My Theory of Chaos and Hollyhocks
Someone once told me that if you grow up in a chaotic household, you have difficulty making long-term plans or counting on the future. I didn’t need to be convinced. I grew up with turmoil baked into my DNA. My father was at war in the Pacific for the first two years of my life, and my mother and I shuttled between grandparents in different towns. Even after he returned, my father seemed like a stranger who just lived in our house. He had difficulty holding a job and when he was home, he wasn’t really present. It wasn’t until recently that I realized he might be suffering from a form of PTSD. My mother was the steady breadwinner, but she was plagued by depression and what was referred to in quiet tones as “spells.” Eventually, my father packed his bags and disappeared from our lives even though he lived just a few miles away. My mother was never the same, and our small family seemed to tumble untethered through space.
My little brother jokes that we were raised by wolves, and in a sense we were. No one encouraged us to dare or dream or even have a modest plan for stepping into adulthood. That chaotic beginning affected all the middles to come in our lives in various ways.
Maybe it’s why I’m amazed when I hear people planning vacations a year in advance, buying tickets on what seems to me to be a wish and a prayer. How can you count on it, I marvel? Who knows what could happen?
Maybe it’s why I had trouble trusting in tomorrow enough to hang curtains in all the places I lived as a single mother. Why bother, since you never knew what could happen. It’s only lately that I’ve realized how that involuntary reaction affects my ability to make decisions, to move forward. As an example, I’ve wanted hollyhocks in my yard for a long time, especially the ones so dark they look like black velvet, but I waited too long to buy seeds again this year. After all, there was a pandemic. I promised myself that I would definitely order seeds next spring…and then I decided to order them now, almost a year ahead. I wanted a tiny tangible way to acknowledge that even though life can be precarious and unpredictable, the universe can also be kind and welcoming. That it’s never too late to grow, to commit to the uncertain future, to believe that there could be hollyhocks to come home to.
Nikki Hardin is a writer of stories, musings, and memories. Her poetry has been published in Riverteeth Journal. She was the founder and publisher of skirt!, a monthly women’s magazine in Charleston, South Carolina. You can reach her at nikki@thedailynikki.com.