The Watering Can
A Mother, A Daughter, Continuity and Conflicts
The battered old watering can sits unobtrusively in its spot on the corner shelf, below the ivy that I have never quite managed to kill. Each day, when the guilt from looking at my wilting tomatoes finally spurs me to action, I fill the can and water the plants on the balcony: tomatoes, peppers, basil, even a morning glory that insists on flowering in the afternoon. Those flowers sum up my relationship with plants — moments of beauty, but not when I expect them.
I can’t water plants without thinking of my mother. Our house was filled with plants: tubby cacti, towering Dieffenbachia, and a scraggly Charlie Brown-style pine that served as a quasi-Christmas tree, undecorated but presiding over a pile of gifts. Plants filled the house, and in summer they spilled onto the front porch.
Mom’s gardens dominated the back yard. Blooming hedges of lilacs and forsythias in the spring, a maple tree that turned deep crimson in the autumn, snowball bushes and rhododendrons all summer. Oak trees for shade, in those years before central air conditioning. And two large vegetable patches.
We all worked to make Mom’s vision a reality, digging up and planting in the spring, digging under in the autumn and of course watering, with a heavy rubber hose that was always tangled, throughout the hot summer. How I hated wrestling with that hose!
Mom talked to her plants every day, fed them special concoctions, and sprayed them with a mix of water, dish soap and hot pepper to keep bugs and birds off. They loved her back, with rich green leaves, a rainbow of flowers, and enough vegetables to feed us for the whole summer and, as preserves, for much of the winter.
I grew up, bought a house, planted a garden. Each spring, I hoped that this would be the year that my green thumb would appear, blossoming like the forsythia lining Mom’s back fence.
As a girl, I admired so much about my mother. Her intellect. The deft way she handled rude people. Her clothes. Her knitting and crocheting (she was a veritable blanket and baby bootie machine). The way she always kept the radio on, and didn’t mind if we sang off-key or got the words wrong. How she did what she set out to do, whether that was more schooling, starting her own profitable business, or exploring new cities on holidays.
Other aspects I resented: she cooked foods I didn’t like, and made me eat them anyway. She wouldn’t be played off against Dad to get what I wanted. She sometimes used cutting language to stop my complaining.
It was, in short, a healthy mother-daughter relationship. Even when we banged heads.
With time, I’ve grown to understand her a bit better. I learned that her relentless focus on organization was the only way to stay on top of ‘having it all.’ Her persistence was partly determination not to be proven wrong. Her high standards for my grades and behavior gave me the opportunity to do whatever I wanted to do in life.
Many of these characteristics are now mine, too. I insist on plugging along towards my goals, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly, regardless of what anyone else says. I am the list queen, a productivity evangelist. And I constantly pursue new knowledge, whether via travel, meeting new people, online courses, or voracious reading. I’ve learned to knit and crochet, though nowhere to her level.
In some ways, I have surpassed my mother’s accomplishments. In others, I am but a pale shadow.
Still, the watering can waits, taunting me with the idea that my plants will never grow like hers. Sure, I have those reliable ivy plants. Loyal, nearly indestructible, they recover even if I forget to water them for 3 weeks. I even managed to keep an African violet alive for 3 years — barely, but alive. But the vegetables still elude me. I can harvest a few tomatoes. I hope that this year’s sweet pepper experiment is not a total failure. But those sturdy stems, the variety of colours and textures, the bountiful harvest that Mom coaxed from her garden year after year? Not here. Not yet.
Picking up my watering can once again, I remind myself that I do not have to be my mother. That what I have of her is enough. That those few tomatoes, tasting like my childhood summers, are proof that I did inherit some of her garden skills. That Mom will always be Mom, and I will always be me, and while we will always be similar, we will never be the same.
And that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
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