The women in my family have gardens in their stomachs. My mother raised me to walk around building fences and putting up scarecrows, to cover my garden with tarp, so as to keep the wind and the kids in Sketchers from flattening the flowers. My mother also made sure I understood that most women (normal women) don’t have lavender and squash and peonies where their kidneys and pancreas should be, and it’s actually impossible for it to happen to men. This, she’d say, is where the paradox begins. Because some men that are the type of people that don’t have organs, that should have gardens instead. But since it’s physically impossible, they stay empty, stay hungry. And this emptiness, this hunger causes desperation, and this desperation makes these men think it’s okay to scale your fences and knock down your scare crows and tear your tarp like it's wrapping paper.
“So why put them there in the first place?”
“So you can feel when someone’s trying to get in. So you can prepare.”
“And then you just let them?”
“I’m still figuring that part out.”
My grandmother let her garden die. It’s ironic, since she loves flowers, but then again, she’s never been good at understanding that the person she sees in the mirror is, in fact, herself. Maybe she doesn’t see anyone for who they are. Maybe that is where my mother’s rage comes from, the rage that makes her cough up ash and burn everything she touches. But my mother’s anger is what keeps her alive; her garden thrives on slash-and-burn.
I don’t like anger. I don’t like how it tastes in my mouth, how it feels on my skin, how it sits with me, how it talks. But my mother’s rage flares up in me sometimes. When she was pregnant with me and my garden started to grow, flowers were already coming up smoking. But I hate seeing her eyes staring back at me in my reflection, so I pray rain on my garden until it floods. Now there’s more mud there than anything else, the kind that sucks at rain boots and splatters your clothes like paint. And I like it that way.
I don’t want this beautiful thing inside of me that no one else gets to have. I don’t want this beautiful thing inside of me that makes empty, hungry people want to hurt me so they can swallow it whole. I don’t want to think that there is this beautiful thing inside of me only to have someone tear me open and find it all wilted. I don’t want to have this beautiful thing inside of me that makes my mother see me as prey. I don’t want to have this beautiful thing inside of me that makes me feel obligated to let other people hurt me, because that’s just my cross to bear, that’s just the fate of the women in my family, that’s just the way it is. I don’t want someone to take this beautiful thing inside of me, I’d rather give it away. And I give it away whenever I can, because I don’t really believe it was mine in the first place.
I want to destroy this beautiful thing inside of me, but I think it is already destroyed. I want to believe I did it on purpose. I don’t want to have ruined this beautiful thing inside of me by accident. But in all honesty, I have no idea who I’d be without it, and I don’t think my mother does either. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t recognize me anymore. But I don’t want to only know who I am because of this beautiful thing that turns me into a forest fire or turns the people who love me to wild animals. I am not proud of this beautiful ulcer the same way my mother is. I don’t want to be untouchable because I am breakable like she does, made of fences and cages and glass like she is.
Maybe I don’t want this beautiful thing inside of me because I don’t believe I’ve earned it. Because I am not beautiful. Because no one even realizes I’m one of the special women who is made of gardens. Because really, I'm not. Even though I’m supposed to be. Maybe I used to be. Maybe I killed my garden, too. And it’s not fair to take credit for life I did not grow, for life I let burn out and never learned to rekindle. I am not as brave as my mother, who withdrew from the world to take care of hers. Who only let parts of herself be plundered, and never forgot to tend to those pieces that remained.
