The event that I never thought would happen to me has occurred. We are parents of a high school graduate, as our daughter received her diploma two weeks ago. We knew it was going to happen, almost from the moment she was born. But, is any parent ever ready for it?
My brain has been turning over for weeks about the significance of this event, both for our daughter and for her parents. Sadness, elation, memories, hopes and dreams for her future; it’s been exhausting up there!
As I watched her receive her diploma, and subsequent bursaries and scholarships at the ceremony, I was thinking that the similarities between raising a high school graduate and creating a garden are striking.
Think about it. Walk around your garden and focus on all of those plants that you’ve nurtured over the years. You worked hard to create a good environment for them to grow in by working lots of organic matter into the soil. We built “nurseries” for our newborn children, filling the room with bright colours, toys, cribs and blankets.
Once the plants were in the ground they needed constant attention, regular watering and feeding to make sure they grew. As parents we were constantly inventing new ways to make eating strained beans fun, we were masters at making formula in the middle of the night and we soon learned to tell the difference between a “I’m hungry” cry and a “My diaper is full” cry.
As the plants grew up we strived to surround them with other plants that would bring out the best qualities in all of them; complimentary colours, a succession of bloom, contrasting textures, staggered heights.
Good parents are always aware of who their children’s friends are and what their parents are like.
When our plants grew out of bounds we were there with the pruners to keep the foliage in check. When our kids tested our boundaries we weren’t lopping off limbs, but we let them know when they’d gone too far. Instead of pruning we’d give them a “time out” or tell them they were “grounded.”
If our plants developed a disease or insects arrived to harm them we would devote much energy to finding out what the problem was and then we’d implement the most effective solution. Kids? You remember the sleepless nights, the vomit in the hair, the trips to the doctor’s office or the hospital and the many hours spent sitting up in the living room with a sick child in your arms.
You struggle with plants at times in the garden. They don’t perform as well as you’d hoped. Winter ends and you wonder if they have survived, if you did enough to help them through the cold. We constantly wonder if we have been good parents, if our children have listened to any of the lessons we’ve tried to impart, if they’ve learned anything from living under our roof for eighteen years!
And then you have one of the “wow” moments which I wrote about earlier in the spring. You look around and your garden looks spectacular, so good that you can’t imagine that you were responsible. One of your beautiful children finishes high school with flying colours and appears to be well on her way to becoming a responsible adult and again you wonder how it all happened under your watch.
