A Bountiful¹ Harvest

When our first daughter arrived, I didn’t hesitate a minute to leave a successful business career to devote myself full-time to making a warm, loving home for a new family. As the years moved on, I never regretted that decision. I genuinely enjoyed my life as a wife, home maker, and mother. Besides creating a satisfying marriage and cuddling the babies, home life held additional reward for me. I became an accomplished painter, plasterer², carpenter, and fix-it handy person. Repeated relocations, due to my husband’s career, transformed me into an expert packer and expediter³. My artistic talents emerged as I sewed clothes for the children and accessorized⁴ one home after another.

Fifteen years later, the life course I had chosen took an abrupt about-face⁵ when I had to return to the business world and recreate my ability to earn a living outside the home. Despite long-term counseling, communication with my husband had evaporated⁶ and our marriage crumbled. Our lives, headed in different directions, resulted in a long-drawn-out and very difficult divorce.

Not quite fully recovered from the divorce, I struggled terribly with the demands of being a single parent of three active children. Two teenagers and a nine-year-old managed to keep me forever working. Stretching available funds to extraordinary lengths became a daily contest. Haunted by guilt, I watched the children do without so much because I just couldn’t afford the extras anymore.

To provide sufficient one-on-one⁷ time and moral support for each of the children became my most difficult challenge as a single parent. Time conflicts were all too common. My cheerfulness, energy, and self-esteem eroded daily. Although I had always been a loving, nurturing parent, I started second-guessing⁸ my parenting abilities: Am I being too strict, too lenient⁹? Am I giving each child enough attention? Am I setting a good example? Most important, are the children learning values I want so much to impart¹⁰ to them? Do they feel my love? I felt like a failure.

My oldest daughter, usually a very quiet and private teen, had joined the drama club at school and started acting. This new aspect of her personality surprised and delighted me. The night of her premiere performance, I sat in the front row. Unable to afford roses from a florist¹¹, I made her a lovely bouquet of mixed flowers tied together with a rainbow of ribbons.

When the play ended and the cast lined up across the stage for their initial bows, my son ran up and handed his sister the flowers. She positively glowed with happiness and excitement. Yet when the curtains closed and then reopened for the cast’s individual bows, she reappeared without the bouquet. I convinced myself that she was disappointed she hadn’t received roses as some of the other actresses had. Feeling I’d let her down one more time, tears filled my eyes. Then I noticed that the supporting actresses all appeared with small bunches of flowers cradled in their arms. Now the tears really streamed down my cheeks as I realized my daughter had broken apart her bouquet so that all her friends had flowers to carry on stage for the final applause.

In one wonderful moment, her small act of kindness -- like magic -- provided the affirmation my sagging¹² spirit needed. She had learned to do more with less. She had come through the pain of divorce okay. So would her brother and sister. And so would I.