+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

For all the horror and suffering my mother created for me in my childhood, there were three things about me that she did not obliterate.  She didn’t criticize me for them.  She didn’t verbally berate me for them.  She didn’t ever seem to see or say or do anything negative to me about them.

What a miracle that was!  I experience the benefit from this absence of my mother’s abuse of me about these three things every single day of my life.  In fact, for some strange reason I could not fathom as a child even if I had tried to, my mother actually approved of my BIG THREE as if they somehow offered a glimmer of redemption for EVERYTHING else that she saw wrong with me.

On the other hand, it strikes me how bizarre my childhood was that I would even now, at 58, even think about what shining pleasure I have in my life just BECAUSE my mother allowed me to be me in regard to these three things.  Had I had a different childhood with a different mother, who knows how much more these three aspects of who I am could have blossomed.  Her severe and chronic abuse of me couldn’t help but interfere with all of my development, including these three aspects of me.  But I am grateful my mother did not — maybe COULD not — remove from my life the pleasure I have always taken in these three things:

* My love of the outdoors and the natural world

*My love particularly of plants and flowers

*My creativity and love for making things with my hands

++++

I thought about this today as I worked to change the contours of my backyard.  I thought about this today as I sloshed water into soil and created more bricks for my expanding project.  I thought about this today as I ‘dead-headed’ my flowers, carefully pinching off dead blooms so the flowers do not go to seed and the plants can keep on blooming, and as I snipped away bigger plants to allow more sunshine and air to reach the smaller ones.

Some months back I remember replying to a commenter who wrote about her troubled son.  I paraphrase this mother here:  “Where is my son?  All I can see are the symptoms of his distress.  I cannot see my son at all.  I cannot find him.”

My response to this mother’s sorrow was to encourage her to pay very close attention, attentive attention, to everything she could possibly find out about what her son liked.  What foods does he like?  What colors does he like?  What clothes does he like to wear?  What can you notice about what he likes to do, what gives him pleasure?

When I think back on my childhood in terms of my BIG THREE, I know that the two-year-old me sitting in the middle of the living room floor playing with my pop beads is the same person I am today with my love of making things.  Even though my mother lent a shade of abuse to this particular incident, saying that only a slow and stupid child would sit like that, doing that (she added this part to her abuse litany of me), she did not tie that abuse to my artistic loves or to my creativity.

When I think back on the very first early summer days on the homestead when I was seven, I remember finding a little group of brightly blooming flowers growing in the grasses.  Only because flowers are a part of my ‘gift’ could I have known there was something unusual and particularly special about these few blossoms.  I picked one and ran into the canvas Jamesway to show my mother.  “That’s a Bachelor Button,” she told me.  “It came from somewhere far away from here.  It doesn’t grow here naturally.  A bird must have eaten seeds and brought them here.  Leave the rest of them alone now and we’ll see if they come back next year.”

My mother wasn’t mad at me or mean to me that I picked that flower, or that I bothered her in showing it to her.  On this occasion she treated me as a human child.  Every following year of my childhood on the mountain I looked in that same place for another patch of Bachelor Buttons, but I never saw them grow there again.

++++

True, my mother interfered with my actions every single time she thought I was showing signs of being a ‘Tom Boy’.  I could not climb trees.  I was supposed to play with dolls (which I hated).  I was supposed to be ‘lady like’, whatever that meant to my mother.  But any time I was able to escape from my mother’s glare and meanness to get outdoors, I did.  And I loved it there.

I loved the idea that we could plant seeds and grow things to eat, and grow our own flowers.  But I especially loved Alaska’s wildflowers.  Somehow just today I realized on a whole new level how much of a plant person I am – plants are more real to me like being people than people are.  Of course the abuse and imposed isolation I experienced from birth did nothing to help me develop the social part of my right brain, so I suppose my special connection with plants and flowers perhaps grew more keenly and deeply into me as a result.

But grow into me it did.  I knew the names of all the wildflowers on the homestead.  I knew what they looked like with their first leaves in the spring.  I knew their buds, I knew their flowers.  I knew each of their seasons.  I knew when they were getting ready to seed, and I watched until the moment was perfect so I could capture them.  I made little packets for the seeds, wrote information about the flowers on them, carefully preserved my collections, and took them outdoors in the springtime to sow them among their wild relations.

And I love flowers now.  I love their fragility, their endurance, their shape, their colors.  I love to watch them shake and sway in the wind.  I have never seen a flower that wasn’t delicate.  I have never seen a flower that can survive abuse and harsh treatment.  Flowers endure in their own environment and thrive as their needs are met.  Perhaps they are like little children to me, and I thrive on taking care of them and enjoying them.

++++

Plants are about seasons.  They are about change and resilience to me.  They are about living according to nature’s way, and I suspect that as insane, chaotic, unpredictable, terrifying, painful and violent as my childhood was, there was something stable and predictable and reasonable and knowable about the life of plants.  I could rely on trees and bushes to change their colors in the fall, lose their dead leaves, remain quiet and silently alive all winter, to burst again into life again in the spring.

I never questioned any of these processes.  I noticed, I watched, I appreciated and valued, I loved plants – and the earth they grew out of.  I loved all nature’s influences on the plants – sun and rain, clouds and wind, warmth and coldness.  No plant ever did anything to harm me.  I resonated with their inner stillness, their ‘beingness’.

In other words, I am a creative, ‘artistic’ plant person and for some inexplicable reason my mother never took her monster boots and stomped this out of me.  Maybe somehow she KNEW she could not take these three parts of who I am away from me, no matter what she did to me and no matter how hard she might have tried.

I suspect there is some part of every single person, no matter what our infant-childhood was like, that could only have been removed from us through our death.  Because we endured and survived, those things we innately LOVE remain with us because they are an integral-integrated part of us — they are a part of who we are.

I believe we must find out for our self what the loves of our childhood were, because they are still our loves.  What made us happiest?  What joy did we return to as often as we could?  What are those loves of ours that continue to appear and reappear in our lives as surely as an air bubble will rise to the surface of water?

So maybe instead of feeling grateful my mother ‘chose’ not to abuse me in regard to my BIG THREE, I need to feel grateful that she did not kill me, because as long as I am alive these three loves of mine remain — and they are not a part of trauma for me.  These loves have always been good and pure for me, uncontaminated by my mother.  How super-duper cool is that?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Here are a few pictures taken outside today.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Here are a few pictures of the ongoing mud project behind my house:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++