How Does Your Garden Grow?

I am project oriented. If I am going to spend time doing something, there's needs to be an "outcome" in the end. The blog is one fine example. I love that if I spend some time sitting here, in the end I get to press "publish". I sometimes forget that the joy lies in the doing, not in the product. But I am wired in a way that needs there to be a payoff in the end. Sometimes it takes my children to remind me to just "be".

Take Mouser for instance. For the past, I don't know, year perhaps, she's been intent on digging holes in the front flower bed. It should be called "bush bed" or "mulch bed" because there's never been any actual flowers in it. But nothing brings her pleasure more than a cup or little trowel and some dirt under her fingernails. She can dig a lot longer than you'd imagine. She's made hole after hole, all the while asking me, "Mama, when can we ever plant some flowers together?".

So a few weeks back, Juliana had a birthday party and Holt had a karate belt test and I decided I'd do something special for Mouse. Off to Home Depot I went. When I returned, I came bearing dirt and pansies. She was as excited as Christmas. In so many ways she does remind me of her Grandma.

I spatially and aesthetically arranged each pansy over the location it should be planted. I dug each hole (I know! You're asking "WHY?" She had so much more experience at this skill!), then she set the pansy in its new home and refilled the dirt and patted it down.

When we finished, I stepped back. It was a really nice looking little project we had accomplished. I gave her the pitcher and she watered our symmetrical flower garden. We were finished. We were surveying the fruits of our labors.
And then...

"Mama, I'm ready for the scissors now."

"WHAT?"

"I want to cut off one of the blooms. For you."

Now, had I to do it over again, I would look into her sweet little five year old face and see her intention and realize the gift she was offering. Instead, I saw our little project destroyed.

"Mouse. If we cut off the blooms, they won't grow back. It won't be pretty anymore."

"But it's for you."

And I'm so ashamed to say the "living in the moment-ness" and joy of what we were doing together went sailing right on past me.

"Let's not, okay, Mouse?"

Wailing. Not just crying. Wailing. And wailing finally began to hit home.

So I went inside and got the scissors. And after the five minutes it took to get her to breathe normally again, I began to understand that the whole point of this project was to make a gift for me. And I was taking that away.

So she proudly cut off her favorite bloom. We brought it inside and put it in a little cup of water where it sat on my windowsill until it began to disintegrate.


And when she asks for the scissors again, I will fetch them quickly for her. I've come to see that nothing could be more beautiful than my flower garden of bloomless pansies.