Maybe It's Not Your Turn to Bloom This Year

I've been a shadow of myself the past few years.

I haven't been jet-setting off with my friends for a girls' weekend. I haven't spent my weeknights going out to dinners or book clubs. I haven't hit fitness goals or learned how to knit or even volunteered at my favorite organizations.

The truth is, I'm tired, burnt out, and not feeling like my best self.

I've been supporting my college kids a lot. It's been a bumpy ride at times.

We've helped our aging parents through some surgeries. I've covered for my husband as he started a new job, lost a job, and started a new one again. I drove hours to help a friend who suffered a loss.

I'm dealing with menopause and a nagging health issue that just won't resolve.

And I came to the realization, it's not my turn to bloom this year.

That's the way it is sometimes in life. You can water and fertilize and weed out the bad stuff. You can talk lovingly to yourself for encouragement and try to protect yourself from outside forces. You can stand in the sunshine.

But like the beautiful row of hydrangeas that sit on the side of my house, you may not get to bloom very much.

That's how it often is when you are a parent, especially in midlife when you are caring for those you raised and those who raised you. You put so much effort into tending everyone else's garden that you forget to till your own.

You do the maintenance, but the end result isn't what you expected, even close to what you wanted, maybe not even what you feel you deserve.

But sometimes you have to look a little harder to see what is right in front of you. You may only have one bloom, but you've tended the garden enough to know that your future looks full.

And you grasp onto that.

Sometimes you make big plans for yourself, you create a vision for what you want your life to look like, but the universe has other ideas. There is no expiration date when you are a parent, no end date for when you are no longer needed. You just keep showing up and tending their gardens as needed, sometimes neglecting your own.

There are times I'm hard on myself and feel like a failure. Maybe I'm spending my days on the wrong things, maybe I'm doing too much for others, maybe I need to change....

But the truth is, I'm just seeing it all wrong.

I'm happy that I helped others bloom, and it's just extenuating circumstances--things out of my control--that caused me to remain a little more stagnant than I wanted to this year. It doesn't mean I'm a failure.

It's not my year to bloom--but I survived and flourished in different ways, and I enjoyed seeing others blossom.

And if this isn't the greatest metaphor for life in these turbulent times, I don't know what is.

Sometimes, instead of seeing the lack of flowers, we have to see the strength of the plant that keeps coming back year after year. It's the roots that are developed. The resiliency of what lies underneath the ground that can't be seen by the outside world.

It's what gives me hope.

Hope that my effort to work on myself, no matter how large or small, is not wasted. Hope that I can enjoy others' gardens as much as my own. Hope that I will always keep coming back from hardships and growing.

But most of all, hope that in the next season, I will bloom again.

Love hard,

Whitney

P.S. I wrote this post last year, and I do believe I’m starting to come out of the fog. And more importantly, my hydrangeas had six big blooms this year, so that’s something!