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Green ThumbApril 11, 2010 Another one from To Be Rather Than to Seem, my memoir in progress. It's even got a hyperlink in it! Grandma, said my mother, had a green thumb. This was true. Flowers, vegetables, shrubs, plants of all kinds flourished in and around Grandma's house. My mother -- according to my mother -- did not have a green thumb. For years I believed this. Grandma had a green thumb. My mother didn't. Somewhere along the line, probably when I'd been away from 5 Doublet Hill Road long enough to see it with fresh eyes on my infrequent visits, I noticed that the house I grew up in was home to an array of healthy houseplants, including a couple of tall, glossy avocados that my mother had started from seed. Still, Grandma had a green thumb and Mummie didn't. In my mother's view, either you had a green thumb or you didn't, and if you didn't, a houseful of growing green things weren't admissible as evidence to the contrary. If you did have a green thumb, your plants flourished without effort. If you didn't have a green thumb, your plants might flourish anyway but it was due to dumb luck. Green thumbs were, as I understood it, inborn. Affinity for the water I wasn't sure about. My father loved swimming and sailing, and my brothers, sister, and I all took to the water from an early age, learning to swim in the small brook-fed pond on Grandma's property. Then we graduated to the "town pool" -- a large town-run pond adjacent to one of the elementary schools, maintained with tons of sand trucked in from Crane's Beach in Ipswich -- which included a shallow end for the little kids and a deep end complete with diving board that was open to older kids who had passed a "deep end test." When we were still too young to bike there on our own, Mummie would drive us, but though she might wear a bathing suit, she rarely got more than her feet wet. She sat on the sandy shore, reading or knitting or talking with the other mothers while keeping an eye on us. In a family of water rats, my mother was the odd one out. This was because, as a girl of about ten, when her family was living in Alicante, Spain, she was caught in an undertow and pulled under. Ever since she had been afraid of putting her head underwater. This story was told over and over again. Until I was well into adulthood, it seemed an adequate explanation for her lifelong, incapacitating fear. We're at the mercy of our bad experiences, as well as the color of our thumbs. Deep down my mother believed that either you had it or you didn't -- and she didn't. Her mother did have it, of course: her father hammered that message home over the years. My mother thought she was marrying someone kinder and more supportive than her father had been, but in one of those all-too-familiar ironies of intimate relationships, my father turned out to have a few things in common with her father, and one of them was a perfectionism that went for the jugular of anything less than perfect. My elementary school report cards frequently noted that I didn't "ask for help when needed." This confused me. But I didn't need help: didn't all those A's prove that? I stopped singing after eighth grade because another girl in the St. Peter's Episcopal Church junior choir told me I was always off-key. The choir director never said that, none of my music teachers in school had ever said that, but I took to heart that one snippy remark by a girl I didn't even like: What if she was right and the others were just being polite? Freshman year of high school the choral director urged me to try out for Glee Club. I didn't. Over the years I dropped piano and cornet, French, Spanish, and Arabic, all when I was on the verge of being able to actually use my new skills. I'd start projects, get mired in complications, then drop them. Meanwhile I was creating and spending a lot of time in a fantasy world where the young and powerless found mentors who didn't destroy them for their vulnerability. Eventually I put it all together. I didn't ask for help when needed because it wasn't safe to need help. There was safety in perfection, but you had to get there on your own. I inherited my parents' genes, true, but I don't believe that perfectionism is transmitted in DNA. Year after year after year I assimilated through all my senses the unhappy dynamic that my parents played out. Like my father, I wouldn't tolerate anything less than perfection. Like my mother, I was sure I didn't have it in me. You can't get there from here, warned my subconscious, intensely self-protective self. You'll make a fool of yourself trying. The jugular I kept going for was my own. I was luckier than my mother. Fate and the muses offered me -- not resolution and relief, but a path leading in that general direction. The grassroots feminism I fell into in the mid-1970s insisted on the importance of process. My antiwar movement experiences had already persuaded me that even the noblest of ends didn't justify the use of ignoble means because ignoble means had a way of generating ignoble ends, no matter what people claimed to be fighting for. The means/end dichotomy was false. Second-wave feminism put this into practice. We encouraged each other to develop new skills and do things we'd never done before. It was OK to fumble along and make mistakes, and there were often people around to show me the ropes, whether I asked for help or not. A few years later the 12 steps developed by Alcoholics Anonymous gave me a practical framework for getting from here to there, when "here" was a swamp from which escape seemed impossible. The principles underlying the 12 steps were common to various spiritual traditions; most important to me, they kept the channels to my creativity open. When I strayed from the steps, the writing got sludgy and I'd buy boxes of cookies and eat them at one sitting. To the rational mind, it seems a no-brainer, doesn't it? The subconscious mind, though, never stopped whispering, Watch it! You can't get there from here, you're going to make a fool of yourself, there's really no point in trying. In 1988 my siblings and I organized an intervention and persuaded our mother to enter a thirty-day residential treatment program for alcoholism. She stopped drinking, she completed the program, and as far as I know she never drank another alcoholic beverage; she died in February 1996. She didn't follow up with AA or any other recovery program; her involvement with her church was, I think, what enabled her to keep putting one foot in front of the other. How she managed to live almost eight years in that very unhappy marriage without the anaesthesia of alcohol I can't imagine. If only that strength of will had been directed toward something more than survival. My father attended my mother's intervention but didn't play an active role. The residential treatment program included a day of seminars and discussion groups for family members; my siblings and I attended, but our father declined to have anything to do with what he called "criticism/self-criticism." He never saw anything wrong with perfectionism. For him it was an abstract concept, close kin to high expectations; I saw it as it played out at the family dinner table, and in my own head. A perfectionism that won't tolerate imperfection won't tolerate mistakes, and without mistakes there's no way to get from here to there. Perfectionism means Athena has to be born full-grown from the head of Zeus, and if you aren't Athena you get no credit for being wise. Once in my newspaper days my boss told me I was a "natural writer." I wanted to take his head off, but I just said, probably a little brusquely, that I'd been working at it for a long time. My writing ability is no more or less natural than Grandma's green thumb; whatever she started with, plenty of trial-and-error experience went into my grandmother's gardens. My mother didn't believe her thumb had any special qualities, but her plants grew anyway. If she'd believed in her thumb, who knows how her life might have been different.
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