Saying Goodbye to my Plants
I’m not good with people. I’m
not sure if the reason is nurture or nature or a bit of both but the outcome is
the same. I sometimes claim to be a functional autistic, somewhere on the spectrum at any rate, but perhaps the real answer is simpler than that,
perhaps I’m just an asshole.
I don’t have a lot of friends
(which makes the few friends I do have incredibly precious), my relationship
with my whole family of origin is fucked up beyond hope of repair, and even my
ties to my own kids seem, at times, terrifyingly tenuous.
One thing I’ve learnt in life
is that you have to make choices. You can’t, especially if you are female,
have it all. (Well, maybe some people can, but I don’t seem to be able to manage
it.) When I was 21 I thought I could have it all; be a single Mom, raise 2 kids
while simultaneously getting a PhD. That was my plan. (You’ll note that even
then, at 21, I’d decided to have kids on my own because I knew, given how
difficult I was, that no one would ever marry me.) (The universe, however,
didn’t like my plan. It said, “No!”, and put me in a head-on collision on the trans-Canada
highway. I ended up spending months in hospital and years getting further
operations and, well, that’s a whole other story… but the outcome was that I
figured out you couldn’t have it all. You had to make choices.) (I chose kids,
btw, over a PhD.)
I’m better, it seems, with
plants, than I am with people. My whole house is full of plants which represent
lost relationships. I have an enormous spider plant that comes from a wee cutting
my sister once gave me. I don’t think we’ve talked in over 2 decades, my sister
and I, though she did yell at me when I had the gall to show up for our father’s
funeral, which lets you know, among other things, how old the plant is. I also
have two other spectacular plants, one a huge Christmas cactus, given to my by former friends, both from Deep, and, though I couldn’t manage to maintain my friendships with either of
them, I still have the plants to remind me of what I lost. And I have a huge fairy castle cactus from my mother-in-law. Again, a plant given to me by someone who was
very important in my life at one point. And, again, representing a relationship
that fell apart. I even still have the first plant I bought as a newlywed, many
moons ago. Yup, I can keep the plants alive.
I’m just not good friend
material. When I was living on Rutherford, and very lonely, there were a couple
of women who lived nearby, who, at different times, each saw my plight, and each tried
very very hard to befriend me. (Thank you both.) But I couldn’t do it. Though I
recognized and appreciated their efforts, and would have loved to have become
friends with either of them, I just couldn’t manage to do it.
My life, as I have said
before, feels like swimming through thick dark molasses. That’s the best way I
can describe it. It’s just not easy. I know that no one’s life is easy, but I
honestly believe that personal relationships are, for me, harder than for most.
(My PhD, by the way, the one I didn’t do, was going to be in Sociology. I was going to
research loneliness in our society, try to quantify it, collect personal
stories, and maybe even look for solutions to help those most affected by it.)
But I’ve strayed off topic.
I feel that you have to make
choices in life. I could be wrong but that’s what I believe. And, having chosen
to live a vagabond lifestyle, teach one semester and then go off and crew the
next, keeping my plants is just one chore too many. So I’m going to give them away. I tried to hide them in inconspicuous corners of my ex's house but he found them and brought them to me. They wouldn’t survive in storage and ferrying them all back and forth to
friends or family each time I go off on vacation seems like too much effort. Some of them are, did I mention this, large.
So I’m going to let them go.
And, maybe, in future,
instead of keeping my plants alive, I’ll try to keep my relationships alive.
