Queen of the Night
Tulipa ‘Queen of the Night’
As the dews grew heavier in late August, I ordered a selection of tulip bulbs. This is the deal that I strike with autumn each: when the mornings become misty, I start planning for spring. And I wanted spring 2021 to be full of crimson, black-red and scarlet tulips with a few varieties in apricot and peach tones to highlight the others’ dark glamour. The bulbs were delivered in October, neatly packaged in brown paper bags rolled closed at the top, and I stored them in the cool of the garage until it was time to layer the blubs in pots to make a dramatic display in the spring.
I plant my tulips after the third proper frost, which usually falls in mid or late November. Hard frosts kill viral and fungal infections in soil and homemade compost so tulip bulbs planted after several nights of deep cold have the best chance of healthy growth. But the frosts came late in 2020 and although I planted tulips in a pot beside a friend’s front door, I failed to plant my own. Then rain fell throughout December and there never seemed to be a day dry enough to plant the blubs. When potential gardening moments did arrive, I was always busy doing something else, like wrapping piles of Christmas presents to send as pandemic parcels to friends and family that we were unable to visit.
New Year came and went and still the tulips bulbs waited in their paper bags. By that point, I felt so cross and disappointed with myself that I couldn’t summon the motivation to plant the tulips that I had been so excited about back in August. I didn’t even want to look inside the cardboard box in case the neatly packaged bags were full of sour-smelling bulbs, mottled with mould.
On the last Sunday afternoon in January, I finally grew sick of my own procrastination. The sky sagged heavy with snow and our neighbours’ weathervane showed the wind blowing due east, bringing with it a vicious chill to the air. I hauled on a random collection of warm clothing and forced myself outside to rescue the box of bulbs from the garage. Then I lugged the biggest pots to the more sheltered south side of the house and assembled my kit: wheelbarrow, compost, gloves, horticultural grit and the bulbs. As I put crocks in the bottom of each pot, snow gusted down the side of the house, powdering the compost in the wheelbarrow. My nose ran incessantly in the cold so I burrowed into a pocket to find an old tissue. Then I broke the icy crust of the top layer of compost with a trowel and scooped compost into the pots with my hands, crushing icy lumps by clenching my fists. Once each pot had a base layer of crocks, compost and a sprinkling of grit for drainage, I opened the box of tulips, anxious in case they were all rotten. I pulled off my gloves and unfolded the top of each paper bag, pushing my frozen index finger into the blubs to see if they were still firm. One or two were soft and dusty with blue-purple mould. These spoiled bulbs crumbled in my hands as I discarded them, knowing that I only had myself to blame for their waste. To my relief, however, most of the blubs remained firm and white inside their parchment-like outer skins. I began to layer them in the pots, making a circle of blubs, adding one in the middle, and then covering them with compost before beginning another layer. Spindrift snow whirled around me as I worked so that I had to blink white flakes from my eyelashes as I moved back and forth between barrow and pots.
A few of the blubs were beginning to deteriorate, speckled with the first spots of mould and shedding their papery covering. I decided to take a chance on them: maybe they would come good and grow well once they were in the right conditions. With clumsy blue-cold hands, I planted three layers of bulbs in each of the big pots and two layers in the others. Then I gathered up the last few bulbs and planted them into an old galvanised bucket before top-dressing each pot with grit. I worked fast so that I could get inside and out of the wind and, when I had finished, I stood up too quickly from my crouched position beside the pots. For a minute, I had to close my eyes against the dizziness, blood thumping in my ears. I reached out to the side of the house to stabilise myself and found two lines from ‘Burnt Norton’ spinning in my head: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future”. This chiming fragment from Four Quartets only increased my dizziness and I shook my head to get rid of it. T.S. Eliot was no use to me as I planted tulip bulbs far too late in the season with a wind-chill temperature well below zero.
I dumped my gardening equipment in the wheelbarrow, leaving the pots sheltered against the south wall of the house. All I wanted was to sit beside the fire defrosting my hands around a mug of steaming hot tea but T.S. Eliot persisted, those two lines pitter-pattering about my mind. I stopped to put the bag of compost into the greenhouse and stepped inside for a minute, sheltered by the old glass panels, feeling suddenly confused and bizarrely anguished.
I laid my gloves out on the potting bench and stacked some seed trays, waiting. I know my mind: sometimes words arrive before I can identify an emotion or isolate a thought. My neural pathways tumble-turn articulation and feeling and I need to wait for words and sensations to settle before I can distinguish a pattern. I neatened a pile of plant pots, slipping one pot into another in size order while images jostled into shape: IVF embryos on a computer screen, white against black; my hands placing pale tulip bulbs into dimples in the dark compost. Time past and time present; what was planted then and what I plant now; what might grow now and what might have grown then.
A few days after fertilization, the embryologist at the fertility clinic gave us a report on our embryos: some were excellent, others less so. Science is logical and good quality embryos are more likely to continue to develop, to embed in the uterine wall, to become a pregnancy. But fertility folklore is full of stories of wonky, slightly mouldy embryos that become beautiful babies and so we used all of our embryos, even the not-so-good ones, because each cell circle held our hopes.
Sadly for us, a lovely baby was not to be. Instead, we stumbled from one loss to another and then from loss into emptiness. During this time, the constant presence of teaching as a vocation gave me purpose and meaning. The daily connection with young people gave me everyday laughter and the privilege of being engaged in a dynamic process that reached way beyond myself. And yet, years and years later, I still struggle to reply when a parent of one my students announces,“But you wouldn’t understand, would you? Because you haven’t got kids.”
These sentences invariably arrive during fraught Parents’ Meetings and they are born of anger and pain, most of it not intended for me. What I want to say is, “Wait. It is not that simple.” And then, “I made the same decision as you, twenty years ago. I chose to become a parent. It just that our decisions had different consequences.”
Absence is an unexpected teacher. My husband and I had mature, loving and thoughtful conversations about when to become a mum and a dad. We considered all the things that we were supposed to consider: finances, education, family support, baby names. And around us, colleagues, friends and family members made the same choice and - like us - they lost control of pretty much everything that followed that one decision. Some couples conceived easily and then experienced dreadful post-natal depression; others had one then two babies quickly before a series of inexplicable miscarriages; our friends Charlotte and Kate conceived twins on their first try with a sperm donor. As the years gathered, we witnessed pregnancies and births and met lots of gorgeous babies; we saw joy and muddle and sleep-deprivation. We also witnessed appalling suffering when a late-stage pregnancy had to be terminated on medical advice after the baby was diagnosed with an incurable condition.
Oddly, not being a mum has taught me some of the things that I might have learnt by being a mum. I know that there is precious little in life that we have any real control over. I know that to survive you need rock solid friends and a sense of humour. I also know that unbearable sadness does not actually kill you and that, with time, grief becomes just a little easier to carry. And I have learnt that parents do not necessarily get the child that they hoped for: they get the child that they get.
All parents, I imagine, hope for a healthy baby with ten fingers and ten toes. Many parents will have a name ready for this tiny new person to grow into, probably baby clothes too, and perhaps even a nursery with nappies ready for action. Beyond this, I understand that making a child and helping that little person to grow is not in fact a process over which people have control. There are certainly things that resourceful, committed parents can provide that will help their children to grow well: bedtime stories, good food, clear communication, toothpaste and a sense of absolute safety. But children cannot be moulded into the shape of their parents’ hopes: children take their own form. Some children love to swim while their parents are happy landlubbers; some children are born with life-limiting health conditions, some go on to develop special educational needs, others thrive at primary school and stall during Year 8. Some young people develop an lethargy that plunges their parents into despair; others go so wild in their teens that they become aliens in their own homes.
Not being a mum has taught me about a parent’s unconditional love for a child: I feel it by its absence. The babies born to friends during my fertility treatment are now in their final years at school and, as they have grown, I have seen what is demanded of parents. My working life has given me insights into families of all shapes and sizes and each family that I meet teaches me more about how these complex units function. Throughout this experience, I have been immensely grateful to have a vocation that requires me to work with love. The reality is that teaching is too hard, the hours are too long and the requirements of the role are too demanding for anyone to continue in the profession without love in their work. In that way, teaching is like parenting. And I am glad to know that the history of education is full of men and women who journeyed alongside families, providing opportunities for children to develop through a deep knowledge of their subjects and a profound commitment to their craft.