The Crepening

Crepe myrtles are trees that flower in late summer.

Sorry if you already know that. I don’t like to assume people don’t know things, but if you don’t and I don’t say, then this story won’t make much sense.

Besides, it’s a huge understatement. Saying crepe myrtles are trees that flower is like saying cats are kinda jerks sometimes. Cats are supermassive arseholes with knives strapped to their feet who can’t even show love without stab-kneading you in soft bits, and crepe myrtles are trees that explode annually. They are trees that take sunlight, water and decomposing things and turn them into pure, raging joy. They are trees that never grew out of being glorious seven-year-old girls.

It’s very important we establish this up front.

(I mean, yes, you can get them in other colours, but why would you?)

Crepe myrtles as so completely, inspiringly, unapologetically extra that I simply had to have one in my garden the moment I had a garden to put one in.

I looked it up, and found the best planting time for them is winter when the tree is dormant as this is least disruptive for the tree. So, the first winter in our own house with our own garden, we got a crepe myrtle.

And waited for spring.

And waited.

And waited.

We watched all the other crepe myrtles in our area get leaves, then buds, then flower. Ours did not.

It was dead. We had killed it. We had failed.

Incidentally, we planted this tree just after my first miscarriage.

Bare trees and grey skies and brown, wet leaves in gutters worked their way into my brain and got muddled up with the pain already in there. For years, winter felt like miscarrying, even though out of our four miscarriages only two happened in winter.

I have that kind of brain. A brain that makes connections that aren’t real, a brain that always tells stories to itself, a brain that organises events and ideas and people into pleasing arrangements, a brain that tries to guess at endings.

It’s a dangerous brain to have when you plant a tree after a miscarriage.

We left the crepe myrtle in the ground all through summer, giving it every chance we had to give, hoping it was just a late bloomer. It wasn’t.

One day, my mum visited. She doesn’t visit that often because I don’t live near my parents, so she had only heard about the crepe myrtle over the phone.

… I probably need to take a moment to tell you that by this point I had got pregnant again, found out it was twins, and miscarried again. One of the summer miscarriages. This conversation with my mum happened not long after I wrote Expecting, and I was in a funny headspace. Not only can my humour tarnish down a few shades of dark when I’m in a funny headspace, but remember how my brain likes to make groundless connections? Right.

My mum has never really got my humour.

I don’t know why. All you have to understand to get me is that most of what I say is part a joke and part not a joke. To me, that seems an accurate and healthy way to get by in a world that is both devoid of all meaning and totally made out of consequences. However, some people never seem to see the joke part, and other people never seem to see the not-joke part, and all this is to say that I have, etched on my memory banks, an ever-growing collection of funny-startled-horrified looks people give me in response to things that, to me at least, are completely fine or even funny.

This one was a doozy.

Interestingly, we noticed the nursery had a whole bunch of dead crepe myrtles set aside. We guessed they probably had a dodgy shipping of them, and the first one probably came to us dead, but no one realised because it was the middle of winter and it was supposed to look dead. It wasn’t our fault it never grew.

But it didn’t matter anymore, because we had Crepe Myrtle 2: Electric Boogaloo.

We planted it in late summer, and it had leaves. Therefore, we knew it was alive when it went into the ground, so we were already off to a great start.

We didn’t expect much from it that first season, and it didn’t do much beyond stay alive. It dropped the leaves in winter (I got pregnant again, I miscarried again), it grew them back in spring.

… only not very many.

There was a drought, so we made sure it got it extra water, but it just wouldn’t liven up. It grew buds, but a whole month later than the other crepe myrtles around the neighbourhood, and again, not very many.

We watched and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And then there was a heatwave, and the few buds it had frizzled and fell off.

Fast forward to spring.

We were ready for it. We gave it fertiliser. (I got pregnant again).

It grew leaves. (I miscarried again).

We nurtured it through heatwaves.

It grew buds. (A fire tore through the area, but did not reach us).

Lots of buds.

Covered in buds.

We watched and waited for the crepening I had been counting on for years.

And waited.

And waited.

For SO LONG. It was just a ridiculous amount of waiting. This tree nursed those buds. I checked them every day for over a month, compared them obsessively to every other crepe myrtle, waiting for them to finally …

About a year later, I got pregnant again, but this time I carried to term and had a baby. In the middle of winter.

I wrote most of this back then, just in case. My stupid brain wanted things to work out like a story. The crepe myrtle would explode to life, and I would have a baby. It sort of happened. The tree made a couple of flowers, and I did have a baby. But it wasn’t … right. The crepe myrtle and my brain’s story had parted ways, separated by reality.

This isn’t a story about miscarriage, although it has them in it. This isn’t a story about regeneration, or about how everything works out, because it doesn’t always. It isn’t a story about how things are connected, because they’re not. It isn’t even a story about how I hate winter, because I don’t. Winter has transformed into birthday parties and amateur animal-themed cakes and memories of tiny baby snuggles.

There is no deeper meaning. Things just happen and you cope (or not). My brain might make connections, but I don’t have to believe them.

While my wallflower crepe myrtle has been doing its pleasant but unobtrusive thing, my baby grew up. She’s almost four now, and she has always liked flowers. As a baby she would try to eat them. As a toddler she would shred them, until she got a little more imagination and then she would strip the garden so she could pretend to feed them to animals (usually sharks). She will start kindy soon, and now when she picks flowers, she puts them in jars or gives them to people.

I pulled this little story out of my ‘nah, not that one’ folder because this year, seven years after we planted it, Crepe Myrtle 2 finally, properly, no-holds-barred, well-and-truly Electric Boogalooed.

Incidentally, I’ll be having another baby this winter.