My mother’s internet handle is a variation of “green thumb”, and she can keep any type of flora alive. I, on the other hand, possess an uncanny ability to completely suck the life out of plants. My co-workers are constantly stepping in and tsk-tsk’ing me as they save whatever poor green living thing is gasping for breath in my office. People who give me plants are handing them a death sentence.

I have kept only two plants alive in my lifetime, and each has a story. When my ex-husband and I first moved in together, we bought two hanging plants, which I named LaFern and Shirley. They were philodendrons, and were of a hearty nature. Left to my devices, however, they slowly faded. I had them hanging side by side in a double window of the apartment so they would get plenty of sun, which was great, but probably just dried them out, which was bad. Anyway, cue our apartment fire. Our particular apartment had been totaled by water and smoke damage, but I was able to go up to it about a month after the fire to determine if anything was salvageable.

            I walked in and was greeted by the contents of our two hall closets spilled across the floor. Lying in the center of the chaos, unscathed except for discoloration from the smoke, was a Christmas ornament my then fiancé had gotten me for our first Christmas together. Two chipmunks smiled at me from inside an acorn adorned with an “Our First Christmas” banner. I pocketed them and went into the living room, where I saw Shirley on the floor, dirt scattered, leaves yellow, dead as a doornail. 

            Then I looked up and saw LaFern, still hanging in the window, in a shaft of sunlight, leaves green and dangling, looking sturdier and healthier than she ever had under my watch. The buildings inspector and I marveled at this small miracle. Unfortunately for her, I brought her to our new home, where she followed in the path of her sister Shirley. 

My next plant grew from a cutting from a Chinese Evergreen that was given to my mother when she was pregnant with me. The gifter was the mother of a brother and sister duo with whom my mom was close – Rod and Pam. This mom also gave me my baby blanket. My mother kept this plant alive for 32 years and gave me an offshoot when I bought my house in 2007. Lord only knows how I kept that poor thing alive through the turmoil of the next few years, but I did. It never sprouted more than seven or eight leaves, it leaned precariously to one side, and it had a pathetically developed root system that left it about as firmly anchored as I was at the time. When I brought it to my new home on the lake in 2016 it had 5 leaves. I replanted it. I shored up the stalks with kabob skewers and tiny little hair clips for stability. I sat it in the sun and finally began to water it regularly and give it the attention it deserved. I gave it a view of the lake. I treated it as I was finally treating myself.

            And it stands straight and tall now. It has over 60 leaves. It has a second chance. 

            But I didn’t start this to write about my plant success. I grew up in a house full of plants, with a green-thumbed mother, and the truth is that I actually hate plants and am skeptical of individuals who dedicate a lot of time to indoor plants. 

            My childhood home at one point had a room devoted entirely to plants. It was a small front room full of windows, where all of the plants from the back porch came to live during the winter months. To my young nose, the room smelled like dirt and decay rather than a room full of living things. Plants were in stands and on makeshift shelves. I am convinced that it is impossible to tastefully display a houseplant. I struggle with this task with my Chinese Evergreen – I am not immune. 

This room stood until my parents decided to expand the living room and tore down the wall that separated the two rooms. I remember that we were allowed to draw on the wall before it came down. I drew flowers. My dad drew the nuclear power warning symbol, and the wall was destroyed.

My mother’s friends had plants. My father’s family had plants. I remember my grandmother’s house as a jungle with a mango tree in the front yard and an overgrown backyard that you reached through a mess of a room through the back. The first time I walked through that room I remember looking to my left and thinking that it extended on and on, full of more boxes and plants, until I realized that the other side of the room was dusty, and that I was in it, and that it was only a reflection in a mirror. That, and a book of limericks that my grandfather published that were kept on the mantle out of my reach, are the only things I remember about my grandparents’ Miami house.

            In contrast, I remember several houses of my father’s sister Joan’s, from her houseboat, to her country house, to her small house in the city of Charlotte. All of her homes were studies in plants and tapestries, incense and paintings of nudes. 

            Joan is actually the person who got me thinking about plants. Most of my family is out of contact with her, having been drained by her borderline personality disorder that is now exacerbated by her traumatic brain injury. Periodically I’ll hear from her, and every now and then I see her pop up in the form of a comment on one of my relative’s Facebook posts. Recently, curiosity got the better of me and I checked out her page. 

There were pictures of plants. So, so many plants. I have always felt touched against my will in Joan’s presence, as the people who actually did so were individuals she brought into my life. She herself touched me in intangible ways that were intrusive and hurtful. And one of the pictures I saw reached out and touched me in a way that caused a visceral reaction of pain and the reminiscence of regret, of a childhood in part lost and aged too soon.

            Dust motes are visible in the sunlight peering through a large dirty windowpane onto a black wrought-iron shelving unit. Only the top two shelves are in view, but that is enough to pull me back at least 35 years. 

The windowpane is covered with dust and fingerprints and time, creating a hazy sunbeam for the plants to try to photosynthesize. The shelving on which the plants sit is, as mentioned, wrought iron. It is painted black and I can guarantee that in places that paint is peeling and water has infiltrated and created orange rust, the once smooth metal now mottled and rough. The wrought iron poles for the shelves are just far enough apart for one to have to be careful when setting down a plant, to ensure that it balances on the crossbars and doesn’t tilt over. There are twists and curls of wrought iron on the back of the shelves and the size is off – not enough to make it ornate, just enough to keep it from having clean lines.

There are five pots on the shelves, two on the upper and three on the lower, and to the left of the frame are the stalks of an out-of-control aloe plant. Whatever stand that behemoth is sitting on is at least four feet off the ground. The arms of the aloe plant reaching into the picture are at least two feet long and hang limply – not dead, but not decorative.

            None of the pots match. Two of them sit directly on the shelves, two sit on unmatched plates, and the fifth, the one that really gets me, sits in one of the plastic dishes that are often sold with plants and then discarded in exchange for a more permanent solution. This plant has yet to find a permanent solution. 

The top shelf houses an amaryllis with two red flowers, one proud and tall and at the top of the stalk. A debutante flower. The other appears to be blooming directly from the dirt. I’ve seen dozens of amaryllis in my lifetime. I have never seen one flowering at the bottom of a stalk. Has this flower given up? Is it the world’s shortest amaryllis stalk? Is it the ultimate lesson of “bloom where you’re planted”? Because I’m not entirely on board with “bloom where you’re planted”. I mean, make the best of a situation, yes. But if you’re sitting in shit, don’t just look around and say, “well, guess this is it”, and screw up your energy and bloom – fucking move. Look for an option. The other plant on the top shelf appears to be a philodendron. It’s stalky and strong and non-descript. It kind of looks like Mother Nature took the leaves and stirred them up with her pointer finger. They appear to be clustered around something in the middle of the pot, but it’s not clear what that is. This plant’s pot is sitting in a plastic dish that I hate. I imagine it is old now, and has succumbed to light and heat and time and has cracked.

The second shelf has the three pots on the size scale of the three little bears, and some odds and ends I can’t make out. The odds look like rocks with tea bags attached to the ends. For all I know, they are rocks with tea bags attached to them. I’m not going to speculate. The Papa Bear pot appears to hold some sort of weed. Not the smoking kind – the kind one would pull up and destroy. There does appear to be one random leaf on a very long stalk which could be coming from this pot, but it’s more likely reaching out from the Baby Bear pot. At least that’s what I’m hoping, because otherwise the Baby Bear pot is just full of dirt. Mama Bear’s pot appears to have another philodendron, this one less swirly and arguably the most appropriately shaped plant in the picture.

            I can smell the moisture in this room. I can see the dampness on the floor as Aunt Joan waters these plants with a watering can, though the room is indoors, and spills water on the floor. Or overwaters, and the excess flows out of the bottom of the pots and straight onto the floor, or overflows the mismatched plates, or seeps through the cracks in the old, brittle plastic dish under the plant on the top shelf. 

            I have left the crowning glory of the picture for last. In the center of the top shelf, so incongruent that it crosses over the line into perfection, is an ivory-colored, anatomically correct statue of a naked man standing with one hand slightly extended toward the viewer. The statue appears to be dirty, though maybe those are shadows. I’m going with dirty. It looks as if it were dug up and placed amongst this group of misfit plants, resurrected to complete the picture and provide a story for the guest tour through this room. 

            “Yes, thanks, I like the statue too. I found it out digging in the garden and he just seemed at home here.”

As a child with experience with the male anatomy, being in the room with the statue and adults would have made me very uncomfortable. I would have felt revealed, like everyone could tell I knew about that part of men and boys. I felt the same way around my Aunt Joan’s multiple nude paintings – where should I look? Can I look at the paintings? Do I look away from them? If I look at them will everyone see on my face that someone has touched me in those places? If I don’t look, will everyone know that I don’t need to look because I am already so familiar with all of this?

There are so many elements of my childhood in the picture. The dusty windows from houses we would visit where the only glass that mattered was the windshield separating the motorcycle rider from the road. The shelving, designed to allow water from a watering can to go from one plant to the one below it, but not impervious to the negative effects of this. The care was there, but it was loose, and there was bound to be some collateral damage. The mismatches, the dysfunction, the over- and undergrowth – all visible but unaddressed. Unspoken but not unmentionable – the ground-level blossom, the specially potted weed, the pot of dirt that might have been something, might still be something, may never have had a chance.

I slept with a naked Ella again. I don’t know how she’s not freezing. Actually, I do know. Children are little heaters. Throwing a toddler in your bed is the equivalent of putting a hot potato in your pocket. Instant, radiating heat.

I woke up from an honest-to-God nightmare. And it’s kind of funny now. I was in the Zombie Apocalypse. Yep. Most stereotypical nightmare ever. Maybe it was in my head because we talked about not wanting to survive the End of Days on Monday. Well, there I was. Solo. Trying to rescue a bunch of kids and crazy people. 

Story of my life, right?

I can’t remember now if I actually saw a zombie until the end. I woke up sweating because a zombie was trying to get through a door I was trying to lock. Until then, there had only been the knowledge that zombies were out there. Come to think of it, I guess I never did see a zombie, because even at the end the one that arrived was behind a door. The entire dream had a feeling of impending doom. I dreaded every turn. My job was to find safe hiding places for children and clients. My allies were teenagers. There were no other adults in the dream. They’d all been turned into zombies. The teenagers were awesome at Zombie Apocalypse. 

I suppose this was because of video games. Or maybe the fact that being a teenager means that you’re always gearing up for an apocalypse of sorts. You’re just flying along and any day the bottom could fall out. You never can tell. That was certainly my experience for part of my teen years. In any case, I located shelter. Every shelter had to have two locking doors. And preferably a food supply. I looked for solid houses. We were in farm country. Lots of barns, and farmhouses, but everything was enormously spread out, so there was a lot of running. 

You’re a runner. Do you experience the phenomenon of not being able to run in dreams? 

So. Frustrating. 

I also can never scream in dreams. I go to open my mouth and the world’s smallest “ahhhh” comes out. I sheltered a lot of people. Me and the teenagers did, that is. And then I’d leave the teens in charge and go look for more survivors. Until I got caught in the end, and then I woke up. 

Now I know where I’m going with this. I’ve told you I never know what I’m going to write about when I start writing. Farmhouses jogged my memory of Doodle Hill. 

When I was at USC, there was this music festival called Doodle Hill. By festival I mean that in the spring some unknown person had access to farmland, rigged up a power source, invited a bunch of local bands to play, and scattered kegs throughout a field. Every fake hippie in the county descended on Doodle Hill in their patchwork pants and their parents’ hand me down Volvo. 

My sophomore year was the second year I went. I spent the afternoon in Lake Wylie doing my sister’s hair and makeup for the prom. This is vital information because it got us a late start, and we headed out long after the caravan of folks who followed this kid Jamie, the only person who actually knew how to get to Doodle Hill.

I was armed a loose understanding of a few county roads and the knowledge that the mile-long driveway was marked with a traffic cone, and in my car I had Alison and Lily and Norah. And they’d all just dropped a sugar cube.

Norah was a year younger than us and absolutely beautiful. She’d somehow fallen into the group and we originally befriended her in a keep-your-enemies-close sort of way. She drank well and smoked weed well and was in general a cool girl who we were convinced was going to steal our boyfriends. I got to know her and found out that she was terribly insecure and was palling around with us because she was in love with our friend Jack.

Jack was a player on rollerblades. He was from New England and knew all kinds of things we didn’t know by sheer virtue of being privy to the faster world above the Mason Dixon line. Jack and I share a birthday. There is a bond that’s formed when you go out for your 21st birthday together. We’ve stayed in touch via Facebook. He lives somewhere in Europe now and appears to be a citizen of the world.

And Jack had ridden his rollerblades to Nikki’s dorm room one night, fucked her, and never looked back. She was determined they would have a relationship. Jack was clueless about this. He rode his rollerblades to a lot of rooms.

Anyway, Norah’s familiarity with drugs and her intense desire to see Jack at Doodle Hill probably contributed to the fact that she held her shit together on the sugar cube, riding shotgun with me through the dark, flat roads outside of Columbia, passing cows and searching for a cone while listening to the Dead.

The backseat was another story. Jane was doing her best, but Lily was a mess. She kept kicking my seat like a five-year-old on an airplane and alternating between asking if we were there yet and asking if we were all seeing what she was seeing.

“Only you can see what you’re seeing,” Jane kept telling her.

Lily kept asking, I kept driving, and Norah kept smoking Camel after Camel and pitching their trailing, glowing butts out the window into the night. Every time she threw one someone in the back seat would pipe up, “what was that?”

“Shooting star,” I remember saying. 

After forty-five minutes I conceded that we were hopelessly lost. After pulling down a long driveway and being chased off by a farmer with a shotgun who thought we were there to pick shrooms, I conceded that we were frighteningly lost, and I stopped at a lit farmhouse. I told everyone to stay the hell in the car. Norah calmly lit a cigarette, Jane was singing, and I think Lily was close to licking the window at that point.

I knocked on the door and the farmer’s wife answered. There was a fire in the fireplace and the whole house smelled like chocolate chip cookies. There was a stack of six blue Blockbuster videos on the table waiting to be thrown into the VCR.  She didn’t know where the festival was, but she kindly called around and asked. She finally got someone who knew whose farm it was, but they didn’t know how to get there. She gave me some vague directions that involved going “west” – what the hell did I know about west? It was the middle of the night and I didn’t have a compass – and she apologized for not knowing more.  

I thanked her and headed out to the car and my threesome, who began to look more and more excited as I approached. 

It was weird, until I realized that the farmer’s wife was following me with a plate of cookies. I stuck my head in the car and told everyone not to talk. I didn’t need this woman calling the cops to tell them there was a girl driving around lost with some seriously impaired friends. I know I said it harshly. What comes to mind is the Pulp Fiction scene and the woman yelling, “any one of you motherfucking pigs move, and I’ll execute every last one of ya!”

It worked. Cookies were offered with pleasantries and accepted in silence. I thanked her for her help and said I’d come back if we didn’t find it, and I drove away. In the rear view I could see her standing with her plate of cookies watching us go. I could only hope that she couldn’t see that Lily was trying to eat her cookie like a lollipop.

I rolled down my window, and I heard music. And somehow I followed it. And found a traffic cone. And found Doodle Hill. I let Jane and Lily loose in the field like a pair of puppies, and Norah and I went to find beer.

We all slept in my bed last night, the big comfy king. Finn was hesitant because he knows I never sleep well with them both in bed with me, and Ella always comes in, especially recently. I will put them both to bed, in their room split by a sheet hanging from the ceiling, and within five minutes I will hear the running of her small feet and feel her weight hit the bed.

I don’t sleep well because inevitably Ella, on my left, gets tangled in the hose of my CPAP, and both of them migrate to the middle. I will fall asleep with a foot of space beside me and will wake up sweating, a tiny heater on each side, heads on my shoulders, limbs akimbo, blankets like a straight jacket, weighting me down with love. Last night Finn fell asleep holding my hand, and I was reminded of something he said to me when he was three.

“Would you like to share a dream with me? Hold my hand while we sleep.”

It is an indication of the type of mood he is in. Ella is acting out and Finn is acting in, the opposite of their respective gender roles, the honey bee who will sweeten and sting and the meditator. I talked about COVID with them the other day and cleared up some misconceptions that I think helped. Finn thought COVID killed three of ten, and was relieved to know the real statistic. Ella thought it was fifty percent. I don’t think I dissuaded her, but I at least made her question it.

I explained that the numbers are so high here because right now New York is the epicenter, and we’ll likely get better first.

“That makes sense,” Finn said. “We’re a port. People from all over the world come here. They would have landed here with it and it would have spread.”

His thinking of that impressed me. He often thinks outside the realm of a ten-year-old. He has arrived at many theories of quantum physics, psychology, and philosophy on his own, carrying the weight of knowledge on shoulders that are strengthened by spirit. He is right, of course. People brought the virus here the way they brought hopes and dreams.

I believe COVID will get me eventually, and get me good. I believe it will get most of us, but, as I’ve said before, I don’t think I’ll survive it. I don’t want to go out because I grabbed a virus-laden bag of chips and then touched my goddam face.

I just had an opportunity to work for the federal government providing psychiatric support to the doctors and nurses on the COVID units, and to facilitate farewells between patients and family members. It felt like I would be going to war for an eight week tour, six weeks of service followed by a two-week quarantine. I was all in. This is what I am good at – it is the clinical aspect of my job that enables me to survive the administrative part that is so prevalent. This was my chance to actually do something, to change lives, to matter. I sent my resume. I got the paperwork. I tried to remember where my immunization records were and I started to think about logistics.

And then last night Ella had a meltdown. Finn wouldn’t play with her to the extent she wanted him to, and she feels rejection acutely and goes to a particularly dark place. She has been having a tough time at her dad’s – they both have – and feels particularly secluded and rejected there. Earlier in the day she had said that she didn’t want to go back on Sunday. I told her she was with me until the following Sunday because of Spring Break, and she cheered. She already knew this was true before she spoke. She was looking for reassurance.

In times of rejection, she quickly turns Finn’s perceived dislike to me. Suddenly I hate her and am disappointed in her. Suddenly I think she is stupid. Suddenly she is a mistake and the world is better off without her. Suddenly she wishes she were dead. I would say it is heartbreaking to hear these things come from an eight-year-old, but the truth is that there is not a word that adequately describes what it feels and looks like to see your tiny daughter in this pain.

And I realized that I cannot leave her, or Finn. They are both scared. I cannot leave them to another house where they are scared, with Ella’s brokenness suddenly staring me in the face again. There is the person I am, and there is the mother I am, and the mother I am wins.

And so I will be here, on the front lines not of a pandemic but of parenthood, the greater battle, the one I have less hope of winning but the one in which I matter more. I will hold my children rather than holding dying hands. There is no protective equipment to keep us from the pain of raising our children, but luckily that means there is nothing to dull the glory either. This is the fight, and the fate, I choose.

The old chair was cornflower blue, with little pastel squares dotting its fabric. It was close enough to the bedroom window to where you could slide it over and lean out and smoke, which happened often. The blue chair was comfy but kind of gross, like your dorm room might have been, and one of us was always sitting in it. Someone had to be sitting in it in order to be in compliance with the rules for a game of ball.

Ball was played with a ninety-nine cent beach ball and $9.99 eighteen pack of Bud Light from the Key Food across the street from our apartment building on Bronx River Road. The lights were out on the dingy store’s sign, so we actually purchased from the “K y Foo”. I once got stopped in the parking lot of the Key Food by two neighbors from up the hill, Jim and Diane, who worked with the consumer movement in the social work field. I had the aforementioned beer.

“I won’t tell anyone I saw you with that,” Diane winked, motioning at the beer. 

Was I holding a sheet of acid? Really? “Okay,” I said. 

They proceeded to talk about my future mother-in-law (Jim hated her) for the next twenty minutes. I was ready to get home, and they couldn’t wait to get into their groceries. In the twenty minutes, during which I could practically feel myself losing brain cells, they proceeded to eat an entire bag of double-stuffed Oreos. In the parking lot. No shame. 

Back on the fifth floor in our apartment, I’m sure I spirited the beer into the fridge, grabbed two, and headed back to the bedroom. We were fairly poor, you see. When I first moved to New York we were making nothing – I mean, I was on a grant position that paid five thousand over three months. When we finally got jobs, I think we pulled in $40k between us for the first year. We had about two pieces of furniture in the living room, and we didn’t have cable so we didn’t hang out in there. We sat in the bedroom and watched a tiny television from Brendan’s parents, if we watched at all. 

One of the channels we got was whatever the Mets played on, and it came in as long as we angled the antenna out the window and wrapped aluminum foil from the antenna to the bars of the fire escape. We watched the Mets while we played Ball.

In order to play, one person sat in the chair, and the other person stood a respectable distance away, and you batted the ball back and forth. You could hit the ball in any manner that was legal in volleyball. We tried to see how many hits we could get in a row. 

I generally sat, Brendan generally stood. He was extremely dramatic in the lengths he’d go to in order to save a volley. There were a lot of falls, extensions, collisions with furniture, and spilt Bud Lights. We only really cared about the Bud Lights. 

You would have thought we invented Sim City with the pleasure we got from this game. We played constantly. I don’t remember ever getting tired of it. Maybe it was the simplicity of no other distractions, everything stripped down to the bare essentials of pleasure, the very smallness and easiness and absence of pressure. 

Maybe Brendan and I would have had a better outcome if we’d been able to stay in that one room, with that one focus. But life grows and your attention is pulled in different directions and your pain and your pleasure is divided. We got a couch. We got cable. We got out of the room, and we got on with our lives, and he began to step on me. And I began to do a sidestep of him, which infuriated him. And it led us where we are. But at some point, at some points, I loved him. And I liked him.

Brendan came into my life whip smart and funny and cute. He had amazing stories from New York and Los Angeles, and he was different from everyone I’d known. He took me to the catwalk over the basketball stadium at the University of South Carolina, looking down at the court where the Gamecocks were actually playing well for once in my college life. He took me into the cavernous areas below where his office was, where the industrial team washers were and where he did his laundry. He played me music I’d never heard and he talked about places I hadn’t been. He wrote me poetry. 

We used to go out and then come home to our duplex, and we’d both wait for who would go upstairs first. The stairs were up against the same wall in each side of the house, you see. It would be weird to go up and listen to him going up at the exact same time. We did a lot of crossword puzzles on the porch. We were both huge lovers of words. We were also both competitive at that point. 

We’d go to this restaurant, Sushi Yoshi, and get big bottles of Newcastle and massive quantities of sushi. As we got to know the waitress, the sushi started to disappear from the bill. Soon we were only paying for Newcastle’s and appetizers.

Brendan had this friend Craig, who we were with a lot. He ended up living with him for a period during his last semester. We did a lot of hanging out and a lot of bullshitting and a lot, I mean a lot, of drinking. 

I sat down to write about the good things I remember about Brendan, but what just came to mind is the first specifically controlling thing that I remember his doing in our relationship. We’d been seeing each other for a little over a year, and we were sitting at the table in Craig’s dining room playing cards with him and his girlfriend, Susanna. For some reason that night Brendan had begun to get bothered by how far I was smoking my cigarettes down – he insisted I was smoking the filters. And I wasn’t, because I think that’s disgusting. In all my time smoking, I have always been completely disgusted at the whole thing. I hate smoke, I hate ashes, I hate the smell. I hate it when people let the ash dangle on their cigarettes and I hate it when people tear the filter off their cigarettes and I hate it when people smoke to the filter. Basically, I hate smoking but it’s fucking addictive and I don’t want to talk about it anymore except to finish this story. I am so glad I am done with it.

Anyway, I was talking, and Brendan reached over, took my cigarette away from me, and crushed it out. 

“You were burning the filter,” he said. 

I had a good half-inch before I reached the filter. “No, I wasn’t,” I said. I reached for my pack and he put his hand on it. 

“Why don’t you slow down a little?” he asked. 

I met his eyes and I felt like a disgusting animal, with these base needs that I wasn’t strong enough to overcome. I knew I would listen to him, and also that I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything else until I was able to smoke. 

And I just realized that I can’t do this. I can’t write this chapter. Everything that I can think of that I enjoyed doing with Brendan can stand alone as something I simply enjoyed doing. I thought of these late nights we used to listen to music and hang out, but it was always him telling stories about himself and I don’t feel like he knows a damn thing about me. I drank for the first 10 years of our relationship, and pretty much everything we did involved drinking. Sure I looked forward to hanging out at night – I remember looking forward to when it was okay to start drinking.

I know, I know, that there were times of love and laughter and friendship. But I can’t access them right now. Maybe that’s what trauma has done to me, or maybe that’s what divorce has done to me, but whatever the case may be that’s where I am now. I hope I can come to a place where I can access good memories to share with my children. What a horrible waste of life if there aren’t any there.