The Exposure of Roots
It has been over a year since I posted my first blog. I waxed poetic about stability, and my quest to find it. I thought this past May I finally had. I finished the certification program that consumed my every spare minute (for those of you who don't know, or can't remember, you truly have ONE spare minute a day with a Three-year old in your charge), I had been offered two fabulous positions at two very different schools, and my husband and I were finally working on the same goal: trying to be a family. Sounds stable to me. That is the problem with relying on auditory senses to measure safety, it is not reliable (or valid for those of you studying educational research, or any other research out there). Given identical circumstances, relying on one's auditory senses will not always ensure the appropriate level of safety.
I chose the position in Massachusetts. My husband, daughter and I scoured the surrounding towns for the perfect place for us to reestablish the family that had been ripped apart at the seams. We found just that place. A home for the three of us. A place to transplant the barely surviving roots of our family sapling. The instability came in the ever-so-careful transplanting of these roots. I am beginning to feel that perhaps they did not survive the move, or perhaps it was the tropical storm 2 years ago that ripped them up in the first place. As my sister in law so appropriately explained to me, a relationship needs to be protected from the bull-shit of everyday life. She used the metaphor of a bicycle wheel, with the relationship being the center, and everyday life being the spokes. I think my tree metaphor works just as well. Mine and my husband's relationship is like the roots of a tree. It gives our family its nourishment, its vitality, and its stability. If they are planted deeply in the correct soil, and cared for appropriately, with the right amount of sunlight, nutrients, and water, the tree will grow and flourish. They need to be protected from the harmful effects of acid rain, as a relationship needs to be protected from reckless abandon (and I do not use the word abandon lightly).
I do not think that up to this point, I have been a good protector of these roots. I can't say that my husband has either. We have replanted our family tree in a small town in Massachusetts. We have carefully chosen the soil, and have watered it faithfully, but not so much as to flood away the nutrients it so desperately needs. We are an organic family, so we have refused the use of pesticides or inorganic fertilizer, but my fear is that our tending may have been too late. I fear that the roots have been exposed to the elements far too long, and have been weakened to the point that they are beyond salvation. And if this is the case, what is a girl to do when the one thing she wants more than anything else in the world is stability, and her roots are exposed?
