The Lifeline

My children love playing outside and I love letting them play outside. I had posted recently about our backyard transformation which has allowed our children so many hours of fun outside. 

One of the things I've been able to do is to put potted plants on our patio. This way I can grow my plants, move them as the weather changes, and my husband doesn't have to do creative mowing between pots if they were sitting in the grass. 

I can't remember why anymore, but one day, I allowed my children to use my gardening scissors outside to cut something. I told them what they could cut and then let them loose. Well....as kids are, they started cutting some things which I didn't say they were allowed to cut. For the most part, it didn't bother me. However, I later realized my son had cut all the pink flowers off of my plant and put them into his bucket.

 

 

His gesture was sweet and genuine - he liked the flowers and he wanted to cut them all off so he could collect them and save them in his bucket. I read a book in college about this mentality gone wrong. In a four-year-old? Cute. Grown man? Inappropriate and disturbing. I don't remember there being anything graphic in the novel itself, but if it were not in my list of required reading for my class, I would never have thought to read it. 

My son got an earful from me about how I didn't say he could cut the flowers off my plant. And how flowers die when you cut them off the plant because they are separated from their life source. Their outdoor play ended shortly after and we all went back inside.

That evening, I was outside for something completely unrelated and I noticed the plant was already starting to push out new buds. You can see the little pink beginning to emerge and blossom.

 

Plants are resilient. They will grow back given the proper environment. I actually took my son out the next morning to show him the plant and the new flowers that were growing on it. I think he was semi-scarred I was showing him the plant he wrongly cut so he got weepy again. But in no time, he was outside playing as normal and forgetting that he ever cut them in the first place. 

I'm still learning as a parent that reactions are more memorable than actions. I myself am a product of a childhood of negative reactions, ones I hope not to pass down to my children. It's an uphill battle, one I lose more often than I'd like to admit. But this plant was a reminder to me: if you are connected to the lifeline, you will grow and renew.