I plug my daughter’s middle school address into Google Maps to see which way is the least congested, and then turn left to go the pretty way anyway. Vassar Drive is beautiful all the time, but especially now, when the leaves are changing and the light filters through the yellow.
Echinacea and dahlias still bloom, and the giant Halloween inflatables are starting to appear. We have one, too—a minion, which I bought in 2020, succumbing to my daughters’ pleas. Why the hell not, I thought. I can’t give them a normal life, but I can give them this inflatable minion. I haven’t taken it out yet. Maybe they won’t ask for it this year?
Getting close to the Earth
I put on my audiobook, Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman. I never thought I liked magic, or things that are “witchy,” but recently I’ve found myself drawn to books that venture more into fantasy or speculative fiction.
A couple of months ago, I joined a book group. The first book, The Change, by Kristin Miller, was about women who discovered they had supernatural powers as they aged. I devoured it and felt energized after the first meeting in a way I hadn’t in ages. A month later, I’m still thinking about our discussion of witches. “A witch was historically just someone who was close to the Earth,” one of the women said, when we discussed one character who grew an enormous, unruly garden full of herbs and medicine.
I thought of my garden, which I started from nothing last year. It began as a hodgepodge of grocery store perennials while my husband was undergoing chemotherapy for testicular cancer. As the medicine worked its magic on his cells, my garden worked its own sort of magic on mine. I took photographs of plants I liked as I walked through my neighbourhood, using Google Lens to identify them so I could seek them out at our local plant stand.
I marvelled at the blooms that appeared overnight, and observed the hummingbirds vying for nectar with the bees. I planted salvia and scabiosa, penstemon and peonies. I spoke the names of the plants like incantations. I rooted myself in the soil, alchemizing my pain into literal growth. And now, as I drive, I follow the fall blooms like breadcrumbs that are leading me on.
I come to the junction where there are no more pretty choices; just two crowded commercial roads. One’s full of stoplights and the other is down to one lane for construction. I sigh and opt for stoplights, and I stop and go for 15 minutes until I make the final turn towards school. The Owens sisters keep me company via audiobook, as generations of women work their own magic while solving problems large and small.
Mindfully choosing the best school
I wait in the pickup line at the private middle school where my older daughter is an eighth-grader, and I try to envision my younger daughter at the same school next year. She’s in the fifth grade, so a school change is imminent. However, she’s lobbying hard to go to our local public middle school.
We never thought we’d send the girls to private school, but when our older daughter had a mental health crisis in the sixth grade, a nearly lethal cocktail of late-diagnosed autism and depression with a side of anxiety, she stopped attending the charter school she’d been so thrilled about just weeks before. Even though my younger daughter seems mostly OK, I worry. Like my oldest, she is twice exceptional, meaning that she’s gifted and also neurodivergent.
My younger daughter isn’t autistic, but her ADHD is severe enough that it affects her both at home and at school, and the combination of anxiety and ADHD makes me worry about her at a large middle school. Fifth grade was when things started to unravel for my older daughter. Is that what’s in store for my younger daughter, too? Could we head it off by enrolling her in this small, progressive, independent school for a few years?
Magical gardening—and parenting
My life last summer was full of caregiving—both for my husband and also for our daughters. At the time, gardening felt like a break, like something I did for myself. But now, I can see the ways in which parenting and gardening are the same. With both, you can’t know in the moment whether what you’re doing is working.
You tend to your plants and your children the best you can. You give them food and water, you love them as best as you can. You adjust your spells as needed; a little less freedom here, a little pruning there. There’s also the layering of the tried-and-true with the new; I always want lavender and salvia, but each year, I try some different plants, too.
With parenting, I have some moves that will always work: Stopping for ice cream after unsettling medical appointments (which, for my kids, is all medical appointments) is evergreen. Other systems are constantly evolving. As both a mother and a gardener, you’re part of larger systems: generations, ecosystems.
I see my oldest exit the building, smiling when she spots my car. I remember when I used to brace for her to open the car door, and I was able to tell her mood from the way she carried her body. Was she slumped over, dragging her backpack? Or was she practically skipping, a sign that something good had happened?
This year, even though we’re not yet two months into the school year, she’s more even. I know the combination of nature (she’s growing up, she understands her brain better than she did two years ago) and nurture (we understand, too, and she’s in a supportive school) has led to this change.
Perhaps, though, there is more to it than that. Perhaps my recent attraction to the mystical is also an acknowledgment that there could be more going on, and that in moving towards that, I’m better able to care for my garden, my family, myself.
I know before she gets to me that my daughter will be OK; she’ll take out her earplugs and put on Heather Cox Richardson’s podcast, Letters from an American, which discusses current events in the context of history, and we’ll listen to the day’s atrocities together while we drive home. The irony of my own children’s OK-ness when so much of the world is anything but OK isn’t lost on me.
She takes off her Converse and puts her feet on the dash before greeting me: “Hey Mom, how was your day?” Magic.
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