Jenkins took me to a place where mother and child unite and find peace, answers, questions unanswered and togetherness in nature. With this book, I'm reminded of my deep love of nature fostered in much the same way as Jenkins fostered her son DJ. For myself, my connection with nature was born in the woods with my own Mom, backpacking on the Appalachian Trail, canoeing and portaging through Algonquin, Canada or back country camping under the stars in Maine or Vermont. My Mom was my reality rock and yet she was also my enemy in ways only a teenager can manage. Thanks to her, no matter what she was at any given time, when we were together, we were together in the woods. I recognized myself a strong young woman for the first time on the summit of Mount Katahdin. These reasons must be why this book connects with me so strongly.
The life of a Mom parallels the joys and hard truths of the natural world in so many ways. Jenkins beautifully weaves her own questions about life, her bitterness with certain relationships, personal struggles together with the natural environment around her, all in the company of her almost-teen DJ. In Jenkins' case, her natural world is Wisconsin, which I enjoyed learning about having never traveled there myself. Her prose maintains a fluidity and beauty that allows the reader to really feel the setting without lingering on anything too matter-of-fact for too long.
Throughout the book she talks briefly about life as a woman, a mother and a wife recalling specific events or instances which was many times familiar to me. The human experience and the parenting experience, like the natural world, contains many bits of joy and many bits of sadness. In the time I was reading this book, I'd attended two funerals of loved ones including my grandmother and by the time I finished the book, my Uncle was in the hospital with complications following a heart attack, given a 50/50 chance of survival. A portion of this book deals with death and obviously, that resonated with me very much.
Jenkins writes that "The entire forest is a composition of bits of organic matter that come from life feeding on death. Remnants of foxes, tadpoles, wild geraniums, and trout lilies had perhaps cycled through the people who lived near this place... every element that passed out of my body in the form of my son is now in use elsewhere." Pages later she writes, "My faith isn't that strong. Death can be stingless, but it doesn't always show up as a natural phenomenon of intellectual and spiritual beauty... I'm angry about terrorists and politicians who kill to demonstrate their power, and I won't find a way to think of murder and genocide as beautiful... The idea of life as a cycle, the reuse, the rebirth, and the constant freshness of new life mixed with the seasoned, I see the beauty and sense in this."
A book like this reminds me to get my own kids out into the forest more often, not only because it's good for them but because they'll learn things from nature in a greater, more powerful way than I could ever teach them within the walls of our home or along the pavement of our town. They'll learn things about spirituality, birth, death, family, survival and so on in a setting that is unconfined and very real.
One of the most beautiful passages for me reads, "My youngest offspring is leaving childhood. I've crossed over to middle age. My worth as a human is not based in reproduction; I will do no more to propel my genes into the future through childbirth. Biologically, if not spiritually, my raison d'etre is to care for and protect the earth, so that my life will flow and reside in future generations. I am a water woman who grew babies in the amniotic sea beneath my breath. I live in a chronologically advancing awareness of my final reconciliation with the earth."
I'm a Mom of four young children but one day, I'll have to let each of them go into the world. No matter how far or near this time any given mother is, it's something that lingers on our minds always. I found this passage particularly sad and gorgeous and amazing all at the same time. Mothers are the caretakers of the earth in the end, as we spend so much of our lives teaching our children how to live here on this planet.
