Loss

Published on December 1st, 2023 | by Starr Davis

2

I Lost Custody of My Baby and Went to Buy Plants

I am disoriented being in public without my toddler. I keep looking over my shoulder at my empty grocery cart as if her legs swing impatiently in the metal seat. I walk through Walmart’s gardening section, looking at all the dying pothos marked down for sale. I stroll around to take a look. Maybe I have always had an affinity for dying things. The way a child sees a dying bird and discovers the beautifully primitive feeling of grief. I see a dying thing and want to open my arms, my wallet, my legs. The yellowish leaves and browning tips of some of them remind me of myself. I, too, am fading. I look at another, the glosslessness is giving Ye in his sunken place. I carefully try to untangle the leaves of the pothos plant, its hanging thread resembling a twisted rope of lies, a gentle mess that takes faith and patience to unweave. I keep looping and unlooping each time I think I free one of the vines, another caught, and then the madness begins again. After a few minutes without any luck, it starts to become an obsession, and I begin to cry. In all my invisibility, no one sees, no one knows, or stops to care. After all, they are only pothos, relentless wicked dream chasers, built for suffrage that take forever to die.

At Walmart, all the dead plants are the furthest away from the sunspots. I want to complain to someone. I decide against it. I am no Karen, no white woman, no one important at all. Although the sun shines each day in Texas, in that second, I just miss the sunlight. Back when I could feel. I miss my daughter but am not allowed to miss her. I cannot scream, cry, or break. I cannot throw one of her tantrums. Although I have the excuse, I lack the pigment.

Weeks ago, after another court date, I came across a man’s profile on a dating website, whose profile was a photo of him with the sun on his face. I swiped left because his profile admitted he had one child and was a great father. He messaged me instantly. On the phone, he tells me his story about not seeing his son, and being in another place all alone without him. We have a trauma bond. I miss my daughter. He misses his son. I became his mother. And he, my father. When the first argument comes, he runs, and I let him. I miss my daughter. He misses his son. We spiral into wormholes; a place where only noncustodial parents go. In that place, I unlearned his name and removed myself from the dating app. He blocks my number and turns my thumb of the sky-blue bubbles, green. I quickly learned I did not need a man. I need more plants.

My friends are worried I will go crazy. A woman on a moms-without-custody Facebook forum says she is giving up, “He can have the kids, I just want my life back after all this fighting.” Another one chimes in, “That usually teaches them. Go start a new family and they will come back to pin them back on you!” Another, “I am out of money, out of strength, I pray my daughter comes back to me one day or in another life, but I just can’t anymore.”

I deleted my Facebook. I went to buy plants. A West Elm. Just as tall as my daughter, just as wild, just as thirsty. There is not a lot of sun in my new one-bedroom apartment. I stick it in the only corner the sun visits from time to time. I wanted the tree to go in my room, next to my daughter’s toy basket, so that its shadow could outline a version of her. I tell my friends not to worry. Black women are allowed to be crazy. It is the one thing I can do without doing.

I bought my first plant years ago when I was single, child-free, and living alone in a Bronx studio apartment. A peaceful lily. It was a wild forest green, an elegant plant. I had no real reason for purchasing the lily, except it looked like it belonged on my bookshelf. It was no different than choosing a book at a bookstore. I quickly learned you cannot choose a plant by its appearance just as you should not choose a book by its cover. Minus the proper care, or direct understanding of what it needed, there was no peace for the peaceful lily. It was beautiful for one week then it died.

Its death tormented me. One leaf at a time, I watched it crumble. I watered it. I moved it. I sat it on the windowsill, directly in the sun. When my cat started to munch its leaves, I moved it back to its original place. After that it was ceremonial. A friend of mine told me to take it back to Home Depot and they will give me another plant since that one died way too soon. I put the plant in a shopper’s bag carefully, no different than sitting my daughter in her car seat for the first time, I used both hands and sighed deeply once it was in. I took it back to the garden’s section. An older Black man with a gold hoop earring stopped to help me. I told him about my dead plant. He lifted it out of the bag and examined it as I blabbed on and on about everything I did. He laughed at me. This was not just any laugh. It vibrated. It shook the innermost part of me that was fatherless. I felt conviction and knew I had done something wrong. “Follow me,” he said, walking over to a counter.

At the counter, he shook out the lily from its pot. The soil was everywhere. He did not seem to care as he held up the lily by the neck. It hurt to watch him grab the plant this way. I coaxed myself, it is only a plant, and though we had not known each other long she meant something to me.  I looked at the exposed roots. “You see that?” he asked, exposing the sorry roots. I nodded, waiting. “You did not change the pot, you see…” he sat down the plant and grabbed the pot, “It has no holes at the bottom for air, when you get a plant you gotta pop this off, it exposes the holes so the roots will breathe, baby. See it suffocated.” I shook my head, “I killed it.” He laughed again but with empathy and said, “Yeah but I can tell you didn’t mean to.”

After my personal pandemic, when I ended my relationship with my child’s father, my friend’s mother gifted me a collection of plants from her garden. I was settling into a short time of peace I did not foresee. A time when it was just me and my baby, no different than a mama lion disappearing with her cubs to nurse, strengthen, and focus on her new life. It was restoration. Many women in my family had been or were single moms, so I was surrounded and empowered by their advice and community. I knew it took a village and I was happy to finally have one after so many years of doing life on my own. I had told my best friend that every plant I ever had, died. I have no idea why her mom found me suitable. But unlike the last time, I looked at my newborn daughter’s thirsting eyes and knew I could care for something other than myself. I knew whatever I did not have before, I had now. Three giant pothos potted on the patio, two other carefree pothos hanging in the sunroom (I had to hang them because the baby attempted to swing from the vines like Tarzan), two lady fingers arrogantly perched on the kitchen table, and our dragon tree which stood Godlike near my writing desk. The plants grew. The baby grew. My body and mind were restored from postpartum. It was a time I felt closest to God. Everything around me was in bloom. And like all the other times in my life, when I thought everything was going well, I was served with custody papers. From there it was a downward spiral into a loss of everything I worked to grow.

A mother is just another word for martyr. Until that moment, I had never experienced being involved in a legal case. The only accusation I had ever faced was loving too intensely, too deeply, too early. The reason behind my decision to fight was my unwavering belief in the importance of family. Growing up in a single-parent household, with my father serving a 10-year prison sentence, I had always yearned for my children to have a different upbringing. As a result, I had to suppress any fears within me, whether it was the fear of losing, the fear of never being reunited with her again, or simply the fear of the unknown. And maybe, motherhood is truly, a series of deaths and births. Maybe it will always be this way.

Several days before her father retrieved her, I took her to a park on a rainy day where there were puddles and mud. I remember walking hand-in-hand with her toward the grassy field where she would run on sunny days. I took off her shoes and socks. Her brown toes blended with the brown Earth that hugged her tiny foot and nearly pulled her in. I wanted her to feel the mud underneath her feet. One day, she would need to know how to walk in it. How to run in it. She laughed and splashed around in the mud. Both us, unafraid to whether a storm.

Walking out of Walmart with my two pathos under each arm could not replace the weight of my daughter who was not there on my hip, but it came very close. She learned to grow and love our plants. Each morning, she would run (because she never walked), to the windows to help me open the shades. We would greet each plant and spend time feeling for the ones who were thirsty. I would let her water the plants, and tell her when she over-watered, “Careful baby, don’t drown them, okay?” And her response, a very spirited, OK!!! Would make me laugh.

Maybe she will return to me, a tree, a rose bush, the prettiest poinsettia, or a brave begonia in new wisdom. Maybe, she will return to me sharp as a thorned rose, more beautiful, more dangerous. This is less than a prayer and more so, an intercession that she returns unscathed.

The days our world changed, or the days our world is still changing, are hard and tiresome. I am buying plants when I should be saving every penny for my attorney. Family court is a slow process. But like all things, a process nevertheless. I have learned that losing custody of anything is easy when your body does not make the law. I was buying plants, baby formula, and paying for therapy while he was plotting endlessly to seek revenge. Revenge for uprooting; repotting.

There are no winners in family court, only hurt, confused, and emotional parents who are trapped living out their mistakes. I do not believe I made any mistakes in choosing to shelter myself and my child from harm’s way. I do not believe I am wrong for buying plants either. I think my biggest crime yet, is not having known where the roots were or where they are now. Maybe when I find that things will come into alignment with time and the sun’s warmth.

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About the Author

Starr Davis is a talented writer and devoted mother whose works have been showcased in numerous literary platforms, including The Kenyon Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the Rumpus, and Catapult. She is recognized as a fellow at The Luminary, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and PEN America. Starr serves as the creative nonfiction editor for TriQuarterly and also as a columnist for Mama’s Writing at Raising Mothers. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the City College of New York and a BA in journalism and creative writing from the University of Akron. Starr’s personal-political writing has garnered accolades and landed her reviews in Longreads ‘Top 5 Longreads of the Week.’ She has been nominated for prestigious literary awards such as the Pushcart Prize in poetry and creative nonfiction, Best of the Net, and Best American Essays. Currently, Starr resides in Houston, Texas, where she actively advocates for justice and volunteers with organizations that empower women.



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