Parenting is as easy as gardening!
I like to garden. That is not to say that I am good at it, or that I actually know what I am doing! But I like to be in the garden.
Right now our garden is a much overgrown, tangly, weedy, but beautiful mess. It is a time-consuming but happy challenge for the most part, to garden in our new space.
I had this thought whilst gardening on the weekend;
Gardening is as easy as parenting… not easy at all!
It can be rewarding and joyful and productive, but it’s not easy. In the garden I spent hours pulling out invasive weeds, thinning out, hacking down. It was hard work and for all the time I put in, you could almost not quite see the difference it made in one day. I will only be able to see a difference the more consistently I am able to put the time in.
In parenting as in gardening, you have to keep doing the same things again and again and again. And you often don’t see the change initially. This is especially true of the first 6 years of a child’s life. It is extremely repetitive. Re-pe-ti-ti-ve. Oh my goodness. And time consuming. T-i-m… (I won’t spell it out again, I think you get the picture!)
But the truth is that unless you sow into your child’s life as often and as consistently as possible, you simply won’t reap the rewards you want to see. It takes time and it takes consistency.
Some of the work is back-breaking. Do you remember how heavy your 9 month old got when you were rocking them back to sleep for ages on end?! It’s physically demanding and tiring on a whole new level. And then you have to do it all again tomorrow.
There is an emotional load to parenting that maybe can’t quite be compared to gardening… except maybe when a troop of monkeys obliterates your vegetable patch. (Don’t get me started. Yes, I carry emotional gardening baggage.)
Parenting and gardening should be both be undertaken with a long- term view. We will not get our garden into the shape we want it this season, perhaps not even this year. But we take a long-term view of gradual transformation because we’re not going anywhere anytime soon. And while the transformation is happening, we keep doing all the maintenance that may seem really mundane, but is vital.
Parent your child not only in the current moment, but with a long-term perspective in mind. What values do you want to instill in them? What decisions are you making in parenting them today that will help them navigate life in the future? What kind of person are you trying to raise?
You’re parenting a human being today who is growing up and gradually transforming into someone else…a pre-schooler, a tween, a teen, an adult. You’re constantly getting them ready for the next stage of their lives. How you treat them today matters. What you say and do in front of them matters, because in some way it will be repeated. The way you live your life in front of them is more important than what you tell them about how to live life.
Your role as a parent is to provide the best environment and conditions in which your child can grow. This involves being able to reflect on your parenting, on how your child responds to you, and making changes where necessary.
There is one significant difference between gardening and parenting.
In gardening you plant a cucumber seed and if the conditions and timing is right, it will become a cucumber plant. When you create the right conditions, the plant you harvest at the end is a “what you see is what you get” situation.
In parenting, the end goal is not producing a person just like you. It’s planting seeds, creating a conducive environment and then giving space to allow what you have nurtured to grow and bloom. Ultimately, a person so unique that at times you may not recognise yourself in him or her at all. A wonderful hybrid.
