Naming
There is a Southern Red Oak tree in our back garden. As most fans of Anne of Green Gables would, I have a penchant for naming things and did so with the oak when my oldest was small. My children call her by it now: “Maeve,” or sweetly, “Momma’s Tree.”
Before kids, I probably didn’t give trees much thought. The shade was nice, and that was the extent of it. Fall would come, leaves would be raked. Sometime in the Spring things would grow again. I enjoyed poetry about nature - but being in nature didn’t become an inkling until my first marriage, camping in the slopes of the Mourne Mountains. With tending to my first flower garden. Watching the European Robin on the clothesline. Witnessing my then father-in-law’s joy over the tomatoes from his greenhouse. My mother-in-law’s over the shades of green in her side yard.
Years later, back across the ocean and remarried, my firstborn arrived and the only place he would rest was on my body. I became best friends with a baby carrier and we would walk for what felt like hours each day, up and down our street, or in circles under the oak’s limbs.
Before long, I started to notice more, watching the leaves for the signs of changes I was witnessing outwardly, and within.
I became acutely aware of my rearrangement.
Becoming a mother shifted everything in my life - from my physical insides, thanks to 3 c-sections and big babies - to the way I feel and see the world. Never have I been more conscious of the seasons and the tides they bring.
How I often feel like a selkie removing her skin when alone, and swiftly replacing it for to-do lists and tending to the needs of others.
How the waves take things, never to be seen again, and how they return something you had thought lost forever.
The way the leaves fall and cover the old, only to extend again, open-palmed, their shoots of new growth as the air warms.
Around the time Roan was 7 or 8 months, when I was extra attentive to labeling everything in his environment (because words are delicious to me and I can’t help myself), I named the giant oak. I would lay a blanket in front of our sliding door to the backyard or under her on the soft grass, and together we watched her leaves rustle in the wind. Squirrels bounding from limb to limb. Chickadees taking a perch to tell their morning stories.
It’s been nearly 6 years since those moments, and I have shared them with 2 more babes. I have watched Maeve lean in summer thunderstorms. Go quiet under the snow. I have stared earnestly at her bare branches in March until the first buds open, squealing like a child as I run to tell my boys.
The feeling is similar to noticing the first leaf to change colors. Hearing plops of acorns into the grass and collecting them for nature displays or backyard potions.
By the end of November she will be bare again.
My psychiatrist leans forward in her chair during our regular check-in. I have explained how, lately, I feel overwhelmed in trying to do too much - but I don’t want to let go of it either. My writing, or narration, or homeschooling, baking, and reading. But then other things slide and instead of slowing down, I only take on more water, berating my “failures” when I can’t keep up.
She tells me of an analogy she heard recently: “We are always juggling balls in the air. Some are glass, and some are plastic. What are your plastic balls?”
I reply, “putting away the laundry,” and we laugh. But the expectations to keep everything running are engrained in my body from childhood, from my religious upbringing, from my being born a female.
I am unraveling these labels.
The seasons and the trees and the shorelines have been my greatest teachers.
They have rhythms, yet are not linear or tidy.
They do not place expectations on themselves they are unable to meet.
They expand and retract, yet they hold their true names.
I still have mine, and not just at the surface. All the names I have been and discarded, those I have yet to grow into or lean toward.
Year after year, I reach for them, broadening with the leaves and the waves.
As always, thank you for being here.
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Until next time.
Warmly,
Jess
Wonderful! I love naming trees too! I have named 'my' oak trees, the ones round the corner from my house - great aunt Edie is the hundreds of years old hollow-trunked one who's still growing and fruiting. She gives me such hope, on the days when I feel like I won't get better, there she is sprouting stronger each year. Then close by are the ones I helped plant with the kids from the school 15 years ago, there's Grace and Stuart and Sabrina - all planted the same day yet completely different sizes and shapes. and thank you for the plastic juggling balls! mmm mine might be -sending cards and texts to people who never contact me first, reading every magazine before I recycle them, ...
I really do love the juggling metaphor. Beautiful piece, my friend.