seedling
My mom sporadically wrote in a Mother's Journal over the years, jotting anecdotes and updates on her children. “Sometimes things break, and sometimes they doesn’t,” she recorded me telling my dad at three years old, trying to rationalize away my regret after accidentally dropping a glass jar of dirt we'd been using to grow a little plant. I had been sitting on the edge of the porch with the jar in between my hands in that all-palms, hyperextended-fingers precarious toddler grip, when it slipped and smashed on the pavement below.
Incapable of separating the bond I’d formed with my father through the project from the project itself, I felt fallen in his eyes. That the dirt could be scooped up, the seedling salvaged and replanted, was irrelevant. The only way things could be fixed was if they had never been broken in the first place.
This sense of downfall intensified as my sibling count grew. Displaced in the chaos, I wandered the lonesome landscape of my childhood. I created other worlds to live in; sometimes I created friends. I craved attention and feedback – especially one-on-one time with adults – because I sensed I was set apart, but I wasn’t verbally needy. If I deserved to be noticed, I would be. All I could do in the meantime was make myself into someone worth noticing.