My daughter connects very deeply to nature and growing things, and she has some ambitious plans for a garden this year. She wants her teas and herbs to come from the ground at home instead of buying them at a store, reasoning that something she raises herself will be more powerful. And she really, really wants me to help with this garden.

Reader, I am an indoor kitty – I always have been. Any type of yardwork has always been the worst of chores for me; it’s endless, filthy, unrewarding work – I have a black thumb – and I can’t think of a less interesting way to spend a day outdoors (I’m told some people feel this way about cooking).  

As she has rightly pointed out, everyone in the house is going to benefit from this garden, so we should all have a hand in the creating and maintaining of it. While I’m happy to help site it and find heirloom seeds and such, the actual work of the garden is so much less appealing.

But she’s on the verge of adulthood, the point when she starts pulling away and building her own life. I’m so grateful that she wants to include me in this, that she feels excited about time spent together creating something tangible and beneficial to our family. It’s been too easy lately to fall into the abyss of our phones or Netflix, too easy to stop connecting and stay in our house, too easy to take this time for granted. I don’t want to look back with regrets. I don’t want to dread anything that involves spending time with her.

The answer seems to be adjusting my perspective. That’s honestly been the answer to so much in this past year. “I’m being forced to stay home. I’m cut off from my family and friends” feels a lot different when it’s posed as “I choose to stay home in order to protect myself and others. I show my love and respect for my loved ones by keeping my distance and helping to keep them safe.” It shifts the locus of control and makes you feel like less of a victim of circumstance.

Certainly I feel like a victim in the garden.

**

While she plants things with the intention of developing her practice and connecting the earth, I’ll be looking at this work as honoring my parenting journey.

I chose to become a parent, freely and without coercion. I can choose to be in my daughter’s garden, recognizing that it’s a choice I make in order to reap the benefits of time together and the literal fruits (and vegetables and herbs) of my labor.

I have cared for and nurtured these children, which has sometimes been very hard work indeed. There are a lot of parts of it that were disgusting or boring or exhausting or exasperating, and the results weren’t always what I wished. Working in the earth is going to be much the same. The outcome can be as unexpected and delightful, too.

I swam upstream on a lot of my parenting decisions. We made a lot of deliberate choices about their environment and influences, many of which went against the conventional wisdom I was raised with. It’s not the easiest way of doing things, but it’s work worth doing.

It will be endless, of course. But individual tasks can be completed and the tools set aside for a bit. There will be time to simply sit back and feel the satisfaction of work well done. I will be able to see progress and know that it’s the result of my effort. I will know that there is more work to come that will be satisfying in different ways. As my children become adults, I find that I don’t want the work to end –  I will never want to stop being their mother, even as the seasons of parenting shift and parts become fallow. I hope that approaching the physical work of this garden feels the same to me after time, that I can fall into the cycles of growth and harvest and rest and planning and find that here, too, I don’t want the work to end.

Now if only I could tackle that laundry pile….