"...How Is Your Garden?"

Six years ago, someone left a simple question on my blog.

“Nice. How is your garden?”

I did not see it then.

In 2020, I was already separated. The decision had been made in July 2018. But separation did not mean distance. I was still living in his house -- and as time moved on, in a different room -- under the same roof.

There were no shouting matches. No slammed doors. No dramatic confrontations. Not with him. Not with my daughter. Not with my son. If anything, it was controlled. Civil. Quiet.

But quiet does not mean healthy.

By 2020, the garden was already strained. The development was swift -- like a story arc that grows more knotted instead of resolving. The erosion was slow, but steady. It flowed quietly down the slope until I realized I was living in something that felt suffocating.

Still, it was not yet shattered. It was heavy. Complicated. But standing.

My son knew first. He was already older when the separation unfolded, and I believed he was mature enough to understand the reality of what I was living through. I did not intend for secrets to exist between my children. And so, in time, I spoke to my daughter about my decision. She understood in a way that surprised me. With her tender heart, she said she had quietly known for some time that I was not happy.

To me, it felt like woman to woman. Adult to young adult. I waited until she was older. I did not ask her to choose. I did not force allegiance.

But I now understand that what feels like sharing to one person can feel like weight to another.

My son, now 27, believes I placed too much on her shoulders. He calls it trauma dumping. He believes I involved her in adult pain. Other words were used too -- clinical words. Abusive. Enabler. Even my own mother was described as someone who enabled behavior I never intended to be harmful.

I have sat with those words. I have turned them over in my mind. I do not claim perfection. I am human. I have made mistakes. But I do not recognize myself in the portrait that has been painted.

Before I left in December 2025, we had what was meant to be a family discussion.

First, it was just me and the children. There was no shouting. No chaos. The tone remained controlled. But the words were heavy. My son told me he saw me as a homewrecker. He said that in his eyes, I had been “dead” to him for years. He insisted that I had trauma dumped on his sister and that she needed therapy because of it.

Later, I spoke privately with their father. He told me that when I am not in the house, things feel happier. That perhaps I should consider living elsewhere.

That same evening, the four of us sat down again. The atmosphere remained restrained, but the message was unmistakable. My son said that if I wanted a relationship with him, I needed to seek therapy -- not as a suggestion, but as a condition.

There was no screaming. No dramatic rupture. Only words spoken calmly that carried more weight than raised voices ever could.

Shortly after, I left for the United States.

And yet, sometime after I left in December 2025, something shifted.

There was no conversation marking the change. No warning. Only the quiet realization that distance had hardened into something else.

And then came December 27, 2025.

Just days after Christmas.

That was the day my son blocked me on Facebook.

It did not happen after a fight. It did not follow confrontation. It happened quietly. A small action in the digital world, but it felt seismic in my heart. Not because of the platform, but because of what it symbolized.

It was a quiet closing of a door. No explanation. No final conversation. Only distance.

In the months that followed, I began to feel that the language used in that December conversation had settled into something permanent.

My daughter, who once laughed with me as we shared our heart stories, grew quieter too.

There were no dramatic words. No confrontation.

Only absence.

Not a single message asking how I am -- not even in the middle of rising health concerns that have required monitoring, tests, and strength I sometimes do not feel I have.

Perhaps she now sees those past conversations differently.

Perhaps what once felt like connection now feels like burden.

I do not know.

I only know that the silence feels complete.

And that is why today, if the person who asked that question in 2020 ever reads this -- know that the truth behind my reply is this: my garden has changed.

In 2020, it was already strained. Now it stands in a different landscape -- still rooted, still alive, but altered, carrying absence where warmth once lingered.

My life is not a fairy tale. If it belonged in a book, it would sit among the darker stories -- where woods are deep, lessons are carved slowly, and survival matters more than tidy endings.

But even in those stories, the garden does not disappear. It adapts. It finds new soil. It learns to bloom differently.

My garden has changed.

But it is still standing.

And for now -- that is truth.

___________________________  

If you would like to understand what God’s Bouquet means to me, you can find it waiting on the right side bar of this blog -- where I am still learning to bloom, even here.