Awe
On Watching Her Become
“I am the first and the last.”
— The Thunder, Perfect Mind
I didn’t expect to be stopped by a garden.
She walked me through the back door and into the yard, moving the way she always has, with the certainty of someone who knows exactly where everything belongs. And then I saw it. The basins she’d built herself, deep and deliberate. The soil she’d composted from scratch. The green, climbing and sprawling and insisting on itself in every direction.
I stood there and did not know what to say.
There is a phrase adults use when watching children, they grow up so fast, carrying it like a gentle grief, the ache of becoming a witness to something you thought you were guiding. I had never expected to feel that standing next to my mother. But I did. She had built something while I wasn’t watching. Something alive. Something that did not need my attention or my understanding to thrive.
She showed me everything. And I kept thinking: who is this woman.
I know her. I have known her the way you know the place you learned to breathe. She packed gummy bears into my hands after hard days. She remembered the things I said once and thought no one heard. She studied me like I was a language worth learning, and never once stopped translating.
But the garden. The garden was something else.
She makes her own compost. Takes what breaks down, what most people would consider finished, and turns it into the thing that feeds everything else. She does this quietly, without announcement. She has probably always done something like this. I just didn’t know she had a name for it.
I thought about all the things she composted for me over the years. The bad days I brought home still wearing them. The silence I carried for thirteen years about my body and what it contained. The parts of myself I handed her already half-rotted with shame, waiting to see if she’d set them down. She took every piece. Turned it. Fed it back to me as something I could grow from.
She didn’t keep the damage. She made it useful.
That is a specific kind of genius. The kind that doesn’t ask for credit. The kind that just keeps working.
The second time my father had heart surgery, I drove over the night before and stayed.
The first procedure hadn’t held. We had hoped it would, and it didn’t, and so we found ourselves again preparing for the thing we thought we were done preparing for. I woke up early. Drove us to the hospital. The same hospital where I was born.
When they wheeled him away, my mother and I were left alone in the room together. I am emotional. She knows this, has always known this, has never once held it against me. She is too. But even then, in her own fear, her own held breath, she found it.
It’ll be okay, baby.
Not performed. Not forced. Just the reflex of a woman who has been tending so long it lives in her body now. She calls me her strength. Writes it in every birthday card, has for years. And there is truth in that. I drove over. I stayed the night. I was the one in the room. But even leaning on me she couldn’t stop. The tending doesn’t have an off switch. It doesn’t know how to wait.
What she gave me in that room wasn’t comfort exactly. It was proof. Proof that what she built in me was sturdy enough that we could stand in the same fear together. Not her holding me up. Not me holding her. Both of us upright, in a room we didn’t want to be in, built from the same love.
That is what tending produces, given enough time.
She still makes Easter baskets for both of us. I am 36. My sister is 34. There is no age at which she stops thinking about what would make us feel remembered. Her banana nut bread is so good my friends have opinions about it. I share a corner when I must. I want every crumb.
Then yesterday, at my sister’s, she did it again.
She had brought herbs with her. The basil came first, its smell filling the space before she even came through the door, proof of what her hands had been doing. She brought the rosemary too, and before they left she was in the driveway with my sister, showing her how much water it needed. Not handing it over and walking away. Teaching. Transferring the practice along with the plant.
Then she reached for her phone. “Let me show you something.” Picture after picture of the garden she’d already shown me in person, and she narrated each one like it was the first time, still lit up by it, still unable to keep it at home where it lived. She mentioned my father’s tomato plants, thriving in their own corner of the yard, and laughed. He bought them already formed. She did not hold it against him. She was too busy growing things from the ground to spend energy judging someone else’s shortcut.
She told us about one of her plants. The growth had become so expansive, her word, expansive, that she couldn’t keep it all. She gave some to a coworker. Sent some home with my sister, who gardens too. Passed along the peppers she grew like abundance was just a natural consequence of paying attention.
My sister gardens. I hadn’t thought about that until now. The tending passed down, translated into a different language, but the same root impulse. Watch something. Give it what it needs. Don’t ask it to be smaller.
I tend language. I build things out of sentences and years and the pieces of experience I didn’t know how to carry until I wrote them down. I have been gardening this whole time without the soil.
My mother taught me that without ever calling it a lesson.
People talk about Mother’s Day like it’s about gratitude. And it is. But this year, standing in that backyard and then watching her pull out her phone at my sister’s door, I felt something closer to awe. The thing that happens when someone you’ve known your whole life becomes, briefly, a revelation.
Not for who she was to me when I was small. For who she is right now. Still building. Still composting. Still growing things so abundant they overflow into other people’s lives before she’s even finished tending them.
There is a theology in that. The idea that a life isn’t measured by what it accumulates, but by what it gives away before it’s asked to.
She never kept what she grew. Not the peppers. Not the plant that outgrew its basin. Not the love she poured into two children who moved through the world differently, needed her differently, and were known, each of them, completely.
She gave it all away.
She gave it to my sister. To a coworker whose name I don’t know but who now has something living on their windowsill because my mother’s hands were too full of growth to stop it from spreading.
She gave it to me.
That is the gift. Not the moment she offered it. Not the year I finally understood how to receive it.
The gift is that she keeps giving. That the basin she built is always full. That she will wake up tomorrow and tend something, and the day after that, and every day after that, until the ground itself knows her name.
She didn’t keep what she grew.
She never did.
