Why I'm so bad at gardening - A parent's reflection on the 5th Sunday of Easter

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
As my children are growing up, I am beginning to recognize the importance of constantly having to maintain a garden. To be honest I hate gardening and landscaping work.  Some people like to work in the dirt and hot sun, but not me, I can't stand gardening.  Mainly because I do not have the patience for it.  Day after day having to water, prune, and feed the garden, all the time it looks like nothing has changed.  Day after day constantly wondering if all the work I am doing makes any difference.  Pruning is the most difficult.  If you cut to little, then things will grow back again eventually killing the plant, cut to much and you kill the plant. In other words, cut to much or to little the plant can die, as a result, it feels like you can't win either way, much like raising teenagers.  Being to harsh or too  lenient can hurt the child's spiritual growth. Parenting is this type balancing act.

This past Saturday, Mandy asked me to fix the irrigation system in the garden. I spent the whole day replacing irrigation tubing, plugging holes, and replacing sprinkler heads, only to realize by the end of the day I accomplished nothing, things still didn't work. It's like the children's book "If you give a mouse a cookie" by Laura Joffe Numeroff, only in my case the book would be titled, "If you give a dad a project he will drive to Home Depot a hundred times in one day only to find out he had everything he needed in the first place, and so he basically wasted his whole day buying and returning stuff he didn't need" (I may have to shorten that title). That's the problem with gardening, its a lot work, and in the end its out of my control despite all my hard work. Its ultimately up to mother nature to see how the garden will grow. I think about those farmers who work so hard doing everything right to grow a crop, only to have it eradicated by a tornado leaving them with nothing. How many parents have worked so hard in raising children only to have their children's souls eradicated by the circumstances of life, and the parents feel like they are left with nothing.  But in all humility, how many time have been the actual tornado in my child's life eradicating their virtues because my own anger and impatience.

In other words, there are elements to growing a garden that are beyond our control even if we do everything right.  So to with parenting, we can know all the tricks and techniques of raising children, and yet our children can still make poor decisions.  

Just as our children during the pre-teen and teenage years grow like "weeds" physically, so to do their souls. Often the virtuous garden of their soul in their youth gets inudated with the weeds of the world during the teen years. This means that we as parents are called to be gardeners (did I mention I hate gardening? which is why I am not a good parent, so don't ask me for advice).   It used to be, that when you talk your child once,  that would be the end of it, problem solved. However, as my kids are growing older I am finding myself constantly having to prune their vices back finding myself having the same conversations over and over again.  A good example is trying to teach our children the value of technology without becoming addicted to it.  To much technology and they will be become mindless drones, get rid of it all together, then they will not know how to use it when they need to as adults.  Like gardening, this needs to be a daily task constantly monitoring and paying attention to their "screen time", and what they are watching, and left unsupervised things can get out of control.   I constantly find Mandy and myself (mostly Mandy) having these conversations with our kids over and over again.

This past weekend's gospel reading (5th Sunday of Easter) Jesus tells us, "without me you can do nothing" (Jn 15:5). As parents we are called to be images of Christ to our children, and interestingly enough, our teens cannot live without us, just as we the faithful, can do nothing without Christ.  As much as we want to separate ourselves from Christ, and live independently from him, it only leads to death.  This is something I am starting to see in my children, on one side they want to be independent from me, on the other hand they recognize they need mom and dad for their necessities and cannot live without us.  Consequently, tension and frustration arises in them and the whole house knows it.  When taken to the extreme this is Hell.  Hell is the place where souls spend eternity trying to separate themselves totally from God, but never can.  This in return causes nothing but hatred and rage because they can never be totally independent from God.

One thing you will not see in this blog are lists of quick and easy solutions on parenting, marriage or living out the gospel, because there are none.  There are no "10 easy ways to being a good parent", or "5 tricks for a better marriage".  Parenting, marriage, and life in general is not a task list to be checked off, but rather process of holy conversion  to be lived out over time, like gardening is a process that takes place over time.  Only in the later stages of life do we begin to see the fruit of our labor in the vineyard of trying to raise holy children.  For some parents this is a very sad time, particularly when their children leave the Church. In my line of work I am now seeing many parents blame themselves for their children leaving the Church and/or making poor choices. When in reality these parents are wonderful parents who did everything possible to raise holy children, even though things turned out much differently than planned. Sometimes as parents we simply cannot control the circumstances, and like gardeners, we can only pray for "good weather" in our children's' lives, and if the storms of the world come and destroy the garden of our children's souls, we can only entrust them to Christ at that moment. This is why Christ said, "without me you can do nothing", because he, and he alone can create the beautiful garden within our children's souls. As parents we need to do the work planting the seeds, but only Christ can make virtue grow within the souls of our children and teens.





Comments

  1. I can really identify with this post, Mr. Cox. Our older boy is soon to be a teen, and the analogy of parenting to gardening is quite appropriate, especially now! Thanks for the invitation to follow along with your blog. It looks like really good reading material. Best wishes!

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  2. Thank you Jenny for the compliment. I do have do admit the Holy Spirit along with my wife did give me the idea.

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