“Why don't you just go away,” she whispered to the sunflower standing haughtily in the yard. “When did you become so full of yourself?” She felt for the metal blades in her gardening belt and contemplated cutting it down. Cutting them all down. Her garden was a bed of variegated sunflower breeds and birdhouses, a smorgasbord of seed and yellows. As she pulled out her clippers and brought them to the thumb-thick stalk, she broke into tears. “You did this to yourself, you fool.” She took a tentative then an assuredly passive snip penetrating one side of the skin only, a superficial wound, gumming her tool with its moisture and jamming the blades, preventing them from inflicting any further damage. As she tried to pull the stuck clippers from the stalk, she felt her own flow coming from within. A sob broke her surface, a yawp only a mother can make when loss is near or when those you’ve nurtured are caught in the V of your blades.
She plopped onto the bench nestled within the garden, a bench rarely used because droppings had turned it from functional to decorative, an offering to her avian family from her own. It was a bench brought from her father’s garden after he died, one of the benches sold off from the town park to raise money for its restoration now offering the parental comfort she needed. Like a familiar birdsong. She was both mother and daughter in the same moment not sure what she was thinking or why she was angry. Or with whom? Herself? Her son?
The birds, initially having scattered to the fence when she entered the garden and then to cedars as they witnessed the failed execution, slowly, one by one, made their way back to the sunflower heads, several to the bird bath. She was familiar to them, them to her, a mutually beneficial relationship of trust and dependency. They were as responsible for getting her up in the morning, for marking a new day with their call of need, of having to be taken care of, as she was to them in assuring the seed and water she provided continued on, into and through the winter months. She was constantly critical of those neighbors who started to feed the birds in the fall and then, once it turned cold enough to squelch their sense of duty, stopped suddenly leaving the birds to search out other sources, other back yards. Others like hers. Mothers like her.
Tinged by guilt for keeping the birds from their food, she excused herself quietly with a, “I’ll let you be,” and headed to the sliding kitchen door. There, the cat sat watching from inside with his pleading look, his instinctual jaw-chattering gaze. His need, a tease through glass. She scooted him back with her foot and went to the sink to scrub her hands with garden soap, a gift from her son who always seemed to know her needs better than herself. “How did I get here?” she wondered. As she pulled a kitchen towel from the handle of the refrigerator, her eyes fell upon the photograph. The field of sunflowers. A field as far as the eye could see. In front of the showy crop, a figure in latex biking shorts, helmet, AIDS RIDE jersey, lifting his touring bike upside down and over his head. Her son. Smiling the smile of accomplishment and bliss, the only thing possibly brighter than the thousand sunflower heads bobbing above him. That smile, a gift of recovery, of determination, of courage and of peace, offered to her as a token, contrition for putting her through yet another chapter written by the child who couldn’t stop hurting himself.
“You did this to yourself,” she said wringing the dishtowel in her hands and then lifting it to her face to once again catch a noise whose tenor was far closer to fear than to the anger she felt during the failed decapitation. She didn’t choose this path, these feelings. She resented having been put in this position, of hating herself for the part she played and then hating herself even more for not wanting to admit that part, of attempting to block it out with the distractions that had become her life. Perhaps she should see a therapist. Her sister-in-law had been seeing one to help her with her relationship with her mother, a relationship that essentially didn’t exist but which could now be left alone by the child, put to rest and left alone. Could she do the same with her son? Seeing a therapist would mean intimacy. Talking to someone intimately meant she would have to allow intimacy to exist. She had fought most of the last three decades trying to keep intimacy at bay, trying to suppress that kind of raw vulnerability. It was the root of her problems, this intentional but unnerving decision to forgo intimacy in her relationships. She managed, keeping things ‘lite,’ but she also wondered if something was missing. Her son had pointed out to her several times what he felt was missing in her life. That was just like her son to let everyone know how he felt about this or that, trying to be the family healer when there wasn’t anything to heal. Feel too much, speak too much and you risk everything; she’d seen it too many times to count.
She picked up her phone, punched in *86, and waited to listen to the message again. “Give me something,” she silently prayed. “Leave me some seed I can feed on.” The message was the same:
“Hi Mom. Listen. I wanted to actually speak to you, but this has happened too quickly. So I’m sorry for leaving a message, but it is what it is. I’m at the airport in Minnesota. I’m checking into a rehab…it’s a rehab facility for gays and lesbians, the only one in the country. I need to be here. Things got pretty bad again. I know it’s going to be hard, but I’m not going to be in contact for the next month. I can’t talk to or write to anyone. I just can’t this time. I have to do this right or there won’t be a next time. I’m sorry. I need to turn over my phone to the driver so you won’t get me if you try to call me back. It sucks, I know, but at least you’re not the one having to make this call. I’ll talk to you in a month.”
“You did this to yourself,” she whispered with a little less conviction and, with a deep breath, pressed ‘delete.’ There was nothing to do but get on with her routine. She stood by the glass door to the backyard and surveyed her garden tasks. “Perhaps I should steer clear of the sunflowers for now,” she spoke out loud to the cat still hoping patiently. “What do you think? You want to go out?” She opened the door and watched as the cat crept to his spot under the feeding platform, a spring loaded hunger-hunched ball of fur and claws, before she headed to the garage to fetch the pail of birdseed.
