It's You and Me, Plant

Jordan Miller for openphoto.net

She was pregnant and I wasn’t.  My husband and I had been trying to conceive for a year and a half, and here was my childhood friend, announcing over the phone that she was nearly halfway through her first pregnancy after only a few months of trying. 

Did I feel happy for her?  Of course.  But my enthusiasm was tainted by my own pain and self-pity.  Did I want to have those feelings?  Of course not.  But I was finding it just wasn’t that simple to separate her situation from my own.  It was a recurring internal battle to convince myself that it wasn’t an issue of fairness—of “I was trying first” or “I’m older” or “I’ve been married longer.”  It didn’t help that I found out about another loved one’s pregnancy just a week later.  Both women were due to have their first children in September. 

Just a month after I was supposed to have mine. 

Ryan and I had found out I was pregnant in December—a little over a year after we’d set our hearts on starting a family.  I was nine and a half weeks along when I went in for my first appointment and was informed that the fetus was growing in my right fallopian tube instead of my uterus.  I was experiencing an ectopic pregnancy, for which no medical procedure existed that could save the baby.  I was told I would need to undergo emergency surgery the next morning to keep the developing fetus from rupturing the tube, which could have caused me life-threatening internal bleeding.  

During the week I had off from work after the surgery, I did a lot of thinking and praying about the baby.  I was happy to know that it was in Heaven, where Jesus and loved ones could hold it and tease it about its weird parents until we got the chance to meet each other.   I also felt optimistic that I would be able to conceive again, but uncertain as to how long it would take, and still sad that it couldn’t be this baby. And in spite of my optimism, I also felt resistant to starting all over again, to the fact that those pregnancy tests would soon start showing only one line instead of the two I’d waited so long to see.  Perhaps most pressingly, I feared being left behind.

As I sat on the edge of my bed, wondering how long it would take to get pregnant again, I looked up at my little potted Croton plant in the windowsill, and I felt an unexpected sense of comfort.  Though it took a bit of thinking to pinpoint the reason for my emotional response, I eventually figured it out:  That little plant, as long as it continued to receive the water and sunlight it needed, would most likely still be occupying that same spot in the corner of our bedroom windowsill, growing slowly but steadily, after all was said and done and I had given birth to the baby I so desperately longed for.

The plant was like a reference point for the unpredictable journey I anticipated with dread, and not just that, but an inspiration as well.  It seemed so patient.  I was more like the plant a former high school classmate of mine had written about in English class.  Her clever, symbolic poem had told the story of a restless daisy who dreamed of the day she would be taken from her constricting pot and transplanted into the beautiful garden outside. 

My little plant was of a different sort.  In spite of her boring life on the windowsill, she grew on in silence and grace, never lamenting her luckless lot in life. 

I could learn a lot from plants like mine.  The way Jesus always went around, saying things like “consider the lilies,” “learn this parable from the fig tree,” and “the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed,” I should have figured that out already.  And what about the example of The Giving Tree?  That tree was a saint—so patient and generous, and so completely content to be little more than a landmark in her beloved boy’s busy life, though his moved on with little acknowledgment of her. 

I couldn’t exactly carve something like “Me and P” with a heart around it into my plant, like the boy, but it did give me a great deal of comfort to look over at it and think, Here we are.  It’s just you and me, plant.  It helped to have a symbol for my suffering.

 

“Suffering”—that was the word my expectant friend used to describe my unenviable circumstances after my congratulations quickly dissolved into lamentations during our phone conversation.  She told me about a friend of hers who had recently defined suffering as simply being in a situation beyond one’s control.  Hearing his interpretation stirred a sense of hopefulness inside of me, because at that point in life, I’d been through enough of such backed-against-the-wall situations to have recognized that they shared a pattern—that in each agonizing circumstance, some rare and inestimable personal quality was sure to follow the suffering.  I came to see that, like the rings inside of a tree, those bitter seasons of discomfort were going to provide me with the layers I needed to make each subsequent season all the more sweet.   

And it was that same, grating feeling of bittersweet that let me know that someday, when I looked over at that plant in the corner of my windowsill, baby or no baby in my arms, I’d be able to see that I had grown, too.