Today

On signs, sensitivity, and the little girl I'm finally starting to understand.

I was out in the garden this morning when I noticed them.

Red maple saplings. Dozens of them were sprouting up everywhere. I’ve never had them in the gardens before. I said, ‘hi dad!’

My father loved red maples. We had one in the front of our house in New York. It started out as a 2 foot sapling and by the time I had reached my teenage years, it was the massive centerpiece of the yard, surrounded by a stonewall lining the driveway.

He used to harvest the saplings and try to plant new trees wherever he could. He’d give them away in 5 gallon pails to friends and neighbors. He gave me many over the years and for some reason, my husband and I were never able to transplant them with success on our own property. It always disappointed me.

I stood there for a moment and just let it land as I felt drunk with awe.

Then I thought about the wild violets spreading across the hill. The ones I wrote about recently. The ones nobody planted and nobody tended and that appeared this spring in more abundance than any year before.

That’s my Oma.

I’m not certain she loved wild violets, but something in my memory says she did, or maybe it just feels true in the way things do sometimes. Either way, standing there between the saplings and the violets, I felt something I can only describe as love and support. Like the people I’ve loved and lost were right there in the garden with me, showing up in the only language available to them now.

I see things like this. I always have.

Signs. Signals. The thing underneath the thing. It’s part of what makes me ‘weird’ to others. It’s what makes me feel misunderstood, but the more I learn that this is me in my relaxed and unburdened state, the more I embrace it and am grateful for it. It makes my entire life suddenly make sense.

Most people walk past a red maple sapling and see a weed to pull. I see my father trying to reach me.

That’s not something I learned. It’s something I came with.

Which brought me somewhere unexpected this morning.

Back to a little girl with an October birthday who got held back before first grade.

All of a sudden after seeing the red maples and the violets, the image came to me of myself at 5 years old, wearing her school uniform and pouting on the top step of the front entryway.

My first school experience was not kindergarten. It was called Primary. It is a transition year between kindergarten and first grade for children they felt weren’t “ready”.

I feel confident that I would have been ready academically.

But emotionally? Socially? As a child who felt everything so deeply that the world around her was overwhelming at times?

Maybe not.

Maybe the adults in the room could sense something about me that I wouldn’t have words for until decades later. That I was picking up too much. Carrying too much. Feeling everything in the room whether it belonged to me or not.

The experience taught that little girl this:

Not — you are sensitive and the world will make more sense to you once you learn how to hold what you feel.

What she took was — you are not as smart as the others.

And she carried that for a very long time.

I’ve spent most of my life feeling like I was slightly behind. Slightly less than. Like everyone else got a manual I never received.

I worked harder to compensate and always showed up more prepared. I stayed late and pushed myself to learn things to simply prove something to a belief that was never even true.

All of it tracing back to a year in primary school that a little girl with a sensitive soul translated as evidence of her own insufficiency.

That’s how beliefs work. They don’t form from truth. They form from experience, and then they go looking for proof. It’s found..every time.

What I know now, standing in that garden this morning between my father’s saplings and my Oma’s violets, is this:

The sensitivity was never the problem.
It was always the gift.

The little girl who felt too much grew up to be someone who can see what others can’t. Who can sit with a person and feel the pain, heartache, and the pattern underneath before they’ve finished their first sentences. Who can hold both sides of a family argument without either canceling the other out. Who notices red maple saplings and wild violets and feels the people she loves reaching back through them.

That’s not a consolation prize for being held back in kindergarten.

That’s the whole thing.

I’m not sure why the childhood memories are coming through more clearly lately. I’ve always struggled to access them and they’ve lived behind a kind of fog for most of my life.

But lately they’re arriving, clear as can be.

Maybe that’s what happens when you do enough work on yourself. The things that were buried start moving toward the surface because there’s finally enough space to hold them without being undone by them.

Or maybe it’s just spring.
Maybe things that have been underground all winter are simply ready to come up.

Like red maple saplings.
Like wild violets.
Like a little girl who was always ready....just not in the way anyone recognized at the time.

All love,

Sue

I came across this picture the same day I wrote this…like they belonged together. I clearly look unhappy here….and it all starts to make sense when the memories come back.