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.
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