Always, Always Remember This

Mental Notes and Zinnias

This spring I decided I needed a creative project to make myself feel awake and real again after more than a year as a stay-at-home new mom with my Pandemic Baby (and little hint of this “village” everyone mentions). I wistfully wanted to plant a garden of flowers to cut for arrangements, which I would then draw or paint. This project may seem both strangely specific and convoluted, but I thought it was perfect because it involved flowers, which I loved, but not paper flowers which I have loved.

Before my daughter Maeve was born, my mom and I had a busy and successful small business creating lifelike crepe-paper flower bouquets. We cut and sculpted every petal by hand, achieving fairly realistic paper tributes to Mother Nature’s “real thing,” and we found that people connected with the symbolic meanings of flowers as well as the fact that our blooms didn’t wilt and die. But I was burnt out and ready for a change, eager to throw myself into motherhood; so after Maeve was born I scaled back the business and eventually (quite informally) put it to bed.

While my daughter has since magically bloomed in all the wonderful ways that babies and toddlers do, I have spent much of her 20-month life feeling like my brain has been stuck in mud. I’m never sure how much of this to attribute to the reckoning that comes with the motherhood identity crisis (that no one seems to mention) or the pandemic that superimposed onto our lives when my daughter was a newborn. Because she is still too young to get vaccinated or even to mask, we have largely remained cautious and relatively isolated for her entire life.

So Maeve, my husband, and I planted zinnia seeds. I needed to make something with my hands and brain, and I hoped that some dirt under my fingernails and paint on my clothes might help me shake the mud in my mind.

We started in June, extremely late in the season for planting seeds, and we chose zinnias because they’re tough and exuberant (and I made a mental note to choose more things in my life for their exuberance and tenacity). From my paper-flower days, I had learned that zinnias signify joyous endurance, lasting affection, and thoughts of friends. Metaphorically and realistically, they seemed like a worthy and wise pick for this project, and we crossed our fingers they would still grow in the heavy summer heat. Maeve helped us poke the little seeds into the soil, and she shrieked with glee to stick her hand in the spray of the garden hose while we watered the bed.

Three or four torrential downpours in July all but washed away the entire area of fresh new garden soil we had spread over the previously rock-strewn bed of lethargic-at-best dirt and Georgia red clay. Each time the rainwater became a river and then a lake in our little garden, and each time the young zinnias completely fell over to the ground. But it turns out that not-paper flowers love water, and zinnias really are unbelievably resilient (I made another mental note to be more like a zinnia, on both counts). Soon these zinnias-that-could bent back upward and kept growing. By late August, some stems were over three feet tall bearing darling pink, magenta, orange, cream, and red blooms. Soon our 5x10’ plot of sideways-upward zigzag zinnias began attracting butterflies, bees, and even hummingbirds.

A few weeks ago, Maeve and I were playing outside, and I pointed out an orange butterfly hovering over one of the zinnias. It floated away by the time she walked over to the garden, but she waved bye-bye to the butterfly and pulled a flower close to her face to “smell” it. Zinnias aren’t particularly aromatic, but her gesture absolutely melted me (if a toddler sticking her face into a flower doesn’t soften your cold, hard heart, then I don’t know what will).

My mom and I had modeled smelling the flowers when the azaleas bloomed, and then the jasmine, hydrangeas, roses, gardenias, and daisies, each in turn, throughout the spring and summer. Her favorites, by far, were the daisies. “Daaaeys,” she would call them. She’d see them from her stroller when we’d walk through our neighborhood, and she would yell “Daaaeys! Daaaeys!” until I pulled the stroller up for a closer look. She even started identifying them in her books, correctly pointing specifically to flower illustrations with yellow centers and white petals.

Naturally, I am convinced my toddler is incredibly gifted (nevermind the fact that she refers — and eagerly points — to every child she sees as a “baby,” even if they look like they are beginning puberty; it is not those kids’ fault they are not flowers.) Even though Maeve can’t yet say “zinnia,” she knows these flowers in the garden are not daisies. I also think she knows how much I care about them as I remove the weeds and examine each zinnia bloom closely (mainly looking for pesky and very hungry caterpillars).

We have several varieties growing in our garden, and by that morning with the orange butterfly, many of the stems were taller than Maeve. We had attempted to plant the seeds with a diagonal gap for a path down the middle of the bed, but their sideways and prolific growth patterns had other ideas, filling in any free space. There were some little toddler-sized openings though, and Maeve ducked in, almost fully surrounding herself in the leaves and flowers. But as she looked back and saw me approaching on the gravel path, she waddled out and darted around the far side of the plot instead, parallel to the path.

I stayed on the path but crouched down to her level. She giggled and crouched a little too. Then she tilted her head sideways as she peeked at me through all the green, pink, and red. I laughed and tilted my head sideways, mirroring her. She opened her mouth wide, as though she might sing or eat a whole flower; and she threw her arms down and behind her, as though she might launch into flight. I opened my mouth wide too. We crept along our opposite sides of the garden playing peekaboo through the zinnias, these stalwart little blooms having fought valiantly just to keep reaching toward the sun.

As I wondered if our silly game was perhaps irreverent among such resolute stems, three orange butterflies floated through the flowers and flitted around Maeve’s head. I laughed again and tried to snap a photograph of this moment in my mind, thinking — with a sense of utterly joyful awe and peace, coupled with an equally desperate and consequential feeling of urgency — “please let me always, always, always remember this.”

I wonder, perhaps, if this is the basic gist — the upshot and the burden — of motherhood. A zing of sparkling joy in a weightless laugh, here; a throb of sleepy, sweaty calm in a heavy head on your lap, there. Rhythms punctuated by a gut-wrenching, stomach-flipping flash of fear in those moments when you, gentle and ferocious Mother, cannot control the inevitability of gravity, the roughness of pavement, or the choices, words, or actions of Other People. Some days are sun, some days are water, some are dirt. Sometimes they mix together and become the mud in your mind or on your toddler’s clothes. Any good and any bad can float in or flit away as quickly as the butterflies around Maeve’s face.

We have a children’s book about the ways and moments when your “heart fills with happiness.” The feel of grass on bare feet, holding hands, listening to stories. I think of my favorite page: my heart fills with happiness when I feel the sun dancing on my cheeks. In this moment in the garden, with the zinnias and the butterflies and my little flower girl, I felt awake — crisp, clear, and fully awake — with sunshine dancing on my cheeks and Maeve’s.

I haven’t drawn or painted the zinnias yet. I wasn’t sure I could even bring myself to cut them at all, determined to keep that moment bright in my memory (always, always). But when the blooms themselves started to fade, I finally cut some flowers. I arranged them in little glass vases with some dusty miller and rosemary clipped from other spots in our yard. I placed the vases on our dinner table, and I left some flowers on our neighbors’ doorsteps, too. It may not be what I planned for my wake-up-and-feel-alive-again project, but it felt wistful and real. Progress.

When I saw new blooms starting to open up again in our resilient little garden, I remembered that zinnias are a cut-and-come-again flower; harvesting the blooms encourages new growth. I poured myself a glass of water and made another mental note to be more like a zinnia.