The Pomegranate Tree
There is a pomegranate tree on the hill in our backyard that my daughter's dad planted when she was thirteen. She is now twenty-one and all grown up.
Her dad and I have a complicated past that is quite a bit older than the tree. We were together for ten years before I became pregnant. I already had two sons and didn’t want to be a single mom again, so I waited. Having a child of his own was important to him and age was becoming a factor, so we got pregnant. When I was two months pregnant, he met someone else. We haven't been together during her life. This is one of those moments I thought to myself, God laughs loudest when we are busy making plans.
What we eventually figured out was how to raise her together. It took time, and it wasn’t simple at first. Somewhere along the way, we found our way and figured out how to remain friends. Raising her was more important than everything else, and eventually I made peace with the fact that if he wasn't happy with me and someone else made him happy, he deserved to be happy.
At the time, I was devastated and, more than anything, scared. I didn’t see it coming. I had started at a new company shortly before becoming pregnant. I had taken a much lower salary for the possibility of a better future and didn't feel secure. Suddenly I was going to have a baby alone, and I didn't know how I was going to pay for childcare and take care of my sons from a previous marriage, the baby and myself. I had been a single mother before. I hadn't planned on doing it again.
When it was happening, it felt like my life was falling apart and I didn’t know where the bottom was. I can now say it was one of the best things that happened to me. I couldn't see that while I was going through it.
The job that I worried wouldn't provide enough for us did. It changed my life financially and gave me opportunities I likely would not have had otherwise. My life changed in other ways too. I raised my children, met my partner nearly a decade later and he came with three girls that became my daughters and I had the privilege of helping raise. I couldn't have imagined any of it when I was sitting there wondering how I was going to afford childcare.
My daughter's dad planted a pomegranate tree at my home many years later.
I had already lived here for about seven years by then. My daughter was growing up here, and the trees around the house were becoming part of the history of our family. I love trees for that reason. You plant them at one point in your life, and they become part of your life and your family's story.
Our pomegranate tree has not exactly been an overachiever. Until this year, the annual harvest was somewhere between zero and one pomegranate.
One.
This made the pomegranate considerably more important than perhaps one piece of fruit deserved to be. We would discuss it and wait to see what the tree would bring. My partner would decide when it was ready because apparently he has knowledge the rest of us do not. Then we would cut it open and enjoy it. We love pomegranates in this house, which made the tree's refusal to produce more than one disappointing.
This year, something changed. There are pomegranates.
Plural.
My partner changed the watering and added fertilizer. Maybe that helped. Perhaps the tree needed more time. I don’t actually know.
The pomegranates aren't ready yet. I keep admiring them anyway. Whether we will actually get to eat them is another question. There is still
wildlife to contend with, and I don't mind when they help themselves to what we have growing.
Seeing more than one pomegranate on a tree that gave us almost none for years brings me joy. Maybe delight is a better word.
I love knowing the history of the tree and remembering that my daughter was thirteen when it was planted. Which brings me back to a memory from after her thirteenth birthday. My sister sent her dad and me a text telling us she was proud of who we had grown into and how we had raised our daughter together.
She is twenty-one now.
Her dad and I have grown in ways neither of us could have imagined when our life together ended. My partner now tends a tree planted by the man I once thought I would spend my life with. None of this feels awkward to any of us.
It feels like our family.
Families accumulate history in unexpected places. In photographs, houses, the recipes we make year over year and stories we have heard so many times that sometimes we forget they are part of who we are.
On the hill in my backyard, a tree was planted, a girl grew up and people found different ways to remain connected and in each other's lives.
For years, we got one pomegranate.
Then one fall, I walked outside and discovered there were more.