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If I let them, my 39 kids would try to drive me nuts, but I don’t let them do so. I go outside.
“Where’s Mom?” they always ask only to hear the stock reply, “Outside.”
I don’t know why they bother to ask.
When my older kids come over and the weather is nice, they don’t even go in the house, knowing they might as well go around the house to find me sooner
Today, mid-January, 70 degrees and my daffodils are blooming two weeks early. Gardening is in my blood, it’s my therapy, it’s my antidote for being over-run, and often poisoned, by the raging children who take all their negative emotions out on me.
It’s not my fault that they ended up in the foster care system and that they now have, at the very least, trust issues. But it is safe for them to unload it all on me, knowing on some level, that I’m not going to reject them. They know I won’t simply because I haven’t. Period. It took awhile to build up to this, but it’s there now.
To me it is often tiresome, but very necessary. Sometimes my blood pressure boils at the unfairness of it all towards me so I go outside and kick over a weed bucket, push the wheelbarrow to kingdom come, or I weed my fury away.
The garden has taught me patience, I can plant a seed but it takes a couple of months to bear fruit…my kids take years.
I have to nurture my garden or it won’t grow, an obvious ditto for the kids as well.
Sometimes I’ll blast my ipod in my ears and all I can then see are kids with their mouths open and flapping at me. I just smile and act like I get it.
Today I worked in one of the front gardens, weeding around the rest of the daffodils that have pushed up and are budding in front of me, I yanked out honeysuckle that dominates everything, and I wrassled with ivy. Wrassle is a word, that’s what we do in the South.
The daphne and the red buds are blooming, the camellias are in their full glory, and a dozen or so of my hens clucked all their news at me that I couldn’t hear anyway due to my ipod.
But, as usual, I kept my good mood, using my gardens for therapy, so that I can continue to face the cantankerous emotional demands of my children who are still angry at what all has been done to them over the years.
I do relish the challenges involved in raising my family but I also need just a little bit of down time myself to regroup and get my own game face on, I’m only halfway done raising my children.
