LATEST FROM OUR BLOGGERS
Parents Give Their Children Eating Disorders
Do you eat to punish yourself, or to gain some control over your life? Will your chil...
View More
Today's Everyday Sweepstakes Action: Reply to Today's Community Chalkboard Question!
Getting to know our members better is truly important to us. One new way to do ...
View More
Share Your Inexpensive but Delicious Lunch Ideas
It’s that time again. Every year, around the beginning of summer, our f...
View More
BLOG roll
poll
Do you believe you can help sway for a specific gender when trying to conceive?
BLOG archives
BLOG contributors
Weeds
Thursday, September 16, 2010 by Jeannie Fleming-Gifford
It’s fall. I seem to be spending any minute of yard time I get pulling weeds. It's when I do some of my best thinking about parenthood. Weeds: they are everywhere I look. Nothing seems to stop them; not lack of water or pulling them out. They are Olympians. Dam* weeds. They get in the way of my perfect garden.
I’ve decided that keeping my garden weeded can be compared to some of the adventures of raising a child. Just like the garden, there are plenty of weeds in my life that get in the way of my goal of raising a happy, healthy child.
There are the weeds of health problems, those “bumps in the road” (ugh…a sick child) that sometimes get in the way.
There are weeds in family life, relationships that I need to work on and work through in order to make them work in my child’s life. Weeds sometimes seem to pop up in the most inappropriate of places. Although they are trimmed back, they are resilient (most times, kids are too: www.planningfamily.com/blog/resilient/).
Don’t get me wrong. Despite the weeds in parenthood, “flowers” (new skills, words, etc.) usually bloom.
Every day we tend to our garden. We tend to our lives. Just as our vision each spring is for our outdoor gardens to bloom, so is our vision for our garden of life. The flowers in our garden are comprised of people and resources – different and beautiful – that help us as parents. Each day we have the opportunity to plant new seeds that will grow, if nourished. Their roots, embedded in the ground, hold these new flowers and enable them to grow strong, despite those pesky weeds.
The garden of parenthood can be beautiful.
I suppose it’s time for another twenty minutes of pulling weeds.
Then again, maybe the weeds aren’t so bad after all. They make us stronger people. They make us stronger parents. What weeds are you battling these days?
