Gardeners Hands

When I was a single mum I thought to not be judged, or seen as not doing a good job, then Luna needed to look clean, look ‘good’, to make me look like I was ‘good’

At some point, someone, another single mum, pointed out that with her first kid she felt exactly the same, but she grew to understand a happy kid often looks a state. It’s actually almost a sign of their joy, the stains of their whimsy.

Paint on forearms from creative exploration,

Face covered in mango like it’s been plucked and ate straight from the tree,

Knees dirty, hands too. From making fairy gardens and digging tunnels.

A kid living in their wild side.

With time to climb trees and hide from giants.

I felt my heart align with what was true, I felt a homecoming, a connection, with what was inside of me beneath the things I’d picked up from those around me, that I’d internalised. Perhaps a spark of intuition being realised.

These days I’m okay with my kids being grebs, but I find myself apologising for the dirt under my nails, from tending to the earth -whilst tending to my heart and my head- the way it fills the cracks of my skin like rivers on a map. When I dye too, from the plants that I’ve grown, my hands stained like a snakes cold back. But how happy these hand are to have held such life and love, I don’t want to apologise for their work and their joy. I don’t want to belittle their magic with a ‘sorry’ that shrinks their brilliance.

They haven’t done anything wrong.

I’m growing too, like the flowers I keep for company and growing to understand that in my life a lot of opportunities for joy I’ve mistook as things to dismiss, to shy away from. Shrunk from authentic parts of me that somehow ‘made me bad’.

The queer person in me fighting to be seen whilst I told them repeatedly girls were only for kissing in dark corners, it’s boys that validate your insecurities if they like you back and say nice things, which they rarely did. So I kept dismissing my feelings, shushing them away, hurting others too, but I knew what I’d been told without words. I knew the way I should perform,

to be good.

The world likes me clean, the world likes me straight, the world likes me quiet. I knew the repercussions too.

Lean away from myself and into another version, curated for others, that would be best.

Less hair

Less gobby

Less tracksuits

Less gay

Less loud

Less sad

Less interrupting

Less wild

Less true

And I could never manage it of course, because you can’t train flowers to grow away from the sun. So I spent years, a few decades perhaps, feeling guilty for all the things that felt natural and then guilty still I couldn’t act how I thought I should. Horrid when I wore heels and dressed for men, yet horrid too when I dressed as myself and wasn’t desired. The web complex and not something I understood existed. Or even knew I was tangled in.

Even now sometimes, I pile my clothes up ready to throw away “I want to be a COS woman I say” and all those who know me laugh, “Then you wouldn’t be you” But I think that’s what I’ve always been trying to do. I never even spelt my name the Gaelic way scared of it being too weird, so I pushed away my own name, my heritage, what my mother passed down from hers. I removed the hairs from my face, arms, legs and toes. I masked the parts of me I’d learnt weren’t appropriate.

But I don’t want to apologise for them and their joy anymore. I don’t want to belittle their magic with a ‘sorry’ that shrinks their brilliance.

They haven’t done anything wrong.

So I enter a stage or reclamation. Proudly, at times confusingly, reclaiming, re-wiring, re-writing, re-loving.