Sunflower House
Sunflower House reveals the complex dynamic of a child watching and experiencing their parent inside of an abusive system.
I've been steeped in my childhood trauma the last few weeks, but today, things feel productive. Encountering the grief, confusion, and earth-shattering despair I felt as a child doesn't seem like a reliving of the experience in the way it has before. Instead, I'm working something out of my system like I haven’t been able to in the past. Honestly, I think it's because I've been able to rely on people who have the skills to support me.
Recently, I was thinking about the rotted-out tree stump in the front yard of our family’s Pennsylvania row home. To remove it would've required some heavy equipment and we were renters, so we were stuck with it. My mom tried every year to beautify the stump with flowers, and we'd look through the bulb catalog and choose them together. They never really took. It always just looked like a rotted-out tree stump with flowers struggling in it.
In retrospect, it's interesting to me that she never thought to cultivate mushrooms. After all, the things in nature that are dead must rot in order to free up resources for new life. Flowers can decorate, but a stump will always be a stump until it’s reclaimed by the earth’s unglamorous agents of change.
Not having considered this, she was always on a mission to make shitty things look better, usually involving some unwieldy and unrealistic plan involving the growth of flowers.
The most involved iteration of this project occurred when we lived in South Dakota. Our backyard was something like 30 feet deep with regular grass, and the acres extending behind our house were covered in heavy brush. Our Jack Russell terrier, Guy, was delighted to roam our expansive backyard as well as the neighboring corn and soybean fields during the day and come back to us at dusk, sometimes with a delicate limp from an electric fence shock.
My mother was dead-set on bringing color to this monochrome landscape with a "sunflower house." It involved a complex system of wiring and strategically planted and guided sunflowers. On our drives back home from trips to Sioux Falls, we'd stop at landscaping stores, where she'd lust over all the plants and accessories and decorations she wanted to turn into projects.
She never succeeded in getting the sunflower house going, though. I couldn't tell you if it's because she lacked skill or knowledge, discipline in taking care, or just unlucky with very unfriendly soil and climate conditions for the plants she wanted to grow. But I always came to associate her compulsion to beautify things, whether successful or not, with her yearning for heaven.
Heaven, in fact, is what she invoked when my siblings and I were very little and afraid of thunderstorms. I remember crying while watching Bambi and associating tears with my parents' readings of Revelation 21, where the author says that when the new Jerusalem comes down from heaven and sets the earth as its new seat, God would wipe every tear from our eyes.
As resentful as I remain toward my mother, and as much as I truly am filled with disgust and hatred for her because of the ways she enabled and participated in my father's abuse, I can look back now and see that, even as she did her best to nurture us in totally hostile conditions, she seemed to want us to understand that all suffering is ultimately redeemed by beauty.
I don't personally believe this to be true, but it helps me understand why people dig their nails into the mythos of heaven. It is often the case that justice is never served to those who need and deserve it most in this world. But if you can instill the belief that justice always comes in an invisible realm for which there's no evidence, you can perhaps keep a woman alive for another day in which she can bear more soldiers for the cause of Christendom, and get her to complain a little less about her living and working conditions.
For me, my reframe around the sunflower house is a wish for an end to authoritarianism. The most compassionate way I've been able to conceptualize my mother as a human adult is as a prisoner: a prisoner to the power differentials and sadomasochism of her own family; a prisoner to white supremacist hetero-patriarchy; a prisoner to a uniquely dangerous and malevolent man.
In a way, I admire her commitment to the thankless work of cultivating beauty in ugly spaces simply because it needed doing. It still needs doing. I just wish that, in both gardening and parenting, she would have come to understand that the skill of nurturing life depends largely on knowing how to—and gaining the means to—provide “good enough” conditions and care for vulnerable things to grow, not just covering up the unseemly parts of transformation with prettiness.
I think, too, that perhaps she wanted me to be a flower when I was always more of a mushroom.
Karl Saint Lucy is a songwriter, composer, and vocalist living in The Bronx. Karl is the songwriter, a co-composer (with music producer Marius de Vries), and a co-producer of A24's first movie musical, F**king Identical Twins, directed by Larry Charles, which stars Megan Thee Stallion in her first feature film. Saint Lucy was a featured soloist on John Cameron Mitchell's Anthem: Homunculus musical podcast by Luminary Originals and was an alto finalist for the GRAMMY Award-winning men's choir, Chanticleer, in 2017. Karl's father, Michael Johnson, is the prime suspect in the unsolved 1990 murder of Elizabeth Mackintosh on the campus of Covenant Theological Seminary.