Compassion, in roses, in life
When I was at university I would sometimes, especially in the early years, catch the train out of the city and go stay with my Nana. It felt like going home. I often needed that feeling at that time in my life.
Always, always, Nana would send me off with a bunch of flowers from her garden, wrapped in wet paper towels, a plastic bag and fastened with a rubber band.
If it was rose season the bunch would always include a bloom or two of Compassion. It grew on a trellis and was the biggest, grandest, most floriferous rose in the garden. Everyone in the family called it Nana’s rose.
After she died, the year before I was married, I would continue to visit my aunt who had lived with Nana. And she continued to send me off with a bunch of flowers, and my favourite, the crisp apple-scented Compassion.
When the house was eventually sold, my aunt called to ask if I wanted to transplant a rose from the garden before she left. The large trellis and rose were long gone, having been taken out a few years earlier. But not before a seedling of Compassion had somehow sprung up in another part of the garden, tucked between a lemon tree and another bush rose.
I stood in the garden and looked at it, wondering how to get it out. It was actually quite large. The garden beds had been covered in weed meeting and a good 10cm of stones as mulch. I worked away at it to make a space and started to dig around. It was hard work and after 15 minutes of digging and levering and hefting, I still wasn’t making much headway.
“Okay Nana,” I thought. “If you want me to have this rose, you’re gonna have to help me out here.” I sunk the spade in one more time and pressed down heavily on the handle. The rose flew up out of the hole bringing a web of long roots with it, still perfectly intact. My aunt and I looked at each other and laughed and laughed. It wasn’t the first time or last time that Nana showed up for us both in strange and entertaining ways.
The rose has been in my garden for nine years. That first year I delighted in picking stems and bringing them inside. My heart tightened every time I smelled them, they reminded me of Nana so much.
But there was a long few years where I didn’t pick any at all. I had a garden full of roses and perennials that I could pick a posie from nearly all year round, but I never did. The reason I didn’t was because after a few days, the flowers would start to die and petals would fall. The flowers would decay in the vase, and the water would start to smell.
By this time I had three children, one requiring a lot of emotional bandwidth, and then two littlies born in quick succession.
I didn’t realise until after I began to recover, but I had post-natal depression for over 3 years. I was hanging on by my fingernails, and sometimes even they broke. I had no energy left for anything. The thought of cleaning up a bunch of dying flowers was—strange as it may seem—too much.
It was particularly delightful to pick this bunch of roses today, to bury my nose in them and fill myself up with the scent of apple and memories of my Nana. I’m celebrating having found my way back to myself, having a new experience of mothering, and understanding that the relationships with our children can be healed and renewed at any time.
The experience of post-natal depression has made life now with my children more poignant, more alive, more layered. It has complicated our relationships, and humbled me. I’ve learned to notice and savour the moments that show me love is present, that our relationship is a love-filled one despite the hard period we went through together. It has deepened my capacity for forgiveness, for love, and for compassion.
Mary xx