The Tree That You Come Home To
By Joy Nicholas
@joynicholaswrites
“Did you know that when you sneeze, tiny drops of saliva fly out of your mouth and travel at speeds of 100 miles per hour?” My son Wyatt asks me this as we drive to pick up my daughter Lilly from track practice.
I nod and reply, “That’s why I want you to cover your mouth when you sneeze.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.”
I could just leave it there but decide to throw in a little knowledge flex of my own. “Did you know that if you sneezed with your eyes open, the force of it would make your eyeballs pop out?” All the air in the car gets sucked into a collective gasp. I glance first at the passenger seat and then the rear view mirror. Wyatt and my youngest daughter, Annalee, sit wide-eyed with mouths agape. I backpedal quickly. “Don’t worry, it’s physically impossible to keep them open.”
Annalee closes her mouth and swallows hard. “Are you sure?” she asks.
I know what she is thinking because it is exactly what I thought the first time I learned this trivia tidbit. I used to squeeze my eyes extra tight whenever my nose gave that telltale itch lest I forget and have my eyeballs rolling on the floor like a couple of stray marbles. Eventually, and to my great relief, I realized that my eyelids automatically closed whether I thought about it or not.
“Yes, I’m sure,” I tell her. “It’s how God designed you to get bad things out of your nose while keeping your eyeballs in your head.” She relaxes, but then a shadow of fear darts across her face again. “So … no one has ever been able to keep their eyes open while they sneeze … right?”
I shake my head. “It’s like how you can’t lick your own elbow. It’s just not possible.” There's silence again from the back seat, but this time, a glance in the rearview catches Annalee with her elbow lifted toward her face, pink tongue extended, but an unbridgeable gap between the two. Laughing, I tell her, “See? You really, truly can’t.”
Wyatt and Annalee are in a phase of constantly asking what is and isn’t humanly possible. Now a sixth grader, Wyatt’s questions are more complex: “What would it take for someone to survive on Mars? Or at the deepest point of the ocean?” Annalee’s pop up as we drive around town: “Could a person run as fast as this car right now?” or as she gazes out the window from a third-story doctor’s office, “Can anyone jump this high?” Embedded in all these questions, I hear, “What am I capable of?” or, “What’s the most I could do?”
There are other questions my kids have asked as they grew up, inspired by something they saw in a movie or read in a book or heard about at school. “What would you do if I got pregnant right now? … if I was arrested for doing drugs? … if I got in a fight and was expelled from school? … if I came home really, really drunk?”
In those questions, I hear, “What is the most your love can do?” or, “How strong is your love?”
***
At 5:43 on a July morning almost twenty-five years ago, my first daughter Jayna was laid on my chest. After two hours of pushing that followed a night of relentless contractions, every muscle from my chin to my knees was utterly spent. Through a hazy blur, I willed my arms to hold her, but they lay limp at my sides.
“I can’t hold her,” I tried to say, but my words came out like I was underwater. Then everything went black.
Three hours later, I woke up to a nurse taking my pulse. I immediately sensed the emptiness below my ribcage and gasped. “Where’s my baby?”
The nurse lifted Jayna out of the bassinet and into my shaking arms. Opening the blanket that was wrapped snugly around her, I examined her tiny fingers and toes, the cowlick that came from my husband right at the center of her forehead, the bow of her pink lips. I had loved deeply before, but this love, I knew, was forever changing me.
A few months later, I walked with my daughter around our neighborhood. As I turned the corner, the sun shone into her eyes, making her grimace, so I stopped in front of a house and quickly adjusted the shade on her infant car seat. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement. In the same instant, I heard vicious snarling and barking and looked up to see an enormous German shepherd bounding out of the house.
In nanoseconds, I hoisted the entire car seat-stroller combination high above my head. As I did, a roar emerged from the deepest parts of my soul. If the dog was going to attack anyone, it would be me first, not my small, helpless infant, and I would absolutely not fall without a fight. The snarling dog stopped in his tracks and shrank back, giving his owner time to grab his collar and drag him back into the house. Just before he closed the door, the man cast a slack-jawed gaze my way, and I realized I was still standing there with the stroller over my head, my heart crashing wildly in my chest.
This was the moment I knew something extraordinarily powerful was born the same day as my first child, and that was me, the mother.
***
When Jayna was a toddler, my sister-in-law gave us a copy of Margaret Wise Brown’s The Runaway Bunny.
“Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away,” it begins. “So he said to his mother, ‘I am running away.’’
“‘If you run away,’ said his mother, ‘I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.’”
The bunny then imagines elaborate scenarios he believes will enable him to get away from his mother, but with every idea, his mother provides the counterpart to thwart his efforts. He’ll be a fish, for instance, and she says she’ll be a fisherman. He’ll be a “crocus in a hidden garden,” and she tells him she’ll be a gardener and find him.
In the end, he realizes he cannot escape her love and decides to stay. My kids crowded around me every time I read these words, tucking themselves under my arms as I held the book so they could hear again of this mother’s relentless pursuit of her child. And I hoped they would hear me in the mother’s words, pledging to never let them go.
***
All five of my children ran away at some point in their early years. It wasn't an open rebellion exactly, as in The Runaway Bunny, but more like curiosity meeting opportunity. As a military family, we traveled and moved frequently, spending lots of time in temporary housing situations where we couldn’t childproof as much as we’d have preferred. Jayna, of course, was the first to do it at age two, silently and effortlessly working a special “safety” knob cover to let herself out. I found her standing by a pond.
“I looking to the baby ducks,” she explained when I found her, as if that should have been obvious.
Skyler, my second daughter, went through a gate the gardener had left open, unbeknownst to me. Lilly, my third, slipped out the back door while I nursed her baby brother, climbed a wall that I thought was too tall, and went into a neighboring field to pick me wildflowers. She couldn’t comprehend my tears when she handed the flowers to me. She’d come back, after all, and with a gift. Wyatt boldly dashed out the door twice.
But the very worst case was the last: Annalee.
We were visiting my sister. Jenny and I have a combined total of nine kids and all were under one roof that day, so the chaos level was high. One of the kids apparently left the front door ajar, and Annalee slipped out. I was in the shower shaving my legs when Jayna, then eighteen, called through the door.
“Hey, is Annalee in there with you?”
“No,” I replied.
“MOM! She’s GONE!!” Jayna’s desperate voice shouted as her footsteps pounded down the stairs. I leaped from the shower, my heart racing, frantically throwing clothes over the shaving cream on my legs.
Annalee was just a few houses down when a neighbor found her, but it could not have been more humiliating. In a classic toddler power move, she had removed her diaper and clothes just before exiting the house and was wearing nothing but a pair of plastic dress-up shoes. The neighbor scolded me severely. “This is a nice neighborhood,” she said, “but anything could still happen. You can’t let your baby walk around like this.”
I know, I wanted to say. Believe me, I KNOW! Instead, I just nodded, my face burning with shame as hot tears filled my eyes. I should have been watching her every single second, never assuming there were enough people around for her to be safe. That night, I lay awake for hours, sick from all the what-ifs and the knowledge that my love had, yet again, failed.
***
Of course, these escapes were not the only times my love fell short. Too many times, my pride and temper won the day. I’ve yelled in little faces that crumpled at my fury, said deeply regrettable words, slammed doors and stomped and acted more like a child than the adult example I was supposed to be. But in the moments of deep sorrow, as I’ve begged forgiveness, I’ve been shown grace that astounds me.
And while I haven’t yet experienced everything my kids have asked about, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to love my kids through the hard and embarrassing. I’ve carried raging toddlers out of Target as people stared, sat next to my child in a principal’s office, and listened with an aching heart to tearful confessions that I wished weren’t true.
“I will be a bird and fly away from you,” the little bunny tells his mother in my favorite part of The Runaway Bunny.
“If you become a bird and fly away from me,” his mother answers, “I will be a tree that you come home to.” The illustration shows a bunny-shaped tree with outstretched arms, and the little bunny-bird flying toward it. This is what I’m learning as I stumble along as a mother: that love often shows itself strongest in the wake of heartache, regret, and shame, when we turn back to each other and discover that we are still there.
Guest essay written by Joy Nicholas. Joy is a mother of five and currently living in Germany. You can read more at her Substack, Joy in the World or on Instagram.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.