Receiving love from my Mother Trees
Receiving love from my Mother Trees
As Millennials come of age, we're redefining what it means to tend to those in need
“If you give nature time, and space, it’s amazing what nature will do to bring back what we took away.” — Jane Goodall
On the day I lost my daughter-to-be in late pregnancy, I arrived home to a bulging bag of groceries. It was delivered to our doorstep mere hours after we returned from the hospital, almost exactly one year ago. Though I knew who had sent them, and how they’d found out – through my network of caring friends and family – my first reaction was one of disbelief.
I…was being fed?
We’ve all been isolated during this pandemic, walled off from loved ones by distance or health limitations. In my last post, I also talked about how our culture doesn’t operate like the “real village” as often as we’d like due to more macro historical factors. The stigma of pregnancy loss adds another layer of bricks to the wall, separating birthing folks from the people best poised to help them.
For those reasons, I fully expected that we’d be mostly on our own after this loss.
That bag of groceries, and what came after for us, shifted my thinking.
It served as an important reminder that despite the destruction of our villages past, Millennials are creating a new future when it comes to grief.
In fact, I think more of us may be growing into Mother Trees, a term forester Suzanne Simard coined to describe the keystone plant species that allow whole ecosystems to thrive, through acts of coordinated care. Trees destined to grow taller, and deeper, than the crumbling walls of misguided individualism and stigma that still surround us.
How did this happen? I offer some thoughts on this below.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
Our soil
My earliest initiations in death and mourning came for me in college, when I lost three grandparents in as many years.
The first thing I remember about the rites of grieving then was the silence. My grandparents’ friends nodded over their photos and some touched their bodies, but offered very few words for the dead or the living.
The second thing that stayed with me was the food. The Midwestern church ladies and balding fire hall cooks who served their funeral lunches knew the best recipes for loss by heart — the cream-drenched green bean casseroles, the “funeral potatoes” made on short notice from chest-freezer essentials. These initiations conveyed to me the importance the Greatest Generation placed on acts of service and physical care, given how often words and systems had failed them, from the Great Depression to WWII. The importance of still breaking bread together, when everything else is breaking apart.
This soil was shallow compared to the great old-growth cultures that came before us, and their more elaborate rituals for marking life’s milestones. But it seems it was enough for at least some of us Mother Trees to take root.
Our roots
Between my grandparents’ funerals and the loss of my brother to cancer less than ten years later, the loss landscape seemed to shift dramatically.
As technologies like Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone emerged, Millennials like me, as the first digital natives, began to take over the controls of online culture. We began using the internet to fundraise for and memorialize our loved ones online, creating digital networks of care that paralleled the reach of the earlier root systems that nourished us.
Then we began to extend them. We created meal train lists online and sourced medical supplies through group texts. We started nonprofits and launched new businesses. For example: at one point, I became a host for an organization called The Dinner Party, which organizes “tables” for people in their 20s and 30s who have lost loved ones. The idea is to bring along our favorite recipes – those green bean casseroles, or the vegan version of them – to share with strangers. In so doing, we aimed to fill a much-needed niche for young adults in grief that no amount of “sorryforyourlosses” on Facebook ever could – and that had long been scarce for secular people in this age group before.
Our shoots
Now, our generation has shifted from uploading our inherited networks of care to beginning to update and extend the way they operate. After growing up amid the context of the AIDS crisis, we’ve been dismantling the walls of stigma that separate the “worthy” losses from the “unworthy” ones, having learned that tragedy in one part of our ecosystem ultimately ripples out and impacts them all.
For example, when my parents got divorced in the 90s, I don’t recall a single school adult checking on me. Divorce is now commonly understood to be a form of disenfranchised grief – the kind people don’t have an easy time recognizing or talking about as loss. Things have changed in big ways for middle schoolers in this position nowadays. As a founding Millennial teacher of a new middle school myself, I and my team have moved to create in-school families known as “Advisory groups,” where students not only receive 1:1 support from a caring adult but are guided to provide it to each other, for all kinds of struggles that might have previously fallen under the radar. Absent parents, suicidal siblings, food insecurity – it all goes on the table. Already we are seeing some early fruits: the Gen Z kids I’ve taught are by and large more compassionate and outspoken than the middle schoolers I once knew.
Another example: When one of my close family members struggled with addiction in the early aughts, I felt afraid to talk about it with even my closest friends. My best option for social support was an Alanon group in a church basement. Now, our digital ecosystem hums with a myriad of Zoom-based support groups and social media accounts dedicated to this topic. I can see my therapist from the comfort of my home once a week, send memes about cPTSD to my friends, and generally feel connected, whole and held in care around the clock. This shift may be driving the misperception that we’re all overly-sensitive snowflakes, obsessed with the our inner children and unready for adulthood, but it’s actually what’s allowing many of us to grow up and beyond the limitations of the traumas that kept our parents stuck in cycles of intergenerational suffering, and to give our children and students better experiences than we had. A net positive, if you ask me.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.
Better blooming … and better grieving for the ones who didn’t grow
As Millennials move into our parenting years, it feels natural that many of us would be clamoring to dismantle internalized misogyny and taboos around perinatal loss, birth, and postpartum health. Which brings us back to that grocery bag on the doorstep.
Who sent it? Dear, sweet Nina. A food writer in Buffalo who’s used to acting quickly to snag a scoop, Nina is the kind of person who is always on their way to drop off a baked ziti, or to dig an elderly neighbor out of the snow. (Many Buffalonians are this way; known as the City of Good Neighbors, it’s an American city with more old-growth qualities than most.) Nina is an archetypal Mother Tree.
Nina’s grocery bag (from Wegmans, natch) was especially perfect, not to mention perfectly timed. She sent hummus and nuts, implicit suggestions to nourish ourselves properly during this time—but also a giant tube of ready-to-bake cookie dough, which feels self-explanatory. It filled us up during one of the emptiest evenings of our lives.
As a solitary gesture, this bag drop was deeply moving. As part of a concerted effort by Nina to reach out to me throughout the year, in words and cards and coffee dates, it was concrete evidence of her own gigantic capacity as a Mother Tree, despite us both clocking in at around five feet tall. But fortunately for my husband and me, it was only the opening salvo of the symphony of support we received from our Millennial network this year. (If you’re unclear on how to support loss parents and want to learn, feel free to take out a notepad now.)
Thanks to another friend, Das, who lives on the opposite coast, a small handful of people (including Nina) knew about our loss from the first day. Das, a communications pro based in the Bay and a close member of my chosen family, made sure people had clear and timely instructions about how to support us, a la Anne Helen Petersen’s Personal Emergency/Tough Times Guide. (Yes: cards and food. No: texts asking for details.)
After that, our other Mother Trees spring into action, sending their love through the mycelial network of the U.S. Mail. Through Goldbelly, we received a gigantic box of vegan donuts; through Spoonful of Comfort, we received several deliveries of warm soup. We even opened a FedEx package to find a special wild sourdough yeast from a fermentation-fanatic friend, spilling out of its ball jar. (It’s the thought that counts!) Just as trees send help to a peer in need, so were we being fed by our network.
Our local neighborhood network had also grown since our son’s birth, three years prior. Margaret, another Mother Tree up the road, made a meal train system via shared iPhone Note, and sent it around the neighborhood along with our terrible news. This accomplished several important things. It saved us from having to share our news individually with people, as did Das’ email. It also made it clear to everyone that perinatal loss was, in this neighborhood, the kind worthy of care and casserole drops. By doing so, it quietly-but-radically dismantled the wall of silence and learned helplessness around pregnancy loss that would have otherwise stymied the efforts of our more shy and hesitant neighbors.
My boss was another Mother Tree. She cried with me on Zoom when I told her what happened. She then bravely emailed the news to our staff and students—hundreds of people—on my behalf. This prompted another cascade of support from that part of our ecosystem: coworkers sent digital gift cards for takeout, came to babysit my son, and held Advisory talks with our students, who made me cards. More bricks lifted off the wall of perinatal loss stigma, this time for the next generation. Finally, while unpaid leave for pregnancy loss is covered by FMLA, my boss quietly arranged for me to have two paid months off, no questions asked and no triggering paperwork required. Two months to sit, cry, pray, and find my way back to myself again. (Managers of Millennials, I hope you too are taking notes here.)
Thanks to the love of these many connections, I had what I needed to seal, and then to heal, one of the great wounds of my life. I began to see, finally, what a real village looks like in action.
Due to the pandemic, more of us have been through the crucibles of grief and death than before. I believe that these experiences have taught us that seasons of drought and plenty come for us all, and it makes sense to share when we can, as trees do. I really do hope that the care I’ve received in my own season of loss is a harbinger of what’s to come: a more robust ecosystem of community care for us all.
To do my small part to bring this about, I’m preparing to feed others in my network, as I have been fed.
For example: remember that friend, Das, who put out the all-points bulletin about my loss? Their partner just had a baby. And while the topic of birth and babies remains a tender one for me, I’ll never forget the way that these chosen family members were there for me in a difficult time. I’ve already got a few care packages cued up to send their way.
Feeding others after being fed feels like closing a loop that needs to be closed. And it also feels like a moment where things are opening back up for me again. I see hope that our culture is beginning to function less like an artificial tree farm full of yellowing, solitary saplings, all isolated away in our nuclear-family plots by old stigma-steeped stories that don’t serve us. Instead, we’re acting more like an old-growth forest again, a real village, rich in interspecies connections and sustained by reciprocity.
May the children we raise in our future forests never have to go hungry during their hardest times.
I’m teaching two upcoming workshops – one next week, on Thurs. February 16, on restoring connection to self and community through food, and one on Thurs. March 23, on marking grief milestones through being in nature – both through the organization RTZ Hope. Spaces are filling up for the February workshop, and the link to register is here (scroll down to the very bottom). I invite you to pass this link or email along to anyone who may benefit from these offerings!
NOTES:
Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard’s memoir, interweaves her own thoughts as a cis-woman about her experience with mothering and her landmark discoveries about how trees collaborate within ecosystems. Yet it’s also important to note here that Simard herself is queer and that a more gender-inclusive framing of “Mother Tree” is needed when we map her findings about plants onto how humans behave. This year we have been supported by cis, trans and non-binary folks, parents and non-parents, cool aunties and guncles, and not just people who are mothers in the literal sense. A Mother Tree is as a Mother Tree does.
As I mentioned, in my 20s, I was fortunate to attend and host dinners with The Dinner Party, an organization formed specifically to support grieving people in their 20s and 30s. (One time we even did karaoke!) It’s still a great organization and they’re always looking for hosts. Please share this with anyone you know in this age group who is grieving. Sure, 20somethings may have great skin and cool weekend plans, but those living at college or in big cities away from “home” may be particularly isolated, too, especially since the pandemic put a damper on their ability to form new “chosen families” through work or dating. Those of us who love, manage, or teach people in this age group need to keep this in mind.
I was also, in my 20s, convinced to explain what funeral potatoes are via this cooking video, for my friends at How2Heroes. Utah friends, please forgive me in advance for the bad Mormon jokes at our collective expense.
Divorce is a disenfranchised grief experience that merits the same care (and casserole drops) as any other.
recently wrote about this in her newsletter . Highly recommend.While I’m hyping my own generation shamelessly in this post, I don’t want to imply that all non-Millennials are, as Robin Wall Kimmerer says, automatically “complicit in our culture of destruction” and not working to dismantle it. For example, I recently loved reading this NYT profile of Ira Wallace, a 72-year-old “godmother” of the Southern seed-saving scene–showing just how essential our cultural elders still are in the re-seeding of the village we all desire, literally and figuratively.
Our elders also need of communities of care, particularly those living alone or with chronic illnesses. Community Servings, a Boston-based organization I’ve been writing about and following for twenty years, works tirelessly to serve this population in ways I admire. Please check them out if you feel inclined.
What do you think? Where are you noticing walls of stigma coming down — or staying stubbornly in place? What do you think your generation — be it Millennial or not — does well when it comes to grief? What work still needs to be done, at the individual or policy level, to meet the needs of the next generation? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below. Please also feel free to share this free post with anyone you know who may be wondering how to support a grieving person in need.
So much of this resonated - the disenfranchised grief, the acts of service inclinations of the Greatest Generation, the power of small kindnesses in dark moments that might be less supported, the cPTSD memes. I do feel hopeful that the next generation is getting so much more exposure to and language for emotional fluency than we did growing up.
And thanks for the shoutout, just noticed that at the end! (I just learned that if you @ mention an author or blog it will ping them, but if you just link it won't).
THIS. More and more of This.
(Re)Weaving the mycelial fabric of interdependent community is the living, breathing intention of many intentional acts of support and compassion.
This is the world most of us want to be a part of - thank you for elevating how impactful even seemingly ‘small’ actions can be.