Lies that you tell yourself for a long time grow roots in your mind.
In the Notes feed the other day, I quoted a line about lies from a novel I just read, and that got me thinking about roots.
This piece grew from
’s Tuesday Storyteller Challenge called BREAKING BONDS – Tell the story of an ancestor who chose a different path, leaving behind family, tradition, or expectation.Someone in my tree chose to remain silent.
A lie of omission.
Or the seed of a lie planted right down at the base of the tree.
Speaking of trees, the roots go deep and sometimes twist into a tangled mess. And it can then be difficult for the tree to take up nutrients through these broken bonds in the root system.
Difficult but possible.
This ancestor threw a seed to nearby ground and let a shoot grow under someone else’s care, though that person also had to remain silent and pretend the growth was in its rightful place.
And, you know, it did grow rather right and beautiful despite the absence of the original gardener.
While some would call this ancestor neglectful, others understood the reasoning behind the broken bond. That other tree needed much more tending, and that one grew large, taking up time & effort. A lifetime of effort.
The caretaker of this small seedling watered and fertilized to the point where it grew very strong tendrils that wrapped around the roots of its new tree and held on tight, sort of grafting into something that looked like it belonged there.
Soon, everyone forgot about the ancestor who remained absent.
Everyone except the co-conspirator in the lie. That person worked until fingers were raw, covering roots and digging weeds until fatigue set in, as it always will after a lifetime of hiding.
To quote Nadia Hashimi again from her novel, A House Without Windows:
“Nothing stays buried.” Especially “where people are always sticking their hands into the dirt and trying to dig things up.”
And dig is what I did in recent years.
When I started investigating family records, there was a broken branch in the tree. At first, I had no knowledge to justify this anomaly, but when you examine the root system, you shed light on what you see above ground. The roots had become exposed after all this time and after the death of the planters who once cared.
This ancestor not only had reasons to leave, like other relationships to nourish, but also an accomplice who made the action feasible.
And possibly no conscious knowledge of the severed connection . . . at least after repeating the lie over & over until it spread deep into the ground and anchored itself.
One broken bond does not kill the whole tree.
Sometimes it allows for better growth in two separate trees.
If you find yourself standing on “the frothy near edge of family stories” too, curious about why we are drawn to write, check out my Welcome Page and see how you might climb out of the dirt with me and stand in the sun.
I absolutely love your use of metaphors! You are an absolute master of the metaphor!