Whenever I was angry, my mother told me to go hug a tree. I always thought that was her way of saying “go away” since she was one of those type of mothers who would be cold, distant, and often verbally aggressive towards me. When I had a child myself, I didn’t learn a better way of handling her temper tantrums. The first time I said it towards my daughter (five at the time), she ran outside and hugged this oak growing on our front lawn. She instantly calmed down, apologized, and went about her day. Strange, but I continued to tell her “go hug a tree” whenever she was having one of her fits. At some point, I didn’t have to. She just did it. She wrapped her tiny arms around the trunk of that oak tree.
One afternoon, she returned from high school, threw her backpack down, growled, and went out to the front lawn. I watched her from the living room window talking to the plant. She was saying something about a boy who wasn’t talking to her at school. Even though she expressed her love to him, he still ignored her. He even started dating her best friend, which, honestly, I didn’t know she had. My daughter was a quiet kid who always kept to herself even to me. I didn’t know much about her because rather than me, she wanted to talk to that damn tree.
It kept her happy, so it didn’t bother me at first until I noticed limbs on it was growing to long and pressed up against the roof of the house. I sat my daughter down at the kitchen, placed my hand on hers and said, “I have to cut it.”
My daughter yanked her hand away from me and stood up. She was crying. “It told me you were going to cut it. It’s growing big. But so am I, mom. Please don’t cut it.”
“I have to.”
“If you cut my tree, you cut me!” She dashed out of the house. I folded my arms across my chest and laughed at her dramatics. I didn’t have to look out the window to know she was hugging the tree.
I allowed my daughter to stay home the day I ordered lawn care to remove the tree. She claimed she wasn’t feeling well. I checked and felt her skin was burning up. It baffled me. The other day she was fine. She hugged the tree and went straight to bed, but the sudden flu gave me more reason to remove it. She probably got sick from something on the bark.
In the living room, I watched a chainsaw slice into the oak. Maybe I made a mistake and should’ve had them remove the branches that were pressing against the house.
I walked back into my daughter room. She laid in bed with the covers pulled up to her nose. Her eyes were wide open, but her gaze was fixed on the ceiling. When I walked up to the side of the bed, my foot stepped into something warm and thick. A red substance that was coming from under the covers.
I pulled the blanket down, gasped, and dropped to my knees. Blood was spilling out from a thick slash across my daughter’s stomach and tiny green leaves peaked through.
