Gardening Made Me a Better Parent

Is that potato vine successfully leafing out? Are those elephant ears looking droopy? What looks different today than yesterday? That’s what I’m asking myself as I take a quick walk around the garden with my morning coffee. Close observation isn’t a natural tendency of mine, but I’ve grown into it, as I’ve witnessed it not only allowing me to truly savor the day-to-day, but also as an early warning detection method (is that a spot on my lemon tree? Is my asparagus fern looking a bit too pale?). Similarly, that’s what morning school drop-off has become—a 45-minute experience of waking up my teen son, then noticing how he feels, noting the music he’s listening to in our car ride (high energy? mellow?), his level of grouchiness or animation. For better or worse, my son is about as communicative in the morning as a shrub, so I have to use similar powers of observation to assess his health and well-being.

Not proud of this, but my family is not unlike the formerly barren corner of backyard that until a few years ago was something I tried not to look at. An unpretty, scorched Earth patch, really. A long family illness left us all dazed, and let’s just say I had no idea where to begin in order to heal my son’s misbehavior and our family’s dysfunction—I just wished everything would sort itself out. Lucky for us, through a series of therapeutic interventions, community outreach, mental health consults, spiritual practice, the list goes on…we’re back on track. Not gonna lie, it’s been terrifying, painful and costly; however the wisdom both my son and I have gained is more precious than rubies.

Similarly, at some point during this five-year miasma, I just couldn’t stand looking out at that tangle of clothesline and rubble in the corner backyard. When I angrily started trying to work the sun-baked hard pack, my shovel’s wooden handle snapped. That’s because the task was impossible alone. But in the years since, I’ve intermittently scheduled garden design consults, installed property-wide drip irrigation and designed then constructed a 10-foot rose trellis. (Somewhere in there I flew to England to visit Vita Sackville-West’s fabled white garden for inspiration.) Just like with my family, I was terrified that everything I did was too little, too late and misplaced: Would that olive tree, the one I scrimped to buy, even live in that former scorched earth? Why is there no money-back guarantee?! Today that olive has grown taller, lavender is blooming and white roses are climbing the trellis, thanks to my persistent questioning of people with horticultural experience and training.

‘Look,’ I can hear you skeptics saying, ‘this loosey-goosey “bloom where you’re planted” philosophy sounds great, but we’re raising future adults here, ones that can hurt themselves and others if they don’t follow the rules.” Ah, that’s where the weeding comes in. When my lawn’s errant blades poke up through the nearby flowerbed’s mulch, I pull them out, since it looks better that way and my lavender and roses need space and nutrients to grow. That’s because it’s my garden, and within natural limits, I get to have it my way.

Similarly, I set limits when my teen son wants to do any old thing like blow off his curfew, skim his homework or forget to walk the dogs. Following our metaphor, the weed removal here is, conversely, the set of consequences I lay down for him. He doesn’t get an allowance or video game play time if he doesn’t fulfill his end of the parenting-teen bargain. It’s all written out in a home contract that we developed with a family therapist and re-negotiate every few months as needed—because much like weeds, things are always popping up that require tending.

Type A’s, skip to the next bullet point. The rest of us clueless parents, circle up: Planning, contrary to being the unfun time waster that it seems, is really an investment in a peaceful day-to-day. I’ve learned this, surprisingly, not from years of scorn as the mom-who-didn’t-bring-snacks or as the person madly calling for summer-camp openings in June, but from my plants. When are you going to fertilize? What’s the watering schedule? Are these the right months for design or hardscape changes? All of these considerations are important in your garden, when you’ll need to order inventory or contract planters ahead of time. And somehow, my successes at thinking ahead in the garden have made me better at planning seasonally with my son. Previously, my fear of planning the wrong thing rendered me immobile, thereby making the problem worse. But I’ve since learned that it’s worth the up-front work to get a plan in place, even if it’s not the perfect plan. (After all, what is?) Today I make a few calls, bring up the topic, say summer plans, or possible birthday goings-on, with my son, keep calling, until we have our expectations set. And pro tip—I noticed I was confused about what time to fertilize and apply fungicide to my plants, so I got a planner...and my kid's assignments /appointments are getting logged in there, too.

I was one of those children a friend nicknamed a “plug-and-play” kid—you basically left me alone with a book. I followed rules. I sought to please adults. My son, not so much. He loves to push boundaries and by nature has a rapid-fire and well-reasoned argument for anything he disagrees with. And here we are, together in the Age of No More ‘Because-I-Said-So’ Parenting. As a result, I’ve had to learn to listen to my son, then pay close attention in real time to what I’m hearing, without ratcheting my anxiety up to the what-if-he-doesn’t-follow-my-directions-what-if-he-loses-his-temper-what-if-I’m-a-terrible-parent-this-shouldn’t-be-so-hard level. The only way I’m able to survive and provide the emotional and material support he needs is through first being patient with the process. (Thank you, deep breathing.) I don’t know what the future holds, for him or for me. After all, as gardener Vita Sackville-West wrote, “no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.” Gradually, I have learned that what works with him is patience, like the kind that’s been so rewarding in my garden. I was told that a scrawny stick would become a handsome flower bush if I followed certain steps, and months later, it did. I look at that little bush today and think of how my kid is much the same, a growing work in progress that I need to have faith in, nurture and let show me what he’s got.

Because sure, I'd love to just walk out my door into a lush paradise without any work. Or have my kid just bound over the threshold with an A+ essay that I hadn't nagged him to finish. But in either case, where’s the satisfaction in that?