The tulip poplar was an excellent listener.
Protective and nurturing, it shaded the windows of the bedroom I shared with Missi, two years older, and Lydia, four years younger.
Towering and expansive, it overheard our silly conversations and sympathized in our small dreams, disappointments, and pleasures.
We slept in a set of pine bunk beds with a trundle bed that we had helped Dad build in the garage in Texas when I was probably four. I remember sanding the bedframe for hours with successively smaller grit sandpaper, glorying in the satisfaction of a repetitive task at which I could succeed.
Missi had preemptively claimed the top bunk the minute the idea of a bunk bed was floated for the very first time, and although I protested wholeheartedly, proposing myriad possible shared arrangements such as trading nights, weeks, months, or years in the top bunk, it was her exclusive domain. I expected that over time my parents would insist that some equitable arrangement should be reached, but for whatever reason, they never engaged my pleas for arbitration, and Missi slept in the top bunk until we finally passed the bunk beds on to our younger sisters ten years later.
We played all sorts of delightful games in these bunk beds like spitting wars—which is exactly what it sounds like. We would hang our heads out of bed, Missi grinning down at me and I looking up at her; on the count of three, volleys of saliva were dispatched rapid-fire until one of us gave up. You can imagine which of us always got the worst of that exchange.
She would also dangle her treasured, threadbare, pink-faded-to-gray blanket over the edge of her bed, and I was supposed to try to snatch another thread from it as she twirled and danced it just out of my reach.
The tulip poplar stood in the gap between outdoors and indoors. Outdoors was almost always idyllic. Indoors was increasingly not.
Outdoors, it filled the right side of my peripheral vision as I swung on long, leisurely afternoons awash in soft Virginia sunshine. I admired its stately branches filtering sunlight in flickering shafts of gold and gray. It was splendid and complete, glorious and content.
Indoors, I often viewed its broad leaves through lashes heavy with tears. Alone and feeling misunderstood, I longed to be folded into its fresh, green embrace. When I would finally leave my bed to rejoin the family after confiding in the tulip tree, I felt known, comforted, validated.
Outdoors, roaming under its canopy, I gathered its debris of bruised and fallen blossoms feeling a kinship with this tree. It too had been trampled under inadvertent feet. It too grew defenses, fierce claws bared in fall and winter. It too sometimes grew complacent, dropping its winter guard and displaying blossoms full-throated in the joy of life.
The tulip tree witnessed my transformation into a late riser.
Frequently, we rang in Saturday mornings with a festival of laughter and roughhousing in my parents’ bed. Mom was usually up already, curling her hair in the bathroom down the hall or observing from a rocking chair as she nursed the newest addition to the family, but Dad would linger in bed to tickle and tease and play.
At first, I was a rambunctious, enthusiastic, and wholehearted participant in these festivals, but I began to realize that, invariably, the raucous, delightful occasion would come to an abrupt halt when, in my excitement or in the throes of being tickled, I would flail and accidentally injure a younger sibling. The mood would transform instantly, and we were summarily dismissed. The roughhousing was over.
Ashamed and silent, I would return to my room to cry hot tears and wonder—why was it always me? As far as I could tell, the other kids weren’t more careful than me, but it almost always seemed to be my actions that were the catalyst for anger and the end. I would berate myself for my clumsiness, my abandon, and then I would resolve to be more careful next time. To hold back. To be like the others. To not mess up.
When the following Saturday rolled around, once again, overinvested and overinvolved, I would elbow or kick a sibling, and the fun was over, glee instantly replaced by shame.
Finally, I committed to never join another roughhousing session. On Saturdays I would linger in bed listening to the melee in my parents’ bedroom just down the hall from mine. I learned to savor the feel of shifting to the cool side of the pillow, of stretching my toes down to a fresh patch of sheets, of the morning sunlight streaming through the tulip tree.
Soon it wasn’t only Saturdays. My blankets became my armor, my best defense against the uncertainties of shifting moods and expectations.
My pride would prick when the family began to call me lazy, a sleepyhead, a sluggard. But I was content with my choice. My bed was safe.
The tulip tree was my confidante when no one else would listen.
As the pressures of raising six young children led my family to begin implementing parenting systems, I remember frequently being sent to my room as a consequence for behavior deemed unacceptable and feeling that if only Mom or Dad understood what I had meant, I wouldn’t be there. Alone with the tulip tree, I would choke out explanations between sobs, slowly breathing more steadily as I began to feel known.
One incident stands out. At the dining room table, my family introduced The 21 Rules of This House, a document created by Gregg and Josh Harris and rapidly appearing on the refrigerators of everyone in our circle. My parents went over each rule and the consequences for breaking it, and then dismissed us.
Caught up in (unreasoning) excitement about the new rules, I ran pell-mell in a circle around the house, from dining room to living room to kitchen, back to the dining room, yelling at the top of my voice in a happy, raucous, wordless squawk.
Upon my return to the dining room, I was informed that I had broken rule number five: “We speak quietly and respectfully with one another.” I was spanked and sent to my room.
The sense of injustice stung far more than the spanking. I wasn’t being bad. I wasn’t yelling at someone. I was just happy, I sobbed into my pillow under the sympathetic gaze of the tulip tree.
I will always love tulip trees. For their courage—standing taller than everyone around them. For their foliage—broad, welcoming, open. For their flowers—delicate, bright, and vulnerable. For their cones—fierce, protective, determined.
For the way they kept a little girl’s secrets and offered her unfailing companionship in a world she could no longer understand, in which consequences began to carry more weight than relationship and suddenly what mattered far more than why.
Rachel Brown
enjoys sipping tea, savoring good books, and spending time outside.
She is daily inspired to live more deeply and love more fully by her husband and two children.
One Response
Beautiful. And so sad. I k ow I did the same with my kids. For which I’ve apologized profusely, and frequently. Patriarchy caused so much damage, not only to the kids, but us women-wife, caught in the middle. May God always redeem, because going back and fully rebelling out of that movement is not an option. Sigh!