July 31, 2019

Creating wide open spaces for our kids to survive and thrive is no easy task. Each one of my children embodies complex layers of “easy” and “challenge” and “passion” and “dismissal”. All of this makes child rearing more complicated when you add in societal norms, institutional expectations and my unique skills and abilities as a mother. Sweet Adaline has beautifully and creatively resisted it all until the moment I surrendered and now in a glorious moment of redemption she asks me to TEACH her how to harvest the flowers at their peak, with the right knife, at the right time of day and how to store them properly. Her motive isn’t profit or gain, of course, but the joy she expects each person who receives a bouquet will know. Buried beneath the things that make us difficult for one another is always, ALWAYS, the very thing we are growing within us so that when the time is right the world may experience more goodness than it thought was possible. May we always be making room for this goodness to break ground and flourish, in our children and one another.