A friend of mine with a pair of young children is getting divorced and has to sell her house. A dream house she and her soon-to be-ex built from the ground up. I wrote to her, expressing my condolences. “Honestly,” she wrote back, “I’m grieving so much more than the house.”
I know. Boy, do I know. She is hip deep in the weeds of grief right now, trying to read a map that suddenly doesn’t correspond to the landscape. Go slowly, I wrote back. There is life on the other side of all of it, I said, which is something everyone told me.
I think, though, that while I was hip-deep in the weeds of sorrow myself, I misunderstood what they meant. I thought they were saying that the grief would pass, that I wouldn’t always feel like my shoes were on the wrong feet, and my chest was encased in concrete, and that I would one day stop weeping in the shower. And I did. That part was true.
Before that, though, I made some unfortunate choices while being mired in sadness. Eventually, after many years, I righted the map, peeled off the toxic creeping vines that were curling up toward my throat, and took some faltering steps into the light. I made a little clearing for myself, and then I made it bigger, and bigger again. I stepped into a space where things like forgiveness could grow. And optimism. And gratitude.
I want so much for my friend not to have to go through any of it. I wish the garden of her life never had weeds at all, and that she could stay basking in it, happy, growing lavender, and flowers, and the fattest tomatoes known to man.
But gardens can turn into prisons. Without weeds, gardens are too perfect, too easy. I suspect Eve already felt that truth deep in her bones before she bit the apple. The garden was paradise. It was pain-free, but it was also stifling. I think Eve biting the apple was more a case of a woman making a break for the border than it was any kind of wicked corruption. This makes me heretical, I suppose, but the fact that this story is presented as the original sin tells me everything I need to know about being a woman being free and what it’s going to cost you.
What if the story of the Garden of Eden isn’t a warning tale at all, but actually the map you need when you’re a woman hip-deep in the end of your marriage?
Bite the apple, I want to tell my friend, and free your head, but know it comes with pain, and guilt, and grief. But also know the story doesn’t end there. That’s the lie I fell prey to. That the apple was poisoned. That I was rotten. That I’d ruined everything for the selfish yet simple reason of wanting to possess my own goddamned soul and make a garden for myself in my own image, weeds and all.
To stake a claim for your own soul, first you have to break ground. You have to dig up the earth of your old self and your old life, and oh my god, it sucks. It is both heartbreaking and back-breaking. For a while, the landscape will be thorny, and buggy, and muddy as fuck. You will be questioned, and blamed, and shamed. Keep going.
Don’t be afraid of the grief. Life on the other side of eating the apple will include its presence. Don’t be terrified of it like I was. Know that you will carry it with you always, even after you quit weeping in the shower, but eventually this will make you more human than you’ve ever been and it will be a kind of superpower, the poison that’s actually a cure. Let the grief become part of your ecosystem. Let it go down into the soil and change the PH balance of your life.
Life will bloom again. You will grow different kinds of flowers than you did before. I promise. They will be beautiful, and, this time, they will be all yours.