One of my favorite moments of spring every year is buying some plants to put in the ground. I love the whole experience. Reading the little tags to figure out if this plant will fit the spot I need to fill. Smelling the tiny blooms. Bringing them home and arranging them in a pot. Getting my hands dirty. It’s such an earthy experience. As a person who tends to struggle with living in the present moment, gardening ties me back to reality in such an important way. It’s absolutely therapeutic for me, both when I put plants in the earth and throughout the spring and summer as I tend them.
And every year I think about the many plants I killed to develop the green thumb I’m proud of now.
My mom is not a gardener, but she does love a beautiful plant. In my younger years, I can remember her getting inspired and bringing home some little annuals and then it seems like she almost immediately forgot about them. They became my babies. I named them and watered them and killed SO MANY of them. Mostly with too much attention, too much water, too much messing with them. Over the years I learned the benefits of leaving them alone, how some needed just a little water, and how some of them benefitted when I clipped off their flowers, while others just seemed to wilt when I did. I didn’t have a gardening book, didn’t have anyone to teach me, but I learned so much from making mistakes.
As a mother now I love talking to my kids about flowers and plants. They help me put them in the ground and water them and clip the flowers to bring inside. I would be devastated if I came outside and found one of my beloved plants had been killed through overwatering or had been dug out of the ground or clipped back to the roots. So sadly, my kids may not get to learn the lessons I did by being able to make mistakes.
I think learning from failure is too important of a lesson to be eliminated by my need for control or perfection. It’s become my goal to help my kids find safe places to make their own mistakes.
My plants matter to me, so I may not have the ability my mom did to just hand over their care and hope for the best. But there are so many other ways my kids can learn from making mistakes when it comes to activities they care about and persevering to learn skills that are important to them.
My middle school son loves to bake. I do not love to bake and don’t care much about having baked goods in the house. This has become a beautiful way that I can give him the freedom to learn. He’s been experimenting all summer with recipes and has begun to develop a palate and sense for ingredients that just can’t be taught without licking a lot of spoons and accidentally using a Tablespoon instead of a teaspoon a few times.
We encourage our kids to try a sport every year. They’re all required to do piano lessons, be involved in choir and try a band instrument for a few years. We know they will not be prodigies at these things. We have watched our kids learn from their mistakes and become better and we’ve also watched them realize they aren’t especially good at something, but they can still enjoy participating. It’s possible to love a sport or a hobby or an instrument that you’ll never be amazing at. Taking the risk to try can lead to all kinds of amazing discoveries, even when you mess up or fail completely.
It is so hard to let go of control and let our kids learn by failing. It’s rough to be the parent of the child who loses the big game because they kicked the ball into the wrong goal. Letting your child decorate their own birthday cake rarely leads to the Instagram-worthy photo you had envisioned in your mind. Letting your child kill a pot full of plants does not fit into our design aesthetics, but it may be exactly the lesson our kids need to learn so the next pot full of plants blooms beautifully (or if not the next one, maybe the one a few years from now. . . ).
I gave my daughter her own houseplant this last spring. It was dead within a few weeks. Overwatered. Loved to death. I think she learned something, although I’m not sure if she learned that succulents do better with less or if she learned she’s not a houseplant person. Time will tell. But I’m glad she had the opportunity to fail without me watching over her shoulder. I don’t know if there’s any other way to grow.