Garden Therapy

Garden Therapy

The couple who previously owned our farm—she was a weaver, he was a musician and accordion repairman—were very artistic in the layout of their flower beds, so now it’s nearly impossible for me to distinguish perennials from weeds.

This, combined with the fact that the majority of the plants in Wisconsin in no way resemble the ones I nurtured in Tennessee, makes gardening a convoluted process.

Regardless, I love my time in the dirt. Whenever my girls are in bed, and daytime hasn’t fully transitioned to dusk, I traipse outside in my mud-caked sandals and kid-sized gardening gloves and poke around in the rich, black mulch nestled around the plants—studying each stem carefully, trying to determine if one should stay or be plucked.

I am not sure why I am so addicted to pulling weeds. At first, when I attempted to make sense of the mishmash of dried foliage heaped in the beds, I was still recovering from the stress surrounding my husband’s surgery, and I envisioned each dandelion as the remnant of his hemangioblastoma.

I hacked and I chopped until my clothes and hair were splattered and I was breathing hard through my nose. Now, after a solid month of carbon dioxide therapy, I do not approach gardening with such headlong violence.

Instead, I envision each weed and flower as my daughters’ various character traits, and as I tiptoe around each plant, I think over the day—the tone I used to convey my displeasure (though I’m not sure there’s a gentle way to say, “Don’t run over your sister with the bus!”), the time I didn’t spend cuddling but swept the floor instead—and vow in my heart to nurture my daughters better in the morning, when the sediment of yesterday has been softened with sleep.

And yet, it’s difficult to comprehend how I am supposed to nurture two very different little girls—fair-skinned, dark, extroverted, introverted, live-wire, cuddle-bug—into two productive women.

How am I supposed to know what character traits are the “weeds” that need eradicated and what are going to become beauty-giving flowers, when a headstrong will may look like weakness but will one day give my daughter the strength to persevere through adversity?

Each child requires a different nurturing hand, and often a different method of discipline, and yet just as the strands of their DNA were woven together in my womb, I have DNA strands of my own that often don’t . . . mesh with those belonging to my offspring as well as they should.

Out in my weed-filled flower garden, this is when I begin praying for wisdom—my thoughts jumbled in a pattern of bugs, kids, and dirt that would get me committed if I said them out loud. This is when I surrender to the fact that I am incapable of raising two productive women from babyhood, and that God must lead and direct me during each stage of their blessed, blooming lives, so that one day I will be able to step back from my flower beds and bask in the beauty of what—despite my own weed-filled failings—my daughters have become.

Do you find gardening therapeutic as well?