We Are Often Asked to Grow Things That Are Not Our Garden

As far back as I remember, my mother had a vegetable garden where she grew tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, beans, parsley, and strawberries. I loved going through her garden each time I visited her. She would show me all her plants. She told me what new things she was trying. She told me what grew well and what didn't grow so well.

When she moved to a different state, she had to learn how things grew in that environment — which, by the way, took her longer to figure out.

Though I was raised watching her do this, I never grew a garden consistently myself. I tried my hand at growing tomatoes a time or two, but never ventured outside of that. Gardens take time and careful tending that I didn't have.

But as a mother, I was given a different kind of garden.

Every mother carries a garden she was given to tend without instructions. Every child arrives as their own particular mystery — a personality, a temperament, a way of seeing the world that belongs entirely to them. And we are asked to tend that, to learn it, to understand what this specific child needs, while also learning ourselves.

In the process, we discover facets of ourselves we didn't know were there — patience we didn't know we had, fears we didn't know we carried, love deeper than we imagined possible. Parenting reveals us to ourselves in ways nothing else does.

And children watch us and learn — but maybe not the lesson we carefully planned. Because parenting asks us to guide our children in areas we haven't always fully navigated ourselves. To model patience when we are at the end of ours. To demonstrate self-control while standing in front of the metaphorical chocolate drawer at the end of an impossible day. To show kindness when we are depleted. To be the mirror — calm, clear, and steady — when our own reflection feels uncertain.

This is the complexity and difficulty of being human and being a parent at the same time.

Tending a garden takes time. Real time. Unhurried, present, attentive time. We cannot rush what grows. We cannot tend from a distance. We have to be there — noticing what needs water, what needs pruning, what is being crowded out by something that grew faster and louder than we expected.

But many of us spend our best hours tending other gardens. Our employer's. Our clients'. The garden of a career we built because we had to, or because we wanted to, or both. We give those gardens our sharpest attention, our longest hours, our fullest presence.

And then we come home.

What is left at the end of that day is real love — but it is tired love. Stretched love. Love that means everything and sometimes cannot do everything.

So things grow in our children's gardens. Just not always what we would have chosen. Not always in the direction we would have guided them, had we been there in those quiet, ordinary moments when character is formed — not in the dramatic ones, but in the small ones. The daily ones. The ones that pass without ceremony and shape a person anyway.

This is not an indictment. It is an honest naming of something most parenting content carefully avoids.

We are often asked to grow things that are not our garden. Not because we don't love them. But because time is the resource, and it gets spent elsewhere. Because survival requires it. Because life is complex and the demands on a mother are not small.

My mother knew her garden. She knew which plants needed more sun, which needed more water, which wouldn't survive the move to a different climate. She learned them over years of patient attention.

We are asked to know our children the same way. And some of us are learning — like she did in that new state — in an environment we didn't expect, with a child whose particular nature we are still figuring out, later than we wished.

That is not failure. That is gardening in the conditions we were given.

It is never too late to tend what matters.

To look at our children — whatever age they are now — and begin paying attention. Noticing what is growing. Saying something when you see something good. Being present in the small moments, not just the important ones.

Tending takes time. But it doesn't require perfection. It just requires showing up, regularly, with our eyes open.

That is how gardens grow.

KindCoin is a simple daily practice for families — helping parents notice the good, and giving children a moment to know they were seen. If that resonates, we'd love for your family to try it. Join as a founding family →