There’s a canvas hanging on the wall of my living room with a poem painted on it: a gift made for me by a dear friend. It’s simple— black words on a grey
background— except for one phrase.
Plant sequoias.
Those two words are drawn slightly larger in deep, heart-red
paint. If I had to squeeze my twenty-some years of perspective into one dream,
one goal for my future, that would be it. To plant sequoias. There’s an elusive
beauty to it, isn’t there? Anyone who’s stood marveling at any old tree, let alone a sequoia, has probably felt that quiet awe stir
her soul at this thing whose beginning and ending stretch long beyond her own.
The thing is, it’s a little vague on its own, especially to
the more prosaic reader. Is this a dictate to go around plopping trees into the
ground? I guess it could be—in many of his other works, the poet’s words do sketch
his love for the natural world. But this short phrase, slipped as it is into
the middle of his manifesto, takes on a less literal directive. Every time I
read this poem, and that phrase in particular, my soul thrills to the
commission to invest in the millennium;
to live beyond the scope of my own life.
But while I’ve always loved it, there is a part of me that
shrinks back from the challenge. Am I doing this thing, this beautiful,
life-giving thing? Or am I failing completely? And if I’m not planting
sequoias, what am I doing instead?
Skip ahead a bit: a few lines in the poem and a few years in
my life. It’s May of 2017—the “lost month” as Eric and I sometimes refer
to it now. I’m as bleary-eyed as only a newborn momma can be, sitting on the couch with a baby who’s finally
(hopefully?!) figured out how to eat. Eric is slumped beside me, the pump next
to him and a bottle ready in his hand in case Caleb forgets how to nurse yet
again. I’m fixated on that tiny, soft cheek, willing my baby to keep going, and
this time we’re lucky and he does. I pass him off to Eric, relieved, but inside
I’m already dreading repeating the struggle when he wakes up hungry in a few
hours.
My eyes wander to the poem on the wall above me. A few
lines below the bold red dare to plant
sequoias are the questions that have puzzled me since I first read the
poem.
Ask yourself: Will this
satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
They’ve always seemed a little out of place, given the rest
of the poem, and my new experience doesn’t shed much light on them at all. The answer to those airy, soul-filling words seems farther away than
ever before, and I hate that. Over the months that follow, I try to ignore
them, and it isn’t that hard: the pragmatic regimen of catching a few minutes
of sleep between Caleb’s difficult feedings rule those early weeks, and now,
almost five months in, my days are full of the thousand little things that
stretch a stay-at-home momma’s day so long.
But they’re right there, every day, and I’m not always
successful at avoiding the thoughts they bring to mind. I should be satisfied. More than that, I should be
the happiest girl in the world, because each day I get to wake up to my happy,
healthy son. And some days I am. But if I’m completely honest with
myself, sometimes I’m not. Even though Eric and I decided after much prayer and
conversation that this was the right decision for our family, I still chafe a
little when I see the acronym “SAHM”. I’m still trying to decide how to phrase it
when people ask me what I do. And as much as I love that small, spunky boy of
mine, he has complicated my life in about a million unexpected ways in addition to those changes I was
expecting. So what, exactly, are those few lines from the poem getting at? What
would satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child?
The answer dawns on me one morning late in August. Eric has
already left for work, and the air coming in my cracked-open window is cool
enough to make me burrow down a little deeper under my quilt, a sign that
summer is winding down. I lie there, listening to Caleb’s waking-up grunts, my
mind wandering through the space between sleep and the day to come, and that’s
where I find the answer.
That out-of-place part of the Manifesto—what if it is about this new pattern my days have
fallen into, where everything circles around my tiny, gummy-grinned boy? He is
frustrating and delightful and adorable and exhausting and somehow, crazily, he is enough. He is the most
commonplace thing, and yet at the same time he is the most extraordinary thing
I’ve ever experienced. For the past four months, my world has both shrunk and
been enlarged by this new life, and I’m struggling to put the miracle of that
into words. I see flashes of the person he will become and shake my head in awe
of the fact that he was no more than a whispered thought just over a year ago.
I watch the dimples in his knees grow more pronounced week by week and try to
wrap my head around the thought that my body grew him and birthed him and is still nourishing and sustaining him.
If there is any other thing in the world like this, I don’t
know it.
And that’s what I think the poet is getting at. If we could
all learn the habit of this quiet, simple joy, the discontent that clamors so
loudly for our attention would be silenced. If we could fill our hard,
calloused hearts up with the patient and completely selfless mother-child love
I’m slowly learning, the stories of hate would cease to fill the news each day.
If our leaders could be content with the pain of bringing one life into the
world, they wouldn’t try to play god with the lives of millions.
If the rest of the world could still itself enough to hear
the little baby squeals Caleb is making right now as he’s waking up to a new
day, there would be a lot less ugly and a lot more beautiful.
It’s idealistic, certainly, but no less true because of
that. This is enough. There is loss,
too, and I feel it already: everything about our life as a family of two is gone
forever, and that's just the beginning. But the loss pales in comparison to this new thing Eric and I are creating
together as we raise our child. And—I could be wrong— but I think this shift in my
life’s focus from me to Caleb is some version of planting sequoias. I think that a life spent
caring for my wide-eyed child is investing in a world beyond my own small
millennium.
I think I'm planting sequoias.
