A Mother's Journal ~ A Bit of Birdsong

I went out this morning to check on some flowers.  Throughout my garden I have bunches of these flowers that open up spectacularly every fall.  They are in the daisy or mum family I think — I don’t remember what they’re called, but they are the most beautiful pale lavendar flowers with yellow centers.  They make a great fall display. 

Anyway, at this point I am just waiting for them to bloom.  They’re pretty, even now, but just wait until they’ve opened!

Thinking about waiting on these blooms led me to think about other areas of my life when I’ve just been waiting on the bloom.  For one, there’s my son with dyslexia who we never thought would read!  His reading, however, has finally fully blossomed and now I cannot keep him out of a book.  Probably the part of his school record I am most proud of is his reading list!  It was a long time coming, but it is now beautiful! 

Another area where I am starting to see a fully-opened flower is my marriage.  I can’t say my marriage has ever been bad, but I don’t think that even in the first five or even 10 years of marriage a couple is at the very deep level of trust and knowing that comes after 20 or more years of faithful commitment.  I am so very saddened to look around at my peers and see one or the other of many couples walking off when things look like this:

They are abandoning a great beauty yet to come!

It takes awhile.  It takes forgiveness, kindness, affection, humility — especially humility, which I have learned more about recently — to keep a marriage growing more beautiful every year.  I can only imagine what the bond must be like after 50 or more years!  Lest I sound proud, I know there’s more work ahead for me in my own marriage, but I can say with all surety, I am so glad I have stuck it out this far!

So my thought for today is to look with hope for the bloom in your life — whatever it is.  I remember when my children were preschoolers, toddlers, and infants.  I could not even comprehend how amazingly fast that time would go by.  Yes, the mountains of laundry have to be dealt with at some point so everyone will have clean socks, but the love and teaching you put into your little ones now is like feeding plants.  They are growing faster than you realize.  The fruit and flowers you’ll see in their lives in the not-too-distant future will be a direct result of how you are tending to them now.  Look for the bloom.