolute unthinkable was happening. Life, the world, everyone was continuing? Without her? It could NOT be. Didn’t those fucking flowers know my mother had DIED!

Little did I know – or want to know - at that moment, but it was to be the sight of those flowers that saved me. For those daffodils signified to me the world was indeed going to keep turning, the clocks were going to chime again. Like it or not, life was going to continue and it didn’t matter how much I resisted, I was going to be dragged kicking and screaming, heels well and truly dug in, along with it.

It was to be Mother Nature - her bright yellow foot soldiers were just the beginning - who would be the one to drag me along through that first spring. Slowly, slowly putting little glimmers of hope and beauty in front of me as the months progressed. It is near on impossible to not have your mood lifted, even by a micromillimeter, at the sight of London in spring bloom – the cherry blossom, the horse chestnut trees, clematis in every other terraced house’s garden. At home, the trees leafed out, the hawthorn hedges burst into flower and the lanes were full of clouds of cow parsley.

That first summer about the only place I felt vaguely stable was in my mother’s garden. It was only there that I felt I could calmly feel my emotions in a way that was impossible elsewhere. Anywhere else I couldn’t even trust myself to acknowledge them, let alone express them. The soul-wracking sadness, the loneliness, the rage, the despair. Only in her garden could I release the safety valve on these just a fraction.

It was where I felt the closest to her. A place that had been her sanctuary through years which, now with perspective, I can see were outlined in her own grief, tinged with sorrow, plagued by depression. It was now a place where I felt I could safely feel those same emotions.

We all moved through that summer in a daze and into autumn. Her garden, flowers and vegetables arriving and leaving just as they had done under her care. The pattern, the routine, the sights and sounds, smells and tastes just as they had been with her here. Her beautiful garden still feeding us – literally and figuratively. Maybe not all of her was lost.

The year moved on. Mother Nature sending us markers that time was passing. September evenings began to draw in, the gloaming light descending earlier each day. In October, with sparse hedgerows now lining the newly ploughed fields, it was a year since I had accepted that she was going to die. Then it was Christmas. And then the impossible – it had been a year since she had been with us.

And we had moved – or rather been moved - along. Somehow, we were still here. And just like the year before, we would keep moving along. The seasons would keep coming, the year would keep turning. If we were ever in doubt, Mother Nature would show us that the only way was forward.

If it was Mother Nature that saved me that first year after my mother died, it was to be her again who saved me ten years later when I became a mother myself. It was to be to a much wanted, much loved, perfect baby but whose birth instantly plunged me into the deepest, darkest post-natal depression.

In hindsight, always 20:20, the odds were stacked against me sailing through new motherhood. I had very reluctantly moved back to New York from London. (I had inconveniently married a man who lived there and four months in, one of us had to budge.) All of our friends in New York were heading in the other direction back home. 9/11 had just happened, literally on our doorstep and my wonderful step-father was beginning to ail. Without my own mother and with, to put it politely, the most hands-off mother-in-law (which to be fair has suited us both just fine) the Silver Fox and I found ourselves pretty much alone with a newborn.

Whether things would have been as bad in different circumstances I don’t know but plunge I well and truly did. It was a terrifying, miserable period of time, utterly devoid of joy. And it was a shock. I love babies. I had always wanted to be a mother. This was meant to be a no-brainer.

Instead, as much as I absolutely loved my precious baby, I hated motherhood, I hated myself and I could not believe for a second that I was ever going to feel any different. The old me was gone. She would never return. I felt I had made a terrible irreversible mistake. Added to which, the shame of my failure to be the mother everyone else clearly succeeded in being was all encompassing. For much of that first year, I thought my wonderous beautiful boy – and my brilliant, brilliant, brilliant throughout all of this Silver Fox – would be far better off without me.

At the time, we were living in a tiny one-bedroom third-floor walk-up apartment in New York. The previous summer though we had scraped everything we had together and bought a tiny house with a half-acre of garden on Shelter Island.

Most of the garden was planted with vines. Oh, how chic we thought we would be! Our own little vineyard, twirling the summer evenings away clip, clip clipping our grapes, glass of our vintage in hand, baby on hip. Oh, how the Gods laughed at that!

The full story of those 250 vines is one for another day. Suffice to say, between the weather, the insects, the mold and the birds, it was a bloody nightmare of its own special kind. In the sixteen years we had the house, the Silver Fox, who unlike me persevered with the few we had left after we ripped out the main area after that first year, managed one harvest. This in turn gave off such toxic fumes that the building of the very kind friend/winemaker who was finally going to produce some liquid nectar from all this hard work, had to be evacuated by the FDNY. Chateau Lafite was not losing any sleep. The only person laughing was my brother, a farmer at home who was delighted that I finally realized the reality of farming did not quite align with the bucolic childhood illusion under which I had hitherto been laboring.

It was to our house on Shelter Island that I retreated. And the garden around those disastrous vines was to become my tether to hope. Just as my mother’s garden had at one time been her salvation and then again mine when she died, out in my new garden, not sitting but doing, was the only place I felt I could breathe again.

There, the suffocating fear and dread of being inside where I needed to be a mother would dissipate just enough for me to feel the tiniest glimmers of my old self. There I felt, if not safe, then safer. The vice-like knots of fear and shame and loneliness just slightly loosening their hold.

It didn’t matter that I didn’t know what I was doing (saying I grew up surrounded by beautiful gardens is like saying I grew up with dogs. It bears absolutely no relation to the reality of the stress-fest chaos of the first puppy that’s actually yours.) I had something in front of me that I could break down into small attainable tasks that I felt confident I could achieve in the here and now. Weeding a vegetable bed, sweeping up leaves, deadheading a rose, the jubilation of tearing out some hated hostas and replacing them with, to this day, my favorite combination of Salvia Caradonna, Geranium Rozanne and Nepata. I might have been failing at motherhood but this? This I could do.

Small tasks, success or failure provided just the steady balance I needed as to teeter back into happiness. Proof perhaps I was still here. Time passed. I had made it this far. I could perhaps keep going.

Making plans for the garden was the only time I could allow myself to imagine any part of the future. The rest of life was so terrifying the only way I could cope was to put a mental door of steel up against it. Through the garden though there were now tiny embers of hope, miniscule glowing nuggets of anticipation that cracked through the otherwise blackness and allowed me to look forward - to the future. To a future. It was just enough.

There was no great speedy fix-it, for me or the garden. It took a year for me to feel human again. Years for the garden to slowly grow into the shape it was when sixteen years later, as a happy family, we passed the house on to its next owners. Of the many things that garden taught me, hand in hand, human and gardens together, we are all a work in progress. Never done.

My garden then was not my mother’s garden but it held that same protective spirit. Once again when I truly needed her most, my mother was still there – even though she wasn’t. The years she had taken her own grief and depression out into her garden had created an almost genetic pull in me to follow her lead. If she couldn’t be here to be my mother, she could do the next best thing and guide me into the hands of the mother of all mothers, Mother Nature herself.

And it has been so ever since. Through two more subsequent babies, three toddlers under five, young children, teenagers and now the mother of young adults, Mother Nature has been my guide, my solace and my confidant.

Whenever lost in the everyday world, my garden and more so, Mother Nature has given me the stability, faith and calm whenever I have needed it. She’s shown me all the lessons we assume as parents to be our role, the guidance I would have had from my own parents had they been here. My teacher of patience and tolerance, of balance and calm, of kindness and generosity, to be optimistic but realistic, to hope for the best and plan for the worst, of how to be truly happy. To understand what you have already is already enough.

I’m not going to pretend there have not been moments of frustration and wailing despair. I’ve killed so many things. (I hold the honorary title of Keeper of the David Austin Graveyard.) Other beings - human, animal and insect - have killed things for me. Not everything – not even close - has gone to plan. But even then, Mother Nature has shown me to just keep going, that there will always be next year, a chance to try again. Whatever happens to just keep going.

And along the way to appreciate the glorious good times, to be happy today, to be grateful.

For just as there will be ups and downs in the garden, so there will be in life. Twenty years on from my beautiful boy’s arrival, he faced his own crisis. For us all, it was to be the first domino falling in eighteen months of events that brought nothing but grief, stress and loss, when there were moments when I honestly thought I would once again lose my mind. But, once again, it was to be Mother Nature that saved us both. Me in the refuge of my garden, him, first in the wilds of Utah and now in the California ocean. And just as for me thirty-four years ago, I have full faith that the lessons that Mother Nature has taught him now, will last him a lifetime too.

And now, today, with the world on fire, I retreat to my garden, not as an ostrich with my head in the sand, but to be reassured that there is a greater power than any man. When the worst can and does happen, Mother Nature will be there, quietly turning the wheels forward, keeping us grounded, keeping us moving, keeping us safe. A Mother always to us all.