The root you cannot pull alone

By Luke, founder of Bramble · his story · how this was written

There was a stump in the yard that would not come out, and I found out something about myself trying to pull it. I want to tell you the whole afternoon, because it is the truest picture I have of why this work does not go alone.

The tree that had stood there was an orange tree, and it had never once done what an orange tree is supposed to do. Whatever rootstock it had actually grown from, it gave us four small oranges a season, and every one of them was bitter enough to spit out. It was, in the plainest sense, a tree that bore nothing worth eating.

Four months after I had told my wife the truth about what I had carried since I was ten years old, I decided on a gesture. I would take out the tree that bore nothing, and in its place I would plant a magnolia — her favorite tree, the kind that would grow into the biggest, strongest thing in the whole yard. I did not have better words yet for what I was trying to say, so I decided to say it with a tree. I cut it down. What was left in the ground was the root — a system the size of a manhole cover, laced into the earth like it meant to stay. I went at it with a shovel. That is the whole plan I had: a shovel, and whatever strength showed up.

Digging until it hurt

I dug around it for an hour. Sweat running down my face, my back complaining, the kind of exhaustion where your hands stop feeling like your own. The root did not move. Not an inch. I got down on the ground and threw my whole weight on it, jumping on the thing like I could bully it out of the earth by main force.

It won. I lost my footing and came down wrong, and my ankle went with it.

I sat there in the dirt — hands filthy, sweat and grime on my neck, ankle throbbing in a way that told me something was actually wrong. And that is where my daughter found me.

“Dad, you need some help.”

She came over, looked at me sitting in the hole I had dug, and said it plainly: Dad, you need some help.

I told her I had this.

She said it again. No, Dad. You need some help.

This went back and forth a few times, and I want to be honest about what was happening on my end, because it is the part of the story that matters. I stood up on the bad ankle to prove I could. I made myself look fine while pain was running up my leg. I was not actually fighting the root anymore at that point — I was managing my daughter's read of me, working hard to make sure a child did not see her father as anything less than capable. Even in obvious pain, I was performing that I wasn’t.

She was not fooled. She just kept saying the same true sentence, patient with me the way children sometimes are with a stubbornness they can see plainly and we cannot.

I crossed that street like a dog with its tail between its legs.

Across the street

Eventually I gave up trying to out-argue an eight-word sentence and walked over to a neighbor, who happened to be standing in his front yard as if he had been waiting on me. He asked what I was doing. I told him: trying to get a root out.

He smiled. Told me he had fought that exact fight the week before. Then he asked what I was using.

A shovel, I said.

He shook his head. Told me a shovel was never going to do it — I needed an axe and an electric saw, to cut through the smaller roots holding the big one down rather than trying to lever the whole thing out at once. He had both, sitting right there in his garage, dirt still on the blades from his own fight with the same kind of stump the week before.

I had spent an hour and my ankle finding that out the hard way. He told me in under a minute, because he had already been there.

Fifteen minutes

I went back with the right tools, and within fifteen minutes that root — the one that had not budged for an hour of everything I had — was completely dislodged and out of the ground.

Not because I got stronger. Because I stopped trying to do it with the wrong tool, alone, and let someone who had already fought that root tell me what actually works.

What the yard taught me about the other thing

I have thought about that afternoon many times since, because it is such an exact picture of what took me twenty-eight years to accept about pornography.

I had a shovel. I had willpower, and shame, and promises made at midnight, and every ounce of strength I could throw at the thing by myself. None of it worked, for the same reason the shovel did not work on that root: it was never a strength problem. It was a tool problem, and an alone problem, at the same time.

The man across the street was not stronger than me. He just had the right tool, because he had already been where I was. That is the whole case for a Circle of brothers, made in a front yard instead of a church basement. Some people would call that man an accountability partner, or call the room he came from a support group. I do not much like either word — they can sound like a monitor watching for a failure to report. But the thing itself, whatever you name it, is not a nice-to-have on top of the real work. It is where the right tool actually lives — the thing that gets you out in fifteen minutes what a whole hour alone could not touch.

And my daughter was the one who kept telling me the truth before I could hear it. Something happened to you. Nothing is wrong with you. But you do need some help — she said it as a child sees it, plainly, four or five times over, while I stood on a hurt ankle insisting I was fine. Pride is a remarkably effective translator: it can turn you need some help into you are being told you are weak, when the sentence never said anything of the kind.

I had to get hurt. I had to end up sitting in the dirt before I would cross that street. I wish it had not taken that. But grace does not require you to earn the crossing first — it just keeps sending the sentence, however many times it takes, until you finally stand up and walk over.

What actually grew there

The magnolia went into the ground where the orange tree used to stand, and today it is the tallest, strongest thing in that yard, exactly the way I pictured it the day I planted it as a gesture I did not yet have the words for.

But here is what I did not understand the day I planted it. I thought taking out a tree that bore nothing and putting a better one in its place was the whole gesture — root, dirt, a stronger tree, done. I had gotten the orange tree’s root out with an axe and a neighbor’s help, but I had not yet touched the other root, the one that had grown into my own soul for twenty-eight years. A tree cannot bear fruit while something else is still buried underneath it, drawing off everything meant to feed the blossoms. Neither can a marriage. I had to do to my own life what it took a neighbor and the right tool to do to that yard — get all the way under the thing and take it out, not plant something prettier on top and call it finished.

The magnolia blooms every spring now. It took both roots coming out before it could.