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Bloom Season

Spring is here. Where I live, spring is basically summer, but still. It is the season for blooms. In the several pots on my deck and patio, flowers are blooming. Some have just begun to show their colors after the cold (all right, cool) weather, and others are fading now that the heat is kicking in. One planter in particular is preparing to showcase a blaze of color within the next few days: in it are a gerbera daisy and a geranium side-by-side, their blooms to be deep orange and hot pink. These plants came through the winter, to my surprise, and I am excited to see their little buds and the small beginnings of petals.

Enter my daughters, nearly-four and one. They have a wading pool on the deck. They have a hose with gushing water. They have buckets. Do they want to play with these things? No. They want to pick flowers. 

At first, I ask them not to. What a reasonable request, right? The few blooms on the geranium are gone within about three trips of my one-year-old from the plant to the pool, where she is dropping the flowers one at a time into the water. They look pretty when they float. My last hope is the buds on the geranium that haven't started to open yet (they aren't showing any pink, so maybe my daughters won't see them). The single bloom on the gerbera daisy, I know, is doomed.

The gerbera daisy has a blooming pattern that I have found requires patience. It produces about one to three flowers at a time, and each bud takes what seems a painstakingly long amount of time to open completely. Once the blooms open, they remain for a while, making them worth the wait, but when they fall, there is a long period of waiting again before the next round of blooms appears.

On my daisy plant now is a single bloom that has barely begun its work: tiny petals extend from the center, pale orange and narrow, like squat embroidery needles. I know that in a few days' time, the petals will stretch, unfold, and deepen to their full orange color. I am looking forward to seeing the flower. But my children do not understand this expectation.

I try to explain it to my older girl. Maybe she can understand, but she doesn't seem very interested. She's more interested in the here-and-now (I can't blame her; she's only almost four). She is learning to be patient, but she would rather pluck the flower now, early, to play with it, than wait for it to bloom fully. 

In my frustration at the loss of most of my blooms and potential blooms, I have a choice: I can get upset, yell, and sweep the girls up and take them inside, ending play time with the fury of my dragon-mom fiery wrath (dragon-mom is a real thing), or I can patiently let the children be children. They are exploring. They want to enjoy examining the flowers, picking each petal off and feeling it in their fingers. They want to see how the petals look in the water. They want to play with pretty things. Their actions are not malicious. 

As I sit in the lawn chair, trying to enjoy the outside play time as much as my daughters apparently are, I remember words from Paul David Tripp's Parenting, the book I'm reading with my care group right now. He asks, "Do physical things get in the way of, or create needless tension in, your parenting?" I take a deep breath and look at the flowers. They are, indeed, physical things. They are objects, not people. My daughters are much more valuable than the orange and pink blooms. I can relax. This summer, the world will not come to an end, even if every single bloom is plucked early from my plants. And I doubt even my industrious children could manage that feat.

My children are learning patience, and so am I. Tripp writes that "[i]n every moment as you are parenting your children, the heavenly Father is parenting you." I need to hear this truth: I need God as my parent every bit as much as my children need me as a parent (I suppose even more so). God is teaching me to be patient and gracious with my children, and I am a slow learner. He reminds me here on the deck, as my girls pluck flowers, that the true blooms to wait for are not growing in planters. They are running around naked in the backyard; they are little now, but will be grown-up some day (sooner than I imagine), their deepest, brightest colors yet to be seen.

Petals plucked and dropped on the dirt in the pot.

When What You Have to Work with Is a Tangled Mess

I've been knitting a lot lately. Sometimes the yarn runs smoothly from the center of the skein, like it's supposed to. But sometimes, the dreaded tangle appears. It may be small at first, just a tiny snag in the straight line of yarn, but usually at such a warning sign I sigh in frustration. I know what is coming: a tangled mess that interferes with my serene knitting experience. It takes more time to clear up the tangles and get a length of workable yarn than I end up spending on the knitting itself. By the time my brief window of free time is over (during my children's afternoon naps), I've worked my fingertips sore trying to loosen cotton yarn from its matted knots and probably knitted about three rows.

The tangled mess experience teaches me patience, I suppose, sort of like sitting in traffic. Though I feel like I'm getting nowhere, I know that in reality I'm getting closer to my destination. In the car, crawling along at 25 mph on the highway, I am still facing the right direction. I'll get there sooner or (in this case) later. Loosening the tangled yarn, I know I'm freeing the strand I need to finish my project. I just have to let the project take more time than I had anticipated.

Knitting and detangling yarn is like investing in a relationship; let's say a marriage. The yarn you're using is the yarn you have. You already bought it and you've tied it in little looping knots onto your needles. You've committed to it and you've already put some amount of work into completing the desired object when the tangle appears. That tangle stops you in your work and you face a choice: work at undoing the tangle so you can keep going, or cut your losses and start over with a different skein. I've personally done both. With knitting, the stakes are pretty low, in terms of cost: a skein of yarn is pretty cheap. But with relationships, the cost is higher: the value of a person cannot be measured.

In marriage, you've already committed to a person, through vows and through building life together to some extent before tangles appear. Your spouse is knitted to you and your two lines of yarn are now inextricable. All people have tangles (both spouses have nasty knots that will appear at some point). The question is whether to work on the tangles or to cut the yarn and lose the work you've already put into your pattern. The two of you together form a knitted project, and you build it stitch by stitch one day, one decision, one meal, one conversation at a time.

You can't cut off the person you've tied yourself to or all of your hard work will be lost. You can be assured that any other person with whom you might start again will have tangles, just like this one. The two of you must stop in the midst of whatever work you're doing and untie the knots together. It might feel like a waste of time. You may think you're not making any progress. But if your project, the pattern the two of you are building through your whole lives, is ever to be completed, you have to take the time to face problems and work on fixing them.

Marriage is good at showing the tangles of our lives, our personal messes and failures, and forcing us to stop and sort them before going on. It feels slow. It feels tedious and painful. But it's worth doing because the very fibers we need to complete our work are hidden in that mess. We just have to free them.

My current mess.

Special note:
I have seen, through the example of someone close to me, a time when a marriage cannot go on and the yarn has to be cut. I will simply say this: a marriage involves two people and it requires both to willingly remain in order for it to continue.