One Sunday afternoon in late September, I stood on my front porch and gently ran my fingertips over each branch of my kalanchoe and purslane and other potted plants, extracting dead leaves and spider webs and feathery seeds and allowing their magic to fall into the flower bed below. When the plants stood shining and new and properly pruned, I watered them until the soil was spongey and puddles gathered around my bare toes. It was late September and nearly 70 degrees, and it felt even warmer on my west-facing porch, the wooden boards baked by the late-day sun, but that night it would be dipping into the 40s for the first time since April. It was time, though it did not feel that way—I lifted the plants from their porch hooks and walked them inside, talking sweet nonsense into their leaves as I settled them in a large east-facing window. As I worked, that window transformed from open viewfinder to the outside world to a space so plant-crowded I could hardly see through. I felt myself smiling as I fussed with the window space, determining which plant should settle where, thinking about what it would mean to do this for myself, to bring the green things back inside. To shift focus to my interior spaces.
I can be a compulsive caretaker. Like many of us, I learned, as a child, to act out the caretaker role. If I was always meeting others’ needs, then, my little subconscious brain told me, I would be safe. And maybe, even, I’d help heal the adults whose sorrow and volatility so worried (read: frightened) me. At 36, my caretaking, other-focused parts are still very present—they show up in romances, in friendships, and sometimes even in my work. Don’t get me wrong, I have compassion for these parts. They have helped me provide a lot of love over the years. They prompted me to become a teacher and now a therapist. They supported me in caring for my mother during her final years of life. Many times, they have allowed me tuck aside my needs when a friend’s or a partner’s were, genuinely, more pressing. And. These parts have led me to push down my needs to the point of burn-out and even anger. They have led me into resentment when I haven’t received back the care I wanted (but failed to ask for) or when, despite my caretaking, people have not changed in the ways I thought they should. These parts of me have, at times, taken their caretaking to such an extreme that they’ve become controlling, manipulative, even. Wanting people to change isn’t love, I have learned. It isn’t care at all.
I want to stay curious about the parts of me that learned to place my worth outside of myself, that still sometimes insist that I will only be safe, good, and worthy if I can help or heal or change someone else. I want to stay curious about them, and I want to help them find ways of feeling safe that will genuinely bring about healing, the only healing I can control: my own. What if the parts of me that are so focused on taking care could shift their energy inwards? What if, instead of trying to help everyone else, they brought the greenery inside?
It’s November, now. In my east-facing window, the yellow kalanchoe, white shamrock, and bright red Christmas cactus flowers are in open-handed bloom, and I sit at my dining table, noticing how the mid-morning sun edges the leaves with light. I notice, too, the muted browns and grays beyond the window pane. Even those hardy species who remain green in the freezing temps—English ivy and fescue grass and mountain laurel—have put on their winter coats, packed away their neon vibrancy until next year. If I had left my potted plants outside, their attention glued each day to the afternoon sun, they’d be dead now. And that would have been okay, too, I recognize—I would have added their nitrogen-rich bones to my garden beds, and they would have continued on next summer as kale and okra and tomatoes.
But instead, inside, they bloom. My shamrock glues its three-fingered hands to the window pane, a small child looking out. I almost expect the plant to exhale, fog the glass, and draw a smiley face in the condensation. I think of my caretaking parts, of how young they are, those parts of me that want desperately to be needed, that believe that only then will they be loved and prioritized. Look, I tell my parts, see the shamrock? Because it’s inside now, because its needs for warmth and light and water are met, it can place its green hands upon the windowpane. It can reach out without getting frozen and depleted, without loosing its bloom.
Meanwhile, the yellow kalanchoe plant has opened one small yellow flower. Unlike the shamrock, this bloom angles in, an interior sun. I cock my head and smile at it as I trickle fresh water into its soil, whispering an offering of thanks. Then I put on a kettle, thumb open my journal, and go on tending to me.