“We are what we eat,” was something my mother told me; “but we are also what we hear.” As a child, the meaning of this was unclear to me. I would cover my ears to bad words, afraid that I might morph into a pile of poop in the school playground. And I would tell the teachers when mean things were said to me, hoping that the word UGLY wouldn’t appear on my skin. Then I grew a little older and told my mother that I was pretty sure I didn’t understand her saying. “Words are magic seeds,” she explained. “Like the magic beans the good boy Jack planted to reach the skies. Only, these seeds don’t grow in the soil, but slowly within your mind. And as you grow, your mental garden grows with you, and the seeds planted by the mouths of others begin to grow inside you.” 

My mother was labelled crazy by others, but I now consider her a different kind of wise. It took me far too long to realize that though she lived in a world of her own, she had known things about our world that we refuse to see. In her world of witches, wizards, and words that planted mental flowers, was a joy that she tried to make me feel as a child. As a teenager, for a while, I tried to pretend that I was still entertained by the vague sayings and stories she told. But it all got old, and so did I. I began to want a world of my own and a life without her crazy in it. I moved out and got my own place without carpets of lava and couch spaceships. And in my own space of white walls and gray couches, I would uproot my mother’s words of madness from my mind. I had made a mistake. 

I made many mistakes. I made friends who, if they met my mother, would say she had the mind of a child. Yet, while she coped with our crazy world by jumping from couch to couch, they drank to escape it all. I would join them, believing that it was better to numb my mind with a poop ton of alcohol than to let wizards whisper in my ear. Then one night, at the bar, I met one; a wizard drinking a beer. With his corporate suit, and slicked back hair, there was no magic wand. But once we started dating, his whole classy act was gone. When he moved into my white and gray apartment, he became just like my mother. With his crazy for lava carpets and his need to smother me with his mad. Only, he was even more sad than she was and had hidden his wizard self within the black and white of suits. I would beg him to continue to hide his wizard self at home. 

Before he left me, he told me that it broke his heart to know that I, like too many in the world, had left my childhood joy behind me. And as he shut the door to my apartment, the repressed seeds began to grow inside me. The weeds of non-fiction fought with the flowers of fantasy as my heart pained for what I’d lost. I returned to my mother’s home, stumbling as my head turned and tossed, and the flowers, held in, sprouted from my ears and nose and sockets. I entered the house once full of giant elves and rockets to find my mother sitting silent and alone. As she plucked iris petals from my eyes, I thought of all the many seeds she’d sown in me since childhood. I thought of how much good she brought to my world and how I had exchanged it for one so bleak. I now understand that the magic words she had planted in my mental garden weren’t meant for me to suppress, but for me to share with the worlds of others and make the real world less of a mess. 

“The Seed” by Adana H.