I have a friend that is bearing something heavy, and silent.
It is the kind of thing she smiles through with her mouth, but that never quite leaves her face.
We appeared at each other’s doorsteps in the 80’s as gap-toothed children, and then intertwined in and out of each other’s lives and photo albums for decades in order to make it to this day.
She has seen all my worst hairstyles.
We know things about each other we hope the other never mentions.
Our eyes could always say to each other all we really needed to say.
In the past several years we haven’t seen each other very often.
I read between the lines on Facebook, and add hearts to her photos.
In passing she’s told me of her loneliness, her regrets, and her longings.
I just listen and nod with the deeper kind of understanding you have at 47 than you once did at 13, realizing that so many of those feelings are things that no one ever told me I would likely feel so deeply, and commonly with other women in middle age.
This friend is a hospice nurse, spending her nights caring for the dying and their families.
I wonder if, as she sits up alone in the dark sometimes, listening for the death rattle,
she ever wonders, “Who sits up listening for me?”
She’s been hit with a string of hard things lately;
Things that would break anyone, really.
The whole point of motherhood is to work yourself out of a job, and with that fact comes a sense of loss and grief.
Besides her three dear young sons all moving out of state, she has watched her beloved mother-in-law crumble in the grip of Alzheimer’s, and, let me tell you, there is no worse time than the lonely middle years to have a loved one completely forget your face.
There is a lot of “What is next for me” in the things she says these days;
Another thing I nod to, as (though for different reasons) I feel much the same.
No one really explains this part when you’re newly married, and having your babies.
They tell you about the beautiful, happy parts,
not how your heart and your house will feel after they leave.
They don’t tell you how you’re suddenly left looking around at things, contemplating time and energy you wasted, and ways you should have spent your days.
Several months ago, after placing her mother-in-law in a Memory Care facility, she was working to clean out her old place.
I had seen her advertise a chair she had for sale that I wanted, and so we arranged a time to meet.
What was intended to be a brief meeting led to my family being there for an hour looking around this home that her mother-in-law (also a nurse) had lived in for 40 years.
Everywhere you looked there was a trinket, a picture, a decoration now just collecting dust,
that used to mean something.
A lifetime of memories being slowly erased.
I could hear in the stories my friend told of her that yet another thing she was bearing alone was the burden of making sure the essence of her mother-in-law never fully faded away.
She gave us a tour of the place, being sure to point out the original push-button light fixtures, and complete lack of a stove, but as we made our way into the kitchen, there under the light of a skylight, I suddenly could only notice one thing:
Sitting on the kitchen table, looking desperate for a drink was a giant old Thanksgiving Cactus that I could tell was of fairly advanced age.
For some reason, that cactus spoke my name.
When I asked her what she was going to do with it, she looked at it for awhile, and asked me if I wanted to take it. She had to get rid of all the stuff in that house somehow, anyway.
After the stories she had just told of all her mother-in-law had been, I knew I couldn’t just let it waste away after so many years of faithful nurturing.
It took three of us to lift it, and I wasn’t all too sure it wasn’t dead already by the sight of all the leaves, but I understood my assignment that day:
My friend needed to know she wasn’t alone in her caring, and this was one small way to show her.
My friend needed me.
In the year since I’ve had that Thanksgiving Cactus, it has never produced one bud.
The leaves were all still green, though, so I just kept on fertilizing, and watering.
I’ve researched online, I repotted it, and moved it to a better place,
but the worry has always been in the back of my mind that maybe I got there too late.
Maybe its time had passed as phone numbers and faces were forgotten,
and, though it was thirsty for the nurture it needed, it had been forced to wait.
I had all but given up hope that it would ever flower,
but then I stepped into my shower the other day and glanced up at it as I often do, perched on a shelf my husband made it, where it could enjoy the shower spray.
When I saw it, I gasped out loud.
There, reaching for the morning sun of our bathroom sky light, like a testament to hope and faith was a single, brilliant, white-headed flower.
I’d always expected they would be pink…
I stared with my mouth open for a full minute, and the beauty and truth of what that flower stood for was not lost on me.
There, blooming from what had once appeared dried up and neglected, was proof that sometimes the life that will come next can surprise you.
You can bloom at any age.
That plant had been left unattended for years probably.
All alone on a kitchen table in a house haunted by forgotten memories.
The water washed over me as I just stood there, called by that cactus in a brand new way.
How miraculous that somewhere, deep inside of what looked dried up and unable to be revived, the beginnings of that beautiful flower over my head, there to remind me that things may look bleak, and lonely.
Irreparable.
You may wonder what is next for you, and you may long for many things.
These middle years can leave you root-bound, when all you want is to keep growing, free.
But sometimes, in what feels hopeless, and when you think your time has long passed,
Suddenly a brilliant white flower.
Life is back, at last.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
