Lying Fallow
I appreciate all your kind words and support about my mother. It is hard to write about, not just because it’s hard (which it is) but because my mother is perhaps the most intensely private person I have ever known. And I am not. So I need to talk about it. She would want me not to. I don’t know which line to walk.
For that reason, and for many others, right now is a fallow time for me. Unlike the summer green all around, my inner fields are dark and frozen. Words don’t come easily. No accidental poetry, no glimmers of new ideas. I don’t want to knit. I read, but don’t write. I plod, not dance. It’s hard.
I want to write that I believe that fallow times are necessary, that fields and sleeping seeds draw strength from the rest a long, cold winter grants them. That the rest is necessary to grow once spring comes. That the plants will grow better for not being forced before their time.
I want to believe this. And perhaps I do, somewhere under the cold crust of my winter-sleeping self. But right now, I just feel barren. I feel like spring will not come back.
But that is the lie of every winter. That somehow we need to beg the sun to return, that if we don’t beg hard enough, it won’t come back, that the winter will stay. But the sun returns, almost whether we will it or no. As my mother would say, has said a hundred times: This too shall pass.
All things pass, sun and rain, snow and warm, good and ill. All things pass.
I don’t know if things pass but they do fade with time. I’ve lost a child and my mom a year later. I will always miss them and keep them in my heart but the intense fallowness does fade and you feel new growth again. No time limit. It justs happens when it happens.
Hugs.
Stunts. I have few words these days too. I want to reach out to you and hug you and cry with you and scream with you and take both our pain right now and squeeze it into a bottle to throw into the ocean- but we both know that wouldn’t do good, because new pain will always find you. We just need to let these things happen in us, put us through our mental changes, and let it pass.
Your predicament of not knowing which line to walk in regard to private and not private personalities strikingly matches my own, and yet again I feel connected to you in the parallel soul sister way that keeps us seemingly inextricably linked- different storylines, but same roots or something…
When I read about the potential of you maybe visiting me my heart swelled so big it practically jumped from my chest. I would welcome you into my tiny apartment with the widest arms.
SM, this may be a fallow time, but this was a poignant post. As far as your mother goes, you should feel free to write here b/c there is anonymity. You don’t have to reveal your true identity to anyone, and in so doing, you protect your mother’s privacy. In the end, your mother would want you to be true to yourself.
I fully understand the utter despondency and depression after a move. You expend so much energy in showing your house, selling your house, purchasing a new house, tending to the children, tending to the spouse, and OMG, MOVING, that once you are in the new place, you are completely spent.
So, lie fallow. Pop in here when you can. Take care of yourself and let summer’s beauty and bounty wash over you. Enjoy the lazy days b/c school will be here soon enough. Springtime will come back to your life when you’re ready, just as the real season will creep in under winter’s beard.
You have today. Pack your bags. Go on your trip. Enjoy every minute of being there. You haven’t been there for a while. You don’t know when you’re going back. You’re going to be with dear old friends. Surrender yourself to the pleasure of these reunions.
You can only be there when you’re there. You will have your challenges in the year to come, and so the world is serving you this vacation to fortify you now for the year to come.
Your new house has more peace than your old house. Your new house will be a respite. Your old house had a hard-fought dissertation and other struggles under its roof. This house says, family. come home and rest, so much is already done.
Let the peace be on your side. Rest right now so you will be strongfor yourself and your family when you have to be.
Lying fallow, sometimes, is the ONLY option.
Be gentle with yourself.
I’m sorry. The fallowness holds nothing but potential, but sometimes, that is meaningless and empty in itself.
You have my dearest sympathy. I cannot imagine.
Take a breather. You deserve it. You need it. Find that second wind.
Strangely, it is my daughter who says that to me. All things pass, & nothing remains the same.
Take good care of yourself, first & foremost.
You do not know me but my daughter was telling me about your blog and how it might be comforting for me to read it. I could have written the first paragraph of Lying Fallow. I, too, have always needed to talk about things.
Everything in my mother’s life was a big secret. She passed away on May18th, just four days after her birthday and Mother’s Day. Even now I feel a rush of guilt for needing to talk about my memories of her. It’s as if she is standing behind me saying “don’t share that, it’s only our
business”. I have started, just barely, to write my memories down. There isn’t anything holding me back anymore, even my guilt can’t shut me up.
You have a beautiful way of expressing yourself with your writing. My daughter was right. It’s been a real comfort to read your blog.
I stumbled upon your blog unexpectedly and was awestruck by this post. I lost my own mother about four years ago through breast cancer that metastesized to her brain — and so I lost *her* before she lost her life.
It is so hard. The disconnect between being a good daughter and stepping in to parent her (when she was an independent soul, when she had always had the final say, when she was the one we all turned to in the end) just tore me apart.
I’ve been fallow much of that time. Work still got done, but it was work done in patches of grey, seen through fog. I’m starting to smile for no reason again, though, and our new home is a good, happy place.
I’m defrosting like an old refrigerator. *grin
Even if it takes a while, it will come. Watch yourself for the signs of clinical depression, though, as that can stymie your progress.