Pushed to Bloom

Many people, when asked about the moments that had the greatest singular impact on their lives, will talk about the most difficult situations.

Those situations required us to unearth strength and stamina we hadn’t tapped before.

They are the junctures that swept away our settled plans, threw us off course, and compelled us to begin anew.

In the midst of these trials, the bigger picture often eludes us. Only with time and retrospection can we look back and connect the dots, valuing the journey we were sometimes reluctantly set upon.

I can think of so many moments in my own life when I’d settled into comfort, and then the Universe, or God, or Fate showed up and shook my life like a snow globe.

An unexpected divorce at 29, followed by a layoff.

An unplanned pregnancy at 33.

A breakup from the man I thought I’d grow old with at 40.

Each of these life junctures threw me off the course I’d been following, and I had to start again. To live life in a way I hadn’t anticipated or planned for.

This reminds me, strangely and beautifully, of a flower blooming.

A flower requires fertilizer in order to reach its full potential.

And so do we.

We need the shit.

So often, without the shit, we wouldn’t push through or past our comfort zones in order to see our full potential and beauty.

We’d be totally fine and comfortable remaining the dormant seed.

Only we were meant for more than that.

We were meant to bloom.

But first, the shit.

The shitty divorce took the prescribed life I’d been following and forced me to find myself in ways I’d never expected. It was only through my divorce that I began to see just how much of my life had been built not out of passion or desire, but out of what I thought I was supposed to do.

Divorce was the shit that put me in touch with myself.

Coupled with a layoff, it pushed me to explore life in an entirely new way. The life I’d planned wasn’t there anymore. So I had to start asking myself what I actually wanted.

Then, at 33, a friend encouraged me to “live life.” To stop moving from relationship to relationship and just live.

By then, I was beginning to think maybe a family wasn’t in the cards for me.

And then my life was blown up again.

An unexpected pregnancy.

One I knew from the onset I’d be navigating alone.

That wasn’t the way I’d imagined becoming a mother. It wasn’t the picture of family I’d been taught to want.

But later I learned that family doesn’t have to look like the nuclear family.

Family is what you make it.

It’s who you surround yourself with.

It’s the people who show up and stay.

That lesson was reinforced again when I went through an unexpected breakup with the man I thought I’d grow old with. I wasn’t only grieving him. I was grieving the family I thought I’d finally created for my daughter and me.

Nope.

Just more shit.

And when you’re standing in the middle of it, it doesn’t feel like fertilizer.

It just feels like shit.

You don’t know yet what will grow from it.

You don’t know that the thing breaking apart might be making room for something else.

You don’t know that someday you’ll look backward and see that the life you thought was falling apart was also becoming something.

It is only now that I can see each of these moments as the fertilizer I needed to bloom.

To become the woman I am becoming now.

I wouldn’t have explored who I was without the divorce.

I wouldn’t have expanded my life to include motherhood without an unexpected pregnancy.

I wouldn’t have uprooted my life, questioned what family meant, or learned how much I was capable of rebuilding without those unexpected, shitty moments.

None of them felt like gifts when they arrived.

I wouldn’t have called them fertilizer.

I certainly wouldn’t have asked for them.

But that’s the funny thing about fertilizer.

It’s shit until something grows from it.

And maybe that’s why we can’t always recognize the moments that are changing our lives while we’re living them.

Sometimes we’re still underground.

Still pushing through the dirt.

Still wondering why everything is so dark and heavy.

We can’t see the bloom yet.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t coming.

Sometimes the shit is exactly what feeds it.

Always,
Your Trusted Friend ❤︎