“Ponds grow old, and though I will too, I like the ecological idea of aging
as progressive enrichment,
rather than progressive loss.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweetgrass
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass is the book I’m reading at the moment, during early mornings at my desk. It’s popular these days, displayed at local bookstores and discussed in conversations. The author, a professor of botany, lives in upstate New York; she is also a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
For me, it was slow-going at first. Kimmerer’s efforts to learn the language of her heritage, Potawatomi, were initially difficult to relate to. Her tribal tales of Skywoman and the importance of sweetgrass for making baskets were interesting historically but remote to my world. We connected, however, as she launched into the rich stories of her life, especially as the mother of two daughters.
I also have two daughters. With the chapter “A Mother’s Work,” I became a devoted reader of Braiding Sweetgrass. “I wanted to be a good mother,” is how Robin Kimmerer begins this part of the book. Me too, I thought.
Early in the book she focuses on her intense wish to make a wonderful and lasting home for her girls, following what had been an upsetting move to rural New York. Once there, she worked hard, even dredging a pond by hand to make it swimmable. The strength and resourcefulness she conveys were life-affirming, for her, her daughters, and now for me as a reader. It was in this context that she observed, “Transformation is not accomplished by tentative wading at the edge.”
Like Kimmerer, I valued strength and resourcefulness, along with the other qualities I brought to the dynamics of motherhood. And like her too, I insisted on taking risks, for myself and for my daughters. We all needed, I believed, the latitude to explore the promises inherent in being ourselves.
Looking back, I recall our daughters growing up near New York City; our settling into the first house we owned as a family, where we cared for a pond and flower gardens and took on raising vegetables; having a cat and several dogs; breeding litters of purebred puppies from our first West Highland White Terrier; moving to a neighboring town for a larger and more diverse school, where both girls also had jobs and an easy train ride to Manhattan. I remember our buying a log cabin in Maine, a place still the center of our lives as a widely dispersed family. I remember their departures for college — or first, for the younger, a gap year in South Korea, which took us all on a visit there when the year was finished. Having little girls, teenagers, college students, young marrieds and daughters who are now mothers themselves has been one of my greatest joys.
But with time’s passing — my children are in their 50s — a lot has changed. My early roles of birthing, nurturing, anticipating, managing, planning, teaching and being continually engaged with the job of mothering have ended. Intense commitment is no longer needed. Or wanted. Their lives are active, full, passionate, inside their work worlds and outside, as well as with their own families. They deal with their challenges with or without my help, and include me — and my husband — in their activities and celebrations when it’s possible, and in ordinary things too, when they can.
But one of my favorite chapters of Braiding Sweetgrass has given me a broader perspective. In telling the story of “The Three Sisters,” the author explains the importance to our Native American neighbors of corn, beans and squash. Throughout history, the Potawatomi have ritualistically planted a seed of each vegetable in the ground in the same, single square foot of earth, and left the three of them to grow as they always will, in support of one another. Ultimately, she says, “these plants feed the people, feed the land, and feed our imaginations, telling us how we might live.” All of the “Three Sisters” stories, according to Kimmerer, share an understanding that these plants are women, and they emphasize the notion of reciprocity.
As I reflect on the tale and on my connections with my daughters, I recognize the three of us, my daughters and me, within it. We are, and have always been, in an interdependent, reciprocal relationship. We share a long history. Beyond that, we also draw on all that we each do independently. And as I continue my life here in Vermont and they live their lives too, they are ever more clearly my teachers. From my daughter Libby, for instance, I learn about traveling the world; and from my daughter Susan, the opposite, about putting down roots in a beloved place and staying put. And so much more.
My daughters have expanded and deepened my world. Because of them, I am enriched beyond measure.
Mary Otto, formerly of Norwich, now lives in Shelburne. She can be reached at maryotto13@gmail.com.