My mom came in with a plant.
"What is this?" I asked, certain that unless it barked or meowed, it was dead on sight in my care.
"A Cyclamen plant. I thought you could take care of it."
"Okay," I said and there you have it -- I was a plant owner.
A few days before, I had a D&C for a miscarriage. At ten weeks along, the OBGYN and ultrasound tech discovered my first pregnancy was no more. So as I wore some mega-big maxi-pad, I found a place for my plant, and then went back to lying down on the couch with my crampy uterus to watch some seriously nostalgic television. Little House on the Prairie was one of the shows I watched on repeat, enduring the tragic pregnancies the show had one by one, in tears. I was in a funk. The kind of funk that has you eating privately, ignoring your friend's phone calls, and not returning to work.
The flowers on the plant bloomed white shortly thereafter and my friend, an absolute genius when it comes to anything that's green or crawls on four legs or a million who I have known since childhood, Jason, told me how to care for the plant.
"You've kept it alive this long inside. Not bad," he noted, giving me tips on how to not kill my plant.
Since it seemed life was not quite blooming in me, my faith of me tending to life outside of me was zilch.
But overtime, the plant grew.
And soon after, I was pregnant with my daughter and only child to this day. I endured a hellish pregnancy, thanks to Hyperemesis Gravidarum, but I made it. She was mine for the keeping.
Two years after her birth, the plant stood strong, blooming brightly every winter (so unique!) and I remembered to water it even through the fog of the newborn stage and the fatigue of the toddler stage, and enjoyed watching its seasonal bloom. Whenever stems started to wither, I was sure to cut them carefully, pruning my plant and keeping her beautiful. When no one listened, I sang to her and spoke to her. I liked saying good morning to her as I watered her.
And as she continued to live and my child continued to grow, there was one significant death in my life: my marriage.
It took a year and a half to cut the tie officially and stop trying to keep the marriage alive, when we finally separated for the last and final time.
It felt wrong saying goodbye. As much as he didn't seem to love me, my ex-husband had been steady -- rooted deeply into my life almost as much as he was rooted deeply into staying the same.
He couldn't evolve with me. And I couldn't change myself the way he had imagined I would once we got married (I wasn't supposed to stay the same. I was supposed to change for him). The roots of our marriage were dying.
A special component of our dying marriage and our ultimate grief -- the blanket that dampened our sunshine -- was the fact that thanks to Hyperemesis Gravidarum, I was not going to make him any more babies.
Our family tree stopped at three and now, we were severed. Forever.
For the first time ever in six years, this past weekend, almost two years after we put our marriage to rest, my beautiful white cyclamen bloomed a pink bud. I noticed it as I went to sing to her the other day and I thought to myself: "Look, she's changing. She's growing new colors. She's becoming something new."
And yet, so have I.
The woman riddled with low-self esteem. The woman riddled with grief over the fact that she would have no more children. The woman who didn't believe she would find any work. The woman who felt no one would love her again. That she was not worth anything and was too old to be any good, was gone.
Instead, a new bud has formed and in her place, is a woman at peace. A woman in love -- self-love. A woman who is happy with her small family tree.
A woman who doesn't need another person to keep her rooted.
Instead, this new woman -- this ME -- is planted firmly in the ground on my own accord with my little one standing by.