Letters to my Daughters (October): PRUNE

Photo: Annie Spratt @ Unsplash

My darling girls,

You know I always say, sometimes a bit firmly, that I’d rather you didn’t cut all the flowers in the garden? You know how much I love to see things grow.

Well – and this may blow your minds – at this time of year we MUST cut things back! I need you to help me – and I’ll show you that by cutting things back now, we’ll make way for more bountiful growth next spring and summer.

I think it’s good to know a bit about pruning – because it seems to go against all messages of growth. Sometimes we prune the trees and the shrubs because there is a danger of disease setting in – something toxic that needs cutting away. Sometimes we prune things to give them more shape – by design. And sometimes we prune so that, incongruously, we create a greater harvest of fruit or flowers next year.

Sometimes we just need to cut away the deadwood. And my goodness does it feel good when we do.

We did a bit of pruning this week too – but not in the garden. I acknowledged, finally you might say, that it was time to give up on swimming lessons for now. Let’s cut back. It doesn’t seem to make sense, does it, given what I said above about pruning for next year’s growth. If you don’t have those lessons, how on earth will you progress?

But in fact, everything seemed to point to giving them up: the cost (currently prohibitive), the timings (currently stressful), your enjoyment (you both seem to smile a lot more when we go swimming as a family, and frown when you’re in a lesson) and your general humour about it (getting on our bikes in the rain to do something 2 out of 2 children don’t really want to do seems a bit bonkers).

I don’t want toxic feelings to set in about swimming. I want you to love it. And who really cares when you actually learn to swim? It’ll happen. Maybe there’s no rush. Maybe, we can cut back so enthusiasm flows and grows more naturally at a later point. That 2-week, swimming-pool-rich holiday will happen one day.

I too have had a make some choices recently, based on the increasing need to get a bit of a bird’s eye view on what my week-to-week looks like. I felt like I was perpetually racing, reacting in a panic to my diary, and clawing moments away from family life to address the to-do list. I got bored of myself, looking strained at your father, emphasising that ‘I’ve just got too much to do!’ I felt wholly unproductive (even if I was achieving quite a lot).

Giving my week a bit of structure - shaping it, pruning away my obsession with The Guardian App and identifying a more compassionate list of things I DO want to achieve instead – has given me more space - both mental and logistical. At least, it feels like more space. By designing my week a little more deliberately, I do feel like I am likely to harvest sweeter fruit in time. 

This month marks a year since we created more space in our house. It took a lot to get there and has challenged my ideas about ‘stuff’ and ‘space’ – but it feels like a new habit emerging. I realised, as I was forced to go through boxes and boxes of assorted life stuff from the attic, that I have retained and collected things from my life for a variety of peculiar reasons.

Sometimes I kept things for the hypothetical time when I would hypothetically need something. This ‘keeping’ was based on a fantasy of an imaginary time or space of my future self. What a lot of imagining without reference to the here and now!

Sometimes I kept things in need of repair for that (also imaginary) time when I would learn how to rewire a lamp or reframe a picture. Aspirational ‘keeping’. I like to learn.

And sometimes, often clothes, I kept because they felt so much part of my past self that I couldn’t bear to get rid of them – or that my imaginary children of the future would learn something of me as they brushed up against that dress or held that handbag in their hands. Honestly, I kept things of my past in my attic for you before you even existed!

The new habit emerging, the rewiring or reframing happening in myself, is that my association with stuff needs to be more present day, more representative of my now. The emotion caught up in my past or future has its own volume, and the space we have now can’t contain all that. I am no Marie Kondo (as your Dad will attest) but I’m moving in the right direction. I have noticed progress. 

Is it because I experienced a loss that I have clung on to things? Is it hoarding masquerading as ‘resourcefulness’? Whatever the reason, the result is clutter and stuff and dust and a constant reminder that when we keep hold of something, sometimes a little too tight, we can limit our growth, not enable it.

Time to prune.

It is still very much a work in progress, but what is changing too is my relationship to what is coming into my life now, what needs to be released from my past, and how I think and feel about the objects and bits and bobs that need in a home right now. Today.

Don’t let me encourage you not to collect things that are valuable for your future. I have made a home for things this year that have been with me my whole life – and with which I will never part. But maybe my acknowledgment is that I previously kept things for reasons which now feel banal and full of misplaced need. Maybe noticing that as you go along in life will not require such a U-turn on stuff later.

Letting go can be painful, but it can offer opportunity for healthy growth in time. All good things come to an end, and cutting away things that no longer serve is a good habit I wish I had learned before I stuffed an attic full of paraphernalia that became a burden, rather than a joy.

With love, your Mama (a constant work in progress) x