{"id":3687,"date":"2010-05-13T12:10:14","date_gmt":"2010-05-13T18:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/?p=3687"},"modified":"2010-09-11T20:11:58","modified_gmt":"2010-09-12T02:11:58","slug":"the-handoff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/the-family\/the-handoff\/","title":{"rendered":"The handoff"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"stained\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I woke up Sunday to a voice mail from my dad, asking if I could maybe shave off some time and get to Saltillo a little earlier than I had planned. “Your mom’s having a bad time,” he said. “She needs her spirits lifted.”<\/p>\n

Lately the quality of my mother’s days varies wildly, usually depending on how well she’s been able to police herself and not, as we say, “overdo it” during the previous few days. Overdoing it for my mother is staying up all night, maybe not going to bed at all. Overdoing it for my mother is spending all day and into the night in her beloved flowerbeds, trying to plant and shape and craft and prune and weed and move and split and perfect. Overdoing it for my mother is letting her mind go to the dark place it likes to visit every now and again.<\/p>\n

The good days are wonderful but the bad days? I’ll be honest. I’m not around much for the bad days. It’s a blessing and a curse to live these two hours from her. I don’t get to see her, monitor how she’s doing, listen to her when she just needs to rattle, make her laugh, do the heavy lifting. And I don’t get to see her when she is in so much pain that she cannot leave the bed. For two days.<\/p>\n

I hear about it sometimes, often in my dad’s tone of voice on the phone or in his eyes when I do get to come home. He’s grown weary of certain patterns of behavior and the domino effect they have. I don’t know how to tell him that I’m sorry it’s not easy, but that he has always told me that life isn’t easy. That seems like a callous thing to say, or even think. But I don’t know how to make it better for him. When I’m there he seems so short with her. She seems to take it in good stride, and even joked about it with him. I know his attitude comes from a place of fear for her well-being. And I have never really been able to read tension between my parents accurately. When I was a kid, I would absolutely fall apart every time they argued. I am decidedly un-kid now, and when there is tension between my parents, I feel physically ill.<\/p>\n

Mom showed me her hands Sunday evening. Swollen and dirt-stained, they carried nicks and calluses from her ungloved battles with plants. “I have an obsession,” she told me, referring to her habit of weeding at all hours. If she is standing outside long enough, she will go to pulling. Even if she’s not in her own yard. I told her she had to take it easy. I know she feels rushed by the natural current of spring and how a gardener knows certain things have to be done at certain times and with certain amounts of repetition, but she has got to learn her limits and then stop short of them. Every time.<\/p>\n

She led me through the yard, asking me if I had any of this, any of that, and uprooting what she thought I might like to take with me. We went to the basement, where she had attempted to winter over lots of her finest greenery, and she admitted to me, “I don’t think I’m going to be able to do this next year.” I saw why. Once we stepped outside, the garage was flanked by enormous pots of elephant ears and plants taller than any living human carrying Turner blood. The woman needs a greenhouse of her own (my grandmother’s is full and quite old). My dad, ever the loving husband who wants to give his bride whatever she needs, has been plotting and scheming to get one built despite the overall gloomy financial outlook for a one-income household.<\/p>\n

As I watched my mom look over the orchestra of plants she had been nursing for years and years, choosing which ones to pass on to me, I realized that she is passing a torch to me. Not using her lit candle to light my candle, but handing me the whole candle and saying, “Here. You keep this lit. My hands won’t even make a fist anymore.” And I can’t tell you what an emotional gutcheck that is to me. Holding court over her flowers has brought her such joy in her life. She has filled every nook and cranny of the homestead with shape and color. Trees she planted when I was a kid are now taller than the house. She has named<\/i> some of these plants, and addresses them by name, as they are somewhat fickle like humans. And here she is, confronting the reality that the upkeep is just too much for her. My heart hurts for her.<\/p>\n

But now I understand why she just falls all over herself to help me get my yard in order, why she wants to populate it with the same plants she and my dad and my grandmother have been looking after for as long as they can remember. These little pieces of all that hard work need to live on. And I’m proud to give them life for as long as I’m able.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I watched my mom look over the orchestra of plants she had been nursing for years and years, choosing which ones to pass on to me, I realized that she is passing a torch to me. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1056,85],"tags":[500,1529,908,2266,451],"class_list":["post-3687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gardening","category-the-family","tag-family","tag-featured","tag-flowers","tag-gardening","tag-mom"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1jWWl-Xt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3687"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4212,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3687\/revisions\/4212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}