Growing Pains

There’s a black bathtub with gold accents, knobs and faucets and drains, settled in a brownstone with mismatched entryways cushioned between other worn faces, the block dotted with ants marching lines into Manhattan, the florist across the street sells daffodils so early and the bakery always has vanilla cupcakes. I was born here, a tub too wide and too shallow the water didn’t quite stretch to encompass my mother and her agony, bellowing contractions above, pain buried under water as it fills the head below me born in silence, born to a world alone. Gulping oxygen for the first time ten minutes after I didn’t yet know of those already cradling their versions of who I could become, couldn’t feel the pressure I’d soon carry wherever. I go back sometimes, a crisp Monday in January the light running in gently it was still early and I’m never going to see reality for this moment but I can exist here as observer. When I think about the home I was born in, checkered tiles stenciling out the kitchen floor, the cupboards and shelves littered with a cherry red, I think about the time where all I knew was water. Draining the kiddie pool after, curling a little thing with hair dark as midnight under the covers, settling into the bones of a family of six, beginning to blink. I wished to hold this security forever.

Change hits like a train some days, is drenched in cloaks under dark alleys upon others when it was decided we would scramble across the continent the brunt smacked me in the face yet my bruises could heal openly. As we began the trek back to the Atlantic two years later the sentence carried stealth in its pockets and the thunder struck louder than my words I wouldn’t dare make the storm worse for a family already up to their knees. It is hard to talk about the things we don’t want to. It’s tension sinking beneath your gums and sticking to your tongue you can taste it. We didn’t know how to wash it down with something sweeter in my family, we ignored the plate sitting in front of us altogether. And when the birds began singing again and the air thick just after rain, everything was still damp and it was just me and my mom and we pretended all the time, seeing the plate as washed, putting it away so as not to stare as the pile might collect in the sink. Still holding my breath underwater I let things happen to me, I was content under weight of noise. A life bathed in background music not exactly swimming I took to currents, no voice as it separates from others. I planted pits at the base of my stomach, I emblematized my worth, I worried about how little numbers might define the finer things like a purpose.

Speaking takes more time than you think, strength found in fields of corn. The idea of home hasn’t always been a constant when I’m swimming through nostalgia but as I walked through beds the summer before senior year the silence blew haphazardly with the wind and the space was comfortable enough to think. To soak. Understanding how we each define family or home, the place for our head to rest or the people we know will be there in the morning, mine felt like ruins for a long time. Some days it still does. Memory took me toward something pure, traveling back I could romanticize the lines to make them beautiful, a childhood heavy with planning and love my mom packed our backpacks for vacation two nights before. Mornings in Italy watching cartoons in a language we didn’t understand and eating cereal we couldn’t hold spoons the right way, and nostalgia sinks teeth into fruit we didn’t realize was so ripe. And time doesn’t exist along a linear wave I’m not content with groupings set to the ticking of the meter, of the clock, to a timeline when I dive into memory I’m not swimming laps down lanes, not counting the times my hands touch the edge it’s movement carrying no boundaries or parameters think about diving down to the bottom of the swimming pool, letting yourself float up on these feelings.

But the rose pokes thorns at the stem it’s the things I’m trying to forget that hurt the most too. I haven’t pinned what I yearn, haven’t been able to sleep like I used to but I’ll exist in these moments until my fingers prune and be confused still on who to trust and who to let sleep by my side, cradling an idea of security, draining bathtubs and stretching the covers over. There were emotions off limits growing up because of the spill they’d make when knocked on their side there weren’t enough paper towels to soak up desperation, anger, desire, irrationality these are known to each of us past name we feel memory connected yet I’d paint inside the lines and sit where I was supposed to and smile on picture day. I’m battling how a past might assign worth but I’m trying to remind myself we carry scars along our bodies and weight in our backpacks and still tie our shoes in the morning, double knot.

When I found farming I paid more attention. The land showed me how to hold on and to let go, taught me patience when carrot tops begin to journey up, letting roots grow underground, believing in time it allowed me to sit comfortably with the dirty, the messy, the unhinged, acceptance of the ordinary. The cows are always there, the mountains are always there, the fields, the trees, the wind and the bees. These are things that will remain, but these will also pick you up on your lowest of days, there to support, and I’ll appreciate the comfort they give simply by presence. Stability. I’ve learned to connect with those who share love in the same shapes as me, those who move quickly weeding beds, for the ones who kill plants down the row, who don’t mind tans lines showing off the outline of their uniform, who crave this enveloping silence, not aching to speak but seeping into present. Birds and turkeys and wiggle hoes. Farming breeds home, a concept not attached to place or person but feeling. Freedom out by yourself in fields with miles til the end of the bed, stealing sugar snaps off the vine in the process, belonging to community where you work with love, content with early mornings and dirt under your nails, endless sweat in summer and the chills moving in with the earlier sunsets, a place where life runs uphill. This is where I could exhale.

There was a quote that resonated saying something along the lines of any great gain to one must then be at the cost of another, and I’m still reflecting on my participation in this cycle. But I’m questioning if this zero-sum relationship falls along the binary, all just winning or losing, alternatives worlds away we’re meant to believe that while what we have isn’t perfect, it’s the best we can ask for, it is the way that it is. Indigenous and black leaders have been yelling since the beginning but radio static just coated voices in white noise why don’t they teach us truth in school? I wonder if we may ever go further than a cycle of recognition for the negative that permeates within our systems, structures, selves followed by rest at the closing of the day, considering our work done, patting our ego on the back and saying good work.

It’s easy to want change, to plan, to think about, harder to enact. Leaning into the riptide and out, falling with waves it’s not consistent, not exactly pretty and mostly just confusing but they’re planting seeds on street corners now I believe little things add up to big things there is a future where you can exist outside zero or one there is energy brewing, patterns distinct to a season it’ll fall with the leaves, bud with the tulips. Thinking about this line on two levels, recognizing a scale perpetuated by capitalism it’s great to rise up the ladder because of your hard work but shitty that our biases twist into the equation and take over the on the microphone I don’t believe in this system yet I benefit from it entirely, saying I want it removed starts at my roots, in my home. Farming is not a just system we begin by attacking inequalities at the sites of our passions, tuning into voices that teach A Growing Culture has been a vital place to start for me. I’m also thinking about the pace of change and I don’t think this one could ever hit all at once. It takes time to grow, but once we begin, we water and we prune until we reap what we sow.

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Thumbnail Image Credit: Tyler Spangler