An Eldest Daughter Plants Seeds

March 11, 2024

My mom has been gone for sixteen months, and I’m beginning to remember more of who she was in her life’s “great before.” Before her mind failed.

Memories of her long journey home, of dementia unto death, are blurry today. They’ve yielded to the farsighted focus of moments shared with her now-adult grandchildren. When they were young children, she admired them as she admired art—the miracle of her baby’s babies. I can see her facial expressions as we enjoyed their antics together, her wide eyes and tight lips aimed at me, saying, “Don’t let them see we’re watching.”

Sometimes, she would throw back her head and laugh out loud at their discoveries. Splashing in the bathtub. Tasting a lemon for the first time. Making it “rain” with piles of leaves.

Sacraments all.

When I became a mother, Mom and I reunited as co-conspirators in all things domestic. But this time I was an adult, feeling responsible for everything and everyone, including her… instead of a child, feeling responsible for everything and everyone, including her. Don’t get me wrong, I forgave her, and I forgive again, in that ever-turning, widening spiral of perspective-entwined memory. Blame is a childish thing, and I’d like to think I’ve put it away. People who have gone before? They were just trying to live, like we are now.

Forgiveness, I find, ripens into clear-eyed acceptance.

Memory, once an angry, adolescent fire, now casts its ember glow, illuminating one simple fact of my childhood. My mother was, among many things, overwhelmed. It was the life in which she and I and my younger siblings found ourselves. Now, we have words like “adverse childhood experiences” to describe poverty, serial divorce, and family members’ self-medication. We even have science to explain the biology of “eldest daughter syndrome.”

Phrased in my oversimplified understanding, in this “pseudo-syndrome,” maternal stress sends chemical signals, which, with help from gender-role expectations, activate something in the daughter. Turns out, this “bat signal” –or “batgirl signal”–has been transmitting for as long as mothers have had daughters.

“Adrenal puberty” occurs in eldest daughters whose mothers send out stress-signals. It’s described as a sort of cognitive maturity that predates actual physical puberty, so that a daughter can assist in keeping her younger siblings alive before she’s physically able to produce her own children. Girls do mature faster than boys; girls with stressful home-lives? Even faster. It’s the gift of being female that keeps on giving.

We shared this special organic bond, Mom and I did.  As did she with her own mother. As did I with my middle, two-spirit child, who was assigned female at birth. (They forgave me and, I pray, they will forgive again.) Stress becomes a matter of nurture as much as nature in this sense. You can take the girl out of poverty, but you can’t take poverty out of the girl.

But wait, there’s more! The stress of it, among many stressors, is heritable.

At the risk of being accused of practicing “toxic positivity,” I’ll say this about childhood. Mom’s, mine, my children’s—childhood is much more than the sum of our adverse experiences. So. Much. More.

Mom enjoyed my children. Delighted in them. When they came along, she was “herself” again. She was the mother I knew when I was a small child, the natural teacher who found awe in my own discovery of the world: Giant grasshoppers, hopping onto border-grass blades that grew as high as my waist. Seeing bunnies and doggies in the shadows she made on the walls. Learning to read, in her lap.

Call it the great “before-the-before,” when, with my dad and little brother, life was sweet. Before Dad’s blackest moods took hold. Before our first and second divorces from him. Before our remarriages, before my little sister, before our re-divorces. Before we moved eighteen times in fifteen years. Before Mom’s full-time work and unrelenting stress.

I got glimpses of the before-the-before as a young mother, enjoying my mother’s grandbabies alongside her.  And there were plenty of those fun moments, simple moments, shared moments while the children were growing up, amid her catastrophes, real and anticipated.

You can take Mom out of the crisis, we learned, but it was harder to take the crisis out of Mom. My gracious husband helped me help her at every turn, to pick up the pieces of each real and impending disaster. Mom was always gracious in return, and our chemical bond continued. If it was a chemical equation that made me feel like her problem-solver, her reinforcements of my role, conscious or not, kept the feeling going.

“What would I do without you?” she said a million times while I was growing up. “Oh, Julie,” she confessed, in those early dementia days, “If only I’d had a mother like you, I could’ve been anything.” I’ve decided to take it as the compliment I believe she intended.

Dementia, alas, was something I could not fix for her.

In the midst of dementia, though, was an odd blessing. No longer was she beset by worries. No longer did the sword of Damocles hang over her. While I was a bit shellshocked and exhausted, my brother and sister tended to her, gently, as if she were the child. My siblings and I grew closer during our mother’s long journey home. These were gifts I didn’t see coming.

Last year, a few months after she passed away, I planted a few flower seeds, which sprouted, but which a careless yardman decimated with a weed-eater. I sobbed like a baby, feeling like I’d lost my mother all over again.

Grief comes out in funny ways.

It does, a writer friend once declared, “whatever the f*ck it wants.” It was all I could do to plant a few more seeds last year, to grow a few dwarf zinnias. The tomatoes I planted were short-lived and caught a fungus, and I didn’t bother with much else.

But the spindly oak tree we stuck in the ground last year now has new growth. It was a live oak “weed” we dug out of a potted plant, not expecting much.

During the past few weeks, I’ve had the energy to plant more in the raised beds we put together. It’s probably too late for the kale, but it’s sprouted so we’ll see what happens. The radish greens look great, but who knows what’s happening underneath the soil? Carrot seeds went in yesterday. They’re tiny and translucent and disappeared when they hit the soil. I had to trust I was scattering enough on top, so they’d be covered with a quarter- to half-inch.

This year I have a bit more energy, to plant seeds I could not see, letting go expectations of whether they’ll come up. What went before comes around again but, through an ever-widening lens, the view is one year different. My high-energy sport of a husband raked up all the live oak leaves, so this year, I won’t be needing any careless, weed-eating yardmen.

I’ve got special plans for the dwarf zinnia seeds I saved from last year. I bought seeds for giant zinnias, too. If it all works out, the bigger ones will watch over the smaller ones. Like mothers with babies. Like grandmothers with grandbabies, laughing in their splendid, sunlit color.