Losing to the weeds
Or does it just feel that way?
This morning, I left the house early to head to a local coffee shop and handle the administrative tasks of my job. I have found that leaving the house helps me to focus and get through the sometimes tedious aspects of my job more quickly. We had been away for the past two weeks, but L has made full use of my car in the short time we have been back. Yesterday, I had spoken with him about cleaning up the trash he left behind on his various trips to fast food restaurants and convenience stores. When I got in the car this morning, I found a new collection of soda bottles, plastic cups from fast food restaurants, paper bags with fries containers and burger wrappers, gum wrappers, salt sprinkled across all the seats from those fries, and multiple sticky rings left by those plastic cups of soda. I wasn’t happy. While my car is far from spotless, I don’t leave trash in the car and don’t want stickiness anywhere. I muttered to myself while cleaning out the car, wiping down the surfaces, and trying to brush the salt off the seats with my hand. I felt a small flicker of anger start to flare, but noticed it and calmly blew it out before it could catch on anything else.
As the oldest child of seven, I often felt like nothing was just mine. Attention was divided and shared and never solely focused on me. My clothes and shoes, hairbrushes and scrunchies, records and cassettes were borrowed frequently by younger siblings, sometimes returned, sometimes damaged, sometimes lost. (To be fair, I did my own share of borrowing from my siblings as well. My sister and I both had a pair of soft leather shoes, one of us had soft pink and the other had a pale peach color. The difference was subtle, but somehow, we were always taking the others’ shoes and denying our possession of them, of course.) I can remember feeling this sense of utter frustration that I could never count on something being protected from other hands, other use. I felt a sense of helplessness, a lack of control over my ability to own anything.
This feeling carried with me into adulthood and often confused my husband. Why would I become so upset when he used my laundry basket? Why did it matter? Why would I get irrationally angry when I saw my coffee mug sitting in the sink in the morning, the dregs of his evening tea left in the cup? Once I became a mom, I had to work through that sense of ownership over almost anything. Babies can wrap their little fist around a necklace and then pull away, taking the necklace with them. A toddler can knock over a favorite mug and watch it shatter on the floor. The first thought is no longer the loss of the mug, but whisking your child away to prevent injury. Vomit or diaper blowouts can permanently stain a favorite shirt or skirt. Eager little hands can rip a page out of a beloved book. Whatever you are eating or drinking is always more enticing than what is on their plates, even when it is the same food. When they are teens, this seems to apply to hair and body products. My facial cleansers, lotions, shampoos, and conditioners appeal much more to my teens than the products they pick out and ask me to purchase for them. After almost 20 years of mothering, I have quietly let go of most of my sense of ownership over things. (Except the coffee mug—which Z loves to push me on, taking the mug from the drying rack for his late night Earl Gray so it isn’t there when I come down for coffee in the morning.)
When L put a serious dent over the front wheel well of my car trying to maneuver out of the driveway, both he and D thought I would be upset. But I had already accepted that he was likely to damage the car. His confidence level did not align with his experience, which is a sure recipe for hitting something. I was just relieved it was the basketball hoop and not another car.
After a morning of writing notes and balancing financials, I came home and attacked the frenzy of weeds that had sprung up in the two weeks we were gone. The combination of alternating wet and hot weather made not only my echinacea, daylilies, and bee balm extremely happy, but also the purslane, spurge, woodsorrel, nutsedge, paspalum, dandelion, sowthistle, orchard grass, and my arch nemesis, creeping bellflower. Creeping bellflower, if you are lucky enough not to be acquainted, is a nightmare weed. It has a deep carrot-like root that can grow down two to three feet under the soil and sends out feathery thin shoots that entangle themselves with other plants. It is also a master of disguise, looking very similar to bee balm in its more mature phase and violet in its early stage. I have been working to eradicate it from my garden for years now, but the best I seem to be able to do is not let it take over.
Illustration by Emil Korsmo, weed chart number 50. Retrieved from https://www.sciencenorway.no/botany-food-plants/emil-korsmos-goal-was-to-beat-back-weeds-but-the-wall-charts-he-made-of-the-bothersome-plants-were-beautiful-and-popular/1686207
I dug down deep, pulled up multiple creeping bellflower tuber roots, ridded the top bed of the garden of most of the pesky weeds and stray maple tree seedlings, but even after three hours, there was still so much more left to do. Although I had completely cleared the weeds in the top bed of the garden a month or so ago, the two weeks of neglect and prime weather conditions had created a feast of weeds. On the far left of the garden, the azalea, lavender, and daylilies seemed to be fighting for their little patches of soil amongst the sowthistle, nutsedge, and of course, the creeping bellflower. I did a first pass of pulling out the things I could, but knew I had to go back with a gardening fork and shovel to get to the roots.
I went inside, spoke briefly to L about his unfulfilled task of cleaning the car. He protested that he had done what I asked, that the munchkins box in the back of the car did not belong to him. That he was unaware of the water bottle and crumpled McDonald’s bag under the passenger seat. He left the room, annoyed.
I felt defeated by trash, by weeds, by things unwanted.
A few hours later, L came back from a drive. “Mom, I vacuumed your car. It looks great now.” D came home from doing errands and commented on how much I had cleared out the top bed, how much better the garden looked without the weeds competing for space.
Sometimes, we need another perspective, a little time, and some space to remember that we can get lost in the moment, in the overwhelm, in the frustration. A step back, a deep breath, another set of eyes, another pair of hands can help us see the big picture. The car will get cleaned and then dirty again. I will have some wins over the weeds and then, I will be out there again, pulling away.
All photos were taken by the exceptional Dana Giuliana, unless otherwise noted.
Thanks for spending some of your day reading this post. I hope it resonated. Periplum of motherhood and other wonderings is free. If you enjoy reading, please comment and share it with friends!
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