A pink dogwood glorifies my front yard. Beneath its branches, my child, 16, has planted a small flower garden of phlox, geranium, and daisies. I have planted four azaleas and three rhododendrons as well. The colors are bright, vibrant, celebratory of this perfect Spring we are spending together, every day of it, all day of its every day, for a number of weeks and months entirely unknown to us. These flowers and shrubs are our cache from the last time we went in our car to anywhere. That was March 25. Two days after the schools closed. Three days after I decided I wasn’t letting Andaluna attend school anymore and sent an email to the principal, guidance counselor, and teachers telling them so. I also called the superintendent’s office to ask about the procedures: do we get the GED? Do I homeschool?
The assistant who answered said, “You can do whatever you need to do to protect your child. Nobody’s going to give you any trouble.”
That was the moment when everything became very real. “You can do whatever you need to do to protect your child.” The world of procedures and forms and records was now on hold. I wouldn’t get arrested. Truancy wasn’t an issue. From woman to woman, probably mother to mother: do whatever you need to do.
Over a month has passed since that conversation, and indeed the world has changed. Physically it looks the same. Psychically, it is an entirely new terrain. Such shift calls us to engage the flexibility and fluidity of the feminine aspects of life and spirit, lest we tighten, harden, and break. In our garden, under a bright-blossomed pink magnolia tree stands a stone statue of the Holy Mother. I purchased it shortly after buying the house and placed her where I could see her from the living room window. Close by, at the head of my first beloved Labrador’s grave stands a stone birdbath with the yin-yang symbol in the bowl, welcoming birds. The two together speak of going inward to me, of beholding something deep within that sustains us in times of trouble. The feminine aspect of the Tao and the feminine energy of the Holy Mother teach me every day to let a little more of the structured world go to allow for a new “currency,” as Louis Hyde reminds us, a new water to flow toward and around me.
When Luna was 12 we walked together through a threshold of pure, white-knuckle terror. The blanket term for it is Puberty, the stuff of light-hearted humor regarding pimples and sexual awakenings relayed in comedies on the big screen. In real life, on the tiny screens of our own lives, it is scarier than anything involving axe-murderers and hockey-mask wearing indestructible beings. Maybe not for all children, but it was for mine. As a single mother with an abusive “co-parent” I’d arranged for Luna to have a therapist from the age of 8. I would hold to the rule of not speaking badly of the child’s other parent while providing someone who didn’t have to. Luna needed to be able tell a story, and a therapist could be that necessary listener who reflects the story back and allows the teller to be the listener and discover how far out of whack things have become. So, when Luna’s therapist told me “It’s serious. We need to take this to the next level,” I took action. I booked the appointment with the psychiatrist the therapist recommended. I paid for the medication. I did not stop there. I withdrew Luna from school. I removed cellphone permission. I took away almost everything so Luna could focus on healing and learning until a time came when I would let the world back into our lives, which it turned out would be six months. All of this is to say I did everything I needed to do to protect my child. All of this is also to say Andaluna and I have been here before.
During those six months, we were never outside of each other’s company. Fortunately, I work at a university where Luna could study just outside my classroom while I taught. When I wasn’t teaching, we were at home. I set up an office for Luna in our basement, to where each morning my little homeschooler actually hauled a backpack to begin the day’s assignments. Luna didn’t question why everything in the world had vanished. I’d explained this was for protection. There wasn’t the slightest argument. Luna understood the world had become dangerous and that I would do anything I had to protect my child. For me, the experience carried echoes of those months before childbirth when the most important part of my life was actually a part of me, too. How imperiled and impervious I felt at once. Walking around with my enormous belly, I parted oceans of crowds in public. At home, I sheltered us from the news on the television, of war, of war, of war. I protected us from my husband whose jealous rages completely overlooked the fact that I felt like a beautiful whale but was as far from cheating with anybody as I was from circumnavigating the ocean. All the same, with my baby inside me, I felt I owned the world.
After giving birth, I lay awake in my hospital room gazing at the best eight pounds in the universe through the plexiglass of the bassinet. Breathing in. Breathing out. There it was. And again. Little life. Precious sweet baby. My baby. I was a mother. Back at the house, though, sitting on the couch alone without the visits from nurses and doctors to make sure we were “doing okay,” I felt at a loss. How do you protect someone from the world? It was my job, and I had no clue how to do it. I read the books, and they were filled with words, but words didn’t seem to come close to what I needed. I needed a circus tent over my home, something bright and large enough to allow for life but with fasteners around the door to keep out whoever we did not welcome. I needed a castle high on ramparts, whatever ramparts were, with a moat and a drawbridge. I needed armor when all I felt I could fit into were sweats. The best I could do, I succumbed, was sit beside my baby every minute of the day. When my baby napped, I’d nap as well, the little body next to my big body. This way we would make it through this safe.
One day, too soon, I ventured into the world with my baby strapped to me in a carrier. I wanted to walk with my Labrador where I’d always walked. I’d walked while pregnant, why not unpregnant, with the baby attached to me? No difference. We walked from my cottage on the campus of the boarding school where I taught to the lake with no problem. I could turn around then and be safely home in less than a mile with no hills. I felt good, though. I kept walking. Through some forest then breaking onto the vast meadows I actually used to run across. We crossed the meadow, the Labrador walked ahead then zipping back to make sure I was following. After the meadow, there was a little bridge where I’d done yoga right up to days before delivery, but here I felt winded and even a bit like sleeping. It was late in the afternoon, though, and no one would come by, so I kept walking. The only next step was the steep grassy hill with the 200-foot oak tree that I used to climb. It felt a thousand miles high and away now. I made my way a quarter of the steep distance, and then I could not walk any more. I had not told anyone where I was going. The dinner bell would ring. The students would begin evening study. I couldn’t walk. I had my baby strapped to me, head bobbing until I lowered myself to the grass and lay down. Lying down felt wonderful. I wanted to stay and sleep there. It was June. We wouldn’t freeze. I fell asleep on my back, my arms around my baby’s trusting body.
I don’t speak easily or ever of that walk. There is a terror in it for me, the terror I felt as I looked up that steep hill and knew I did not have the strength to make it. It wasn’t a terror that I would die. The campus was beautiful and safe. The weather was warm. It was instead the terror of not being able to do something, of having overstepped, overguessed, over-estimated what I could do and, in less gentle settings, not protecting my child. Of course, when I woke, my body was rested, and I made it up the hill and back to my cottage after sunset with nobody the wiser. Except me. I had met a limit that spoke of my vulnerability as a parent. Things that are easy to do when you’re one are not always so easy when you’re two. I didn’t do that walk again for a month, and I did so with a friend. Twelve years later when my child’s therapist told me “it’s time to take it to the next level,” I felt I was approaching that hill again. I knew it would be difficult. I knew I would have to make decisions that might not make sense to anybody but my own intuition, but I would make it up the hill with my child safely. I would find what I needed. What came to mind first was that evening after we had made it home, when I returned to sitting with my child on the couch, the world on the other side of all the walls, and me uninterested in right away venturing out to meet it in favor of protecting this new life.
Staying inside in both these experiences and now the quarantine brings to mind the reverse birth I have read about in Paul’s Letter to the Romans:
“the whole creation groans and labors in pain to this day. And not only they, but ourselves also, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, that is, the salvation of our bodies. For we live in hope; but hope that is seen is not hope; for if we see it, why should we yet hope?”
It is a reverse birth waiting to happen, and until we are born back into her, the mother is experiencing labor pains. For my child and me, there is a familiarity to the “quarantine.” When I declared we wouldn’t be attending school or leaving the house anymore ahead of the governor’s speech, there was no argument. I stocked up on canned goods and rice and explained the possibility that our lives were about to radically change. Luna agreed. When we ventured out for our last visit with the world, we went to the garden shop. There, we were already aware of our six-foot distance from everybody. I told Luna to choose any flowers for a garden. I selected azaleas and rhododendrons thinking of the future when they would be far too large to fit on a cart. We also selected our seed-starts. I had already purchased bags of soil. We have, since, stayed home with our two Labradors, our terrier, and our Pekingese, and our gardens which are growing well. 150 seed starts broke the surface of their soil just last night. We are internal now, reaching for self-sufficiency, we are flowing between activities that have little defined shape. We are in the Feminine aspect, we are with the Holy Mother.
Jesus, according to Phillip, walked with three Mary’s at all times,
“There were three who always walked with the Lord: Mary, his mother, and her sister, and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion. His sister and his mother and his companion were each a Mary.”
I do not see Jesus surrounded by Mary’s but as being inhabited by them. Three women, three dimensions, I see Jesus as dwelling within the feminine dimension, capable of seeing into the heart of the world and all things. Interior. Perceptive. Receptive. Here in our home, with billions around the world, we also move into the feminine—the hearth, the center. My child, Andaluna, and I find ourselves back in the womb together. Just as I pulled Luna back into the womb during the difficult time of puberty, the world now pulls us both back in together. The womb of our home. The womb of our company. The womb of our gardens, even, sprouting brilliant colors. We are among the fortunate and blessed to have our situation, and I pang with guilt at times, which I address with donations to organizations that are doing the excellent work. How to reconcile this aspect I have yet to learn: how does one reach the heart out into the world while doing one’s part by staying in? These mysteries stay with me and will forever. In their presence, and with the letting-go of the world we have known “we groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, that is, the salvation of our bodies. For we live in hope; but hope that is seen is not hope; for if we see it, why should we yet hope?” For now, we move ever deeper into the unknown and know it as our home.
Laura Hope-Gill directs the M.A. in Writing Program and the Narrative Healthcare Program at Lenoir-Rhyne University Graduate Campus in Asheville, North Carolina. Her collection of poems, The Soul Tree, won her the title "poet laureate of the Blue Ridge Parkway," in 2010, a title she still holds. She has written two award-winning architectural history books about Asheville, Look Up Asheville 1 and 2. Her writings explore the metaphors and history of alchemy, which she relates, with Jung, to Christianity, the tradition in which she was raised, while also reaching out to the world's traditions. Her poems, stories, and essays appear in Parabola, Cincinatti Review, North Carolina Literary Review, The Porch, and more. She is honored to be a contributor to The Porch.
