I loved reading this. It’s funny to me because as a very young girl, I know I had the Secret Garden, but I don’t remember if I read it or not. I feel like I read it over and over. When I started reading it for my boys this last year, the images of it in my bedroom on a shelf came back to me. I remember holding it in my hands and having a very strange relationship to the book—. As I was reading this, it reminded me of all the fairytales told in a more modern setting. Always the young girl, maiden, losing her own mother. And then she has to pass some sort of test to uncover the meaning of life/who she is/etc. This post reminded me that in the Secret Garden she is tended to by The Mother. When her heart is hardened, never mothered by her own mother, then she returns to the Earth Mother for her nourishment. Now it makes sense why I was torn by this book as a girl. I lacked birth mother mothering as a child, and subconsciously knew, that we all have to be a daughter of the Earth, a little wild, not always strictly “safe,” but always loved and welcomed to be part of life’s seasons and unfolding. In nature, all parts of us are allowed-Mary’s undesirable traits were never scorned by Mother Nature. She was in her own Winter, just like Earth. You opened so much up here for me with this share. Thank you.
I loved reading this. It’s funny to me because as a very young girl, I know I had the Secret Garden, but I don’t remember if I read it or not. I feel like I read it over and over. When I started reading it for my boys this last year, the images of it in my bedroom on a shelf came back to me. I remember holding it in my hands and having a very strange relationship to the book—. As I was reading this, it reminded me of all the fairytales told in a more modern setting. Always the young girl, maiden, losing her own mother. And then she has to pass some sort of test to uncover the meaning of life/who she is/etc. This post reminded me that in the Secret Garden she is tended to by The Mother. When her heart is hardened, never mothered by her own mother, then she returns to the Earth Mother for her nourishment. Now it makes sense why I was torn by this book as a girl. I lacked birth mother mothering as a child, and subconsciously knew, that we all have to be a daughter of the Earth, a little wild, not always strictly “safe,” but always loved and welcomed to be part of life’s seasons and unfolding. In nature, all parts of us are allowed-Mary’s undesirable traits were never scorned by Mother Nature. She was in her own Winter, just like Earth. You opened so much up here for me with this share. Thank you.