silver bells and cockle shells

Aren’t we lucky to be living in this extraordinary pro-garden moment? We are riding the triumphant wave alongside countless other families who also delight in seedlings pushing their way through backyard soil and proudly share the tomato bounty with neighbors. But I must tell you: organic gardening is way harder than one is given to believe. (Especially if your expectations are drawn from photos of Michelle Obama gracefully pulling feathery fennel from the abundant White House lawn.) Are we supposed to arrange the beds north-south? Or is it east-west? Rotate crops every year, or every other? Pair the marigolds with the beans, or was that basil? And which bugs are the good kind, anyway?

Without Mike’s obsessive care, our gardens would never flourish. And even with his daily attentions, so much can go wrong. Blight, beetles, a determined deer. An active toddler tramping about with heavy feet, oblivious to the distinction between garden beds and garden paths. When my kids were babies, I didn’t have it in me. It wasn't just the work and attention required. There simply wasn't room in my heart, mind, or body for more vulnerable creatures that needed constant attention.

Creating a garden takes creative energy, determination, and a willingness to suffer - because loss is inevitable. A strange fungus has already taken hold of the basil that bloomed with such glowing health just a few weeks ago on the windowsill. Once you transplant those seedlings, letting them put down roots in a world of variable weather and hungry bugs, anything can happen.

This is the first growing season that I've truly cared about our seedlings and the first I've been aware of the zen-like detachment required to nurture a garden. Rather than keeping my children out of the garden, I am finally able to invite them into it. They're big enough now to share my newfound and decidedly un-zen-like attachment to plants.When Gabriel and I planted the pea seeds, he carefully covered each and every one of them up with a dirt blanket and wished them a happy nap. Now that they have woken up and are stretching upwards, his tender paternal feelings towards them have not dimmed a bit.

Plus there are all those excellent garden accoutrements to attract the kids: trowels, garden gloves, the kid-sized rake and shovel. And if the garden doesn’t appeal, they can play on their own somewhere else in the backyard. How novel, how amazing! Sometimes I squat down and weed, or simply contemplate the ruby-veined chard leaves, all by myself, without a child climbing up my back. For a few minutes, anyway.

The result is that I have the space and inclination to fantasize about gardening for the first time. This seems to be a theme developing - an awareness that I am able to put more creative energy into other pursuits, and consider things independently of how they relate to my children. It’s funny, because as I look around and realize with delight how much more my mind and body are my own these days, a part of me has been thinking more than ever about when the children were tiny babies. Remembering the physical intimacy that blurred boundaries unlike anything I’ve ever experienced: nursing a tiny golden babe, watching her peaceful face in profile, or falling asleep with a little one curled in the crook of my arm.

Isn’t change always like this? You can’t get a break. Just as I am leaving that time, and glorying in all the goodness waiting for me beyond it, a voice inside is absolutely yelping in protest. Don’t leave those babies behind!

But what can I do? Somehow over the course of many days and nights, inhabiting this strange temporal reality of very long (sometimes excruciatingly so) moments embedded within days that breeze by in a blur, so fast you can’t remember whether it is Monday or Tuesday or Friday already, my babies have become kids. Before too long, I’ll be marveling at my big teenagers who can do incredible things, and remembering them at age five with an ache of bittersweet longing in the pit of my stomach. Parenting is just so weird. You can’t wait for them to get bigger, and you can’t bear for them to change. Anyway you look at it, it hurts.

Or we could try taking a glass-half-full approach. Here goes: as our children grow, we grow and change with them. There are so many surprises waiting, and they are not only about who my kids will become. They're about the person I am becoming in relationship with them as they grow. I never knew I loved tending a garden before. For that matter, I never thought of myself as a writer. Without my kids taking so much of me, and then slowly giving it back - transformed - I could never have arrived at this place, luxuriating in an hour of writing time, gazing out the open door at a robin hopping about the flowering cat mint. Thanks, kiddos.