Maybe it was the tree. The image came unbidden, suddenly. I was thinking about the arboretum at Davis, California, that I wanted to visit it, that I’d even put said visit on my calendar for today. Whether I’d really go remained to be seen. I feel drawn to go, pulled to go. I want to walk and wander under big trees on new and different earth. Davis is in the central valley, where it’s hot and dry and the sweet scent of earth is dominant. I live on the coast, near the San Francisco Bay. Last night, when I went down to my garden to pick self-seeded arugula for my dinner, the air was scented with brine from the ocean mist drifting over the flatlands of Oakland. This is new. I moved to this flat a year ago, almost exactly. Before, I lived up on the hillside, nearer to Contra Costa County, where the clay earth bakes beneath gnarled old oaks and walnut trees from a prior era, and the air is sweeter. Although, that said, I clearly remember returning home from an overseas trip and being gobsmacked by the intense oceanic aroma of the air of my home, even my home on the hillside.
So, yes, drawn to Davis today because, weeks ago, my teacher Stew Winchester at the Merritt College horticulture program said, after querying the class and discovering no one had been there, “What? You guys gotta go. Get out. See California.”
It’s true. I feel cemented here, mostly for reasons of cost. I have no extra money these days, having worked only five months in 2024. It’s an emergency, and I’m navigating as best I can.
But the bough. Nina’s bough. That is the image that came unbidden, suddenly, when I closed my eyes in the kitchen. I was thinking about trees and my love for them when suddenly the image of Nina’s fig tree appeared in my mind’s eye, and the morning that Mary was over and said we needed to remove the second trunk that was vying with the central leader, that it was best for the tree. Mary is a master gardener. I trusted her professional opinion and immediately went for my Felco saw. I returned to the tree, trusty red saw in hand.
Nina was there. No! she cried. No, please don’t cut my tree! Her eyes were round and brimming with tears. Mary explained why it was better for the tree, and I got started. I didn’t ask Nina’s permission or wait to make sure she accepted it. Sometimes, grown ups just have to get the job done.
I sawed off the bough, and it hurt Nina, and she gathered the severed limb in her arms and carried it into the house, where it remained in her bedroom for a long time.
It reminds me of the time we visited Venezuela when she was about three years old. We stayed one night at a hotel near the airport since it’s too dangerous to travel at night on the road from the airport to Caracas. There was a pool there, and coconut trees all around. We were swimming, and Nina was poking around the pool area and soon had found two coconuts that she brought to the pool. They floated, and she played with them. She took them with her to our room. That night, she put them to bed. She made little beds for them, in a box? In a drawer? I don’t remember. She made covers and pulled the little coverlet up to what would be the chin of the coconut, were it to have a chin. And she took loving care of those coconuts for the remainder of our trip.
I say maybe it was the bough that drove Nina away from me. But I know that’s not the case. How could it be? Was it somehow related though? Did I not listen enough? Did I not understand?
She is gone from me, my daughter, and I miss her terribly, and I do weird things on the regular because I’m in denial, honestly, and I just cannot believe, still cannot believe, this has happened.
I was afraid to have a daughter. When I got pregnant with my second child, I said to myself, It’s okay if it’s another boy. Girls scare me. The mother-daughter tension scares me. I don’t want to risk it. I hadn’t been close to my own mother (that’s an understatement), and I was afraid.
Of course, when I discovered I was pregnant with a girl, a daughter, I realized that’s what I’d wanted all along, and my heart nearly burst with love and gratitude. And when that daughter cleaved herself to me with all the love and care in the world, more than anyone can expect or deserve, I was elated and relieved and grateful. We were pals, Nina and I. She was affectionate and expressive, and I certainly was with her too. She delighted me no end. She was a natural artist who once painted her whole body blue and black when she was a young child, who sewed flowers into the leaves of the pear tree in front of our house, who painted and drew and sang, and who spoke to spirits. Once, when babbling into the wind of the open car window, she said she was talking to my mother, her grandmother, who died long before she was born.
She was that kind of child. She kept one foot firmly in the land of magical realism long after most children had let it go. She was sensitive, grounded, and good. In high school, she visited her mentally ill father most afternoons in Berkeley. In those days, he again wasn’t eating and was terrifyingly gaunt, with deep hollows in his cheeks and temples. Nina would walk up the hill after school to see him in the room he’d holed himself up in at the co-op that was intent on removing him and eventually succeeded. There, she’d make him lunch and make sure he ate it. Where was I? I was working, of course, trying to keep money coming in, the only breadwinner.
During high school, Nina was told (by me, of course) she needed to get straight As to attend a good college, and she did just that. It was no cakewalk either, I tell you. This was before the era of grade inflation, when teachers really graded, as they had when I was a teenager. Nina sat every night at the dining room table and studied for hours. I remember her very first week at Berkeley High, where I’d place her (against her wishes) after discovering that the school she’d spent freshman year at was abominably weak and that she was doing (and learning) essentially nothing there.
She came home with a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince, much to my surprise and delight, and she bore down on it with real seriousness. She could barely understand it. Hell, I could barely understand it. But she wrestled with it nightly, and what do you know, she ended up loving Machiavelli’s The Prince. That’s how she was. She worked hard for three years. She got straight As at Berkeley High in the International Baccalaureate program and even took the optional, and difficult, IB test at the end.
Maybe I didn’t understand how much pressure she was under.
She interviewed with Stanford and UCLA and few other schools, and she got into UCLA, which was incredible, of course. And she went there. The pandemic began in March of her senior year at Berkeley High. She graduated in our living room. We watched on a laptop screen as they finally called her name. She wore her red graduation gown and cap. Her brother gave her flowers, and I snapped a photo in the back garden of her in her shiny graduation garb with flowers in her arms and her brother beside her.
She doesn’t talk to him anymore either.
She doesn’t talk to me, and it’s the hardest thing by far in my life, and to be honest I do all I can to not get totally thrown off my base because I need to be strong right now. I’m looking for work and an income. My sister is very sick. I’m being shaken by big forces.
The biggest one of course is my daughter and her decision to distance herself from me.
People always remarked on how well we got along. I also marveled at how we never really fought when she was growing up, although there was some tension when she was a teen, sure. She used to hole herself up in her room and spend hours on her phone. She’d also lock herself in the bathroom (we had only one) and pore over her phone, watching endless videos. It alarmed me.
I would march upstairs and bang on her door and yell, What are you doing? Go out! See people! Go to a party!
I didn’t sit quietly with her and try to understand.
There was a lot going on. Her dad was very sick and that was fully on my plate.
We seriously, all of us, worried about suicide. B., my ex- and my kids’ dad, had suffered a serious mental breakdown which landed him in the county mental institution for four days. Since that time, he’d had several more breaks, episodes of mania and depression that were off-the-charts bad. When manic, he stayed in a room at the co-op in Berkeley. When depressed, he was psychotic as well, terrified of food, water, and the outdoors. It was a frightening time.
I was busy working full time and working with the Homeless Action Committee in Berkeley where there was an attorney (the grreatest angel that ever existed) named Dorian Morello who was working tirelessly to win B.’s disability benefits. It took five years of effort from her and me. I’d find and bring B. to appointments, write letters to judges, fill out forms, sit with Dorian and strategize.
It was a very tough time, and I know I already said that. Is that my excuse?
I don’t know what went so wrong, but it did go wrong, and after freshman year, my daughter found a girlfriend she loves and drew away from me, hard. I drove down to LA one weekend with Daisy, our dog, and she left me hanging until Sunday morning. She said she hadn’t invited me, I couldn’t assume she was available, and please don’t come again unless I was invited.
And then I wasn’t invited. Ever.
I was troublesome, meddlesome. I tried to do things for her. Freshman year was online due to the pandemic. Nina decided to travel to Merida, Mexico to get some independence, have an experience, live cheaply, and study online. How could I not have seen that was a bad idea? I thought it was a good idea. She arrived in the dark, at night, alone, in a poor, run-down neighborhood. She couldn’t get in. The landlady was terrible. The toilet was disgusting. The place was filled with mosquitoes. And the entire community was barricaded inside.
She called me riven with panic. She was nearly hallucinatory with panic.
I made the decision to come right away. And I did. I was there within 30 hours.
My son said I shouldn’t go. He said, Let her figure it out, Mom. She’s capable.
But I didn’t do that. She was so scared. I nearly called an ambulance to pick her up. Her fear went right through me, was seared into my bones.
Of course I went to her.
I went, and I got us a nice place (i.e., expensive, but not expensive compared to anything here in California, obviously). It was beautiful and safe and even had a little pool in the tiny backyard. I swam in it every day. Nina did not.
Nine logged onto her classes every day from the glass dining table. She was diligent as always.
One day, we went to the market and had some kind of intestine soup, with shit in the intestines. I was trying to eat it as I consider myself super open-minded, especially when it comes to food, but it didn’t smell all that great, and I kept poking around thinking, this actually looks like shit. We looked at it closely together and concluded it was shit, and stopped eating and fled and had a good laugh about that.
We took pictures together in Mexico. I thought we had a good time, ultimately.
Maybe she wasn’t having a good time. Maybe that event de-stabilized her, made her feel ineffectual—being rescued by her mother.
I just wanted to feel needed.
And I love her. I wanted her to feel safe. I wanted her to have a good experience in Mexico. And of course it was fun for me too, to visit Mexico, just me and Nina.
I’m in therapy now and learning about codependence and how codependents are constantly trying to “fix” everyone else instead of looking at themselves or their own lives. I’ve spent my entire life trying to help family members riddled with addiction, and of course B. And of course I ended up with someone mentally ill—because he needed me.
I once dated a great man who was serious about me. This was after me and B. broke up. He gave me a key to his place and introduced me to his whole family. In fact, he embedded me in his family, and they were wonderful. Healthy, grounded, solvent, caring. But, I said to David, for that was his name, You don’t really need me.
I couldn’t love him because he didn’t need me.
I couldn’t accept you can be with someone just to love them, and in fact must.
Maybe I needed my daughter to be weak so I could love her.
Maybe I weakened her somehow. Maybe I made her feel incapable.
Maybe I needed to do that so I had a role in her life.
Maybe I couldn’t let her go.
Maybe she needs to tear away from me, sever the bough as I had done to the Mother Fig tree in our yard, the fig tree that was planted over Nina’s placenta. That was her tree, it literally had her DNA embedded in its hardwood, in its luscious fruits. Maybe I needed to listen when she objected.
In summary, what is this essay about? This is an essay about a mother’s love, and sickness, and codependence, and regret, fear, confusion, pain, and horror.
I miss my daughter, and the more I push the farther she retreats, and this has been going on for four years now and to say I’m heartbroken is no exaggeration.
I carry this shame around in me and I don’t know where to put it or what to do with it.
I thought, for Christmas I will be alone. My son is traveling. Their dad is now in Venezuela with his family. I don’t know where my daughter is. I don’t know where Nina is, and that just kills me. She said in her last brief email that she was traveling across the country “and beyond.” And I’m not invited to know where she is.
And of course this is also about the folly of children, how they don’t know until they have their own children what this feels like. To not know where she is, or if she’s okay, or how she’s growing and changing, to not be invited to know her and her life and her loves and her emerging preferences, to be missing all of this.
It’s like missing a limb. It’s like missing a bough.
It’s like the fig, the mother fig in our yard.
She survived, the tree, that is. Mary said she’d be stronger.
Maybe she is.
Bare, real, raw, a great piece of writing!