Working, Working … In Which I Make Progress
See that gap between the second and third mulberries? That right there, my friends, is progress. It better be progress as it took a couple hours yesterday to do.
I am currently fortifying myself with my second cup of coffee while my back massager hums against my back working at the various kinks and stiffness, and I will shortly be back out there, hacking away at dead hollyhocks, piling them into huge piles so that we may engage in the ritual stripping and spreading of seeds so that I might do this all again in one year.
You ask me, why? Why do this? The hollyhocks make me break out in a rash and itch like crazy, they take weeks to clean up after they’ve gone to seed and I hurt worse than usual while doing this.
Ah, this is why:
If we’re good enough parents, we do the hard, back-breaking work whether we wish to or not so that we can have a chance at the rewards. Not for ourselves, but for our children. It’s our job, and perhaps if more people went into parenting with that awareness and acceptance that it’s years of hard, often seemingly thankless work, well, they’d handle that work a bit better.
My recommendation when you’re tired of all the work, when you think there’s no hope it will ever amount to anything, is to find something like gardening, so that you will have a reminder that it does all work out; that your efforts matter, that your children will grow and blossom in ways you could never have imagined. It won’t be the way you expected it to; I have flowers that have now spread throughout a half acre that originated eight years ago from one tiny packet of seeds. Tending, caring, nurturing matters.
And with that though, I shall go tend, care, and nurture those hollyhocks.
Oh, and one last thing: Laugh and laugh a lot. It makes a hell of a difference.
Working, Working … In Which I Make Progress first appeared at Countering …, and is republished here with permission.
KWombles on 07/20/10 in Art/Play/Myth, featured | No Comments | Read More
