How Lilies Grow

Reflections on Mud

Photo by Natalie Wagner on Unsplash

One of my children is hurting, and acting out his hurt, in a way that tempts me to walk on eggshells. It leaves me feeling as if I’m under water—not a cool, clean mountain lake but a mud-thick marsh. I sip small breaths as if through a reed and hope for enough oxygen to carry me through this moment. Enough oxygen for the breakdowns to break down and compost into something fertile—into something like growth.  

After a day of gently restraining my child over and over again to prevent him from hurting himself or someone else, my forearms were a nettled landscape of angry, red scratches. I tucked into bed for the night, my child’s tender body curled up nearby. (We had houseguests, so we were sharing a room.) And in the thin beam of a flashlight—so as not to wake the sweet, slumbering monster—I read poetry, hoping for something that might offer respite, hope, air.

I found Mary Oliver’s “The Lilies Break Open Over Dark Water,” which you should absolutely read in full, if not today, then in your next dense-as-mud moment, when neither light nor oxygen seems able to penetrate the circumstances of your life or the quagmire of your mind. In the poem, I found my day reflected—“that mud-hive, that gas-sponge, that reeking leaf-yard.” But I found, too, the reminder that no moment lasts forever. That this mud and stink may well be “the broth of life” from which beauty grows—from which “the fists crack open and the wands of the lilies quicken” and rise.

The day that followed was lovely, and it would have been hard for an onlooker to believe that the happy boy splashing up and down the creek was the same child who had repeatedly tried to hurt himself and others on the day prior. I basked in the sun and waded in the water and flowed with gratitude for friends who support you through everything and judge you for nothing.

My son’s hardest days come with near-clockwork predictability. Each time that he returns from his dad’s house, all of my little one’s hurt and rage and confusion pour out. Sometimes the wave takes a few hours, sometimes it lasts a full day or even a bit more. Always, there is that initial crash and roar, followed eventually by the sweet relief—for both of us—of calmer waters. Even in the beauty and blue, a darkness lingers. He begs not to have to move between houses—to just stay with me, which is a wish I cannot grant him. Is it this hurt that leaves him believing himself unlovable? I do the only thing I know to do. I try in every moment to say this, with words, with my body, with my whole soul: Yes, even now. I love you even now. No amount of mud will change that. We will ride this out together. I know it feels like a swamp. We are growing lilies.

Those are the words he needs, and they are the words I need. I do not show up perfectly in every moment. I am not always a picture of patience and grace. Sometimes, I am a picture of sadness or scratches or anger or fear or bone-deep exhaustion. Sometimes, everything is mud. And that’s okay.

Okayness doesn’t require perpetual sunshine. It doesn’t demand that we drain the marsh or quell the tides or spawn perfect children or spin a perfect self. Okayness is rooted in our capacity to sit in the swamp, to swim in the swells, to love the children we have, to love the selves we are. That’s how lilies grow from mud; they crack open to what is.