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The Catholic New World
May 22, 2005

Growing like weeds


By Michelle Martin

For most adults, getting in the car and driving away takes about as much time to do as it takes to say the words.

But with two kids who need to be buckled into safety seats, three backpacks, lunchboxes, a bag of Brownie supplies and a couple of craft projects (with the glue still wet), getting in the car needs its own slot on the daily planner.

But that’s OK. It gives us time to switch gears as we move from place to place, activity to activity.

That’s why, on a spring afternoon, Frank had time to stop and smell the flowers as we made our way home.

He picked a handful of bright yellow dandelions—the kind my friends and I used to rub on our chins to see who liked butter. He wrapped his fingers around the stems and held them up to me: “Here, Mommy. I picked these for you!”

It was one of those moments that seem almost too perfect to be real, with the sun shining down and Frank’s 4-year-old face shining up at me.

“Thank you, sweetheart,” I said. “They’re beautiful.”

And they were.

Frank bent down and plucked another from the grass near the curb.

“Here, Caroline,” he said. “This one’s for you.”

Caroline, 7, wanted no part of it. Already belted into her booster seat, she just wanted Frank to get in the car so we could get going. So she turned it down flat.

Frank, used to the unaccountable behavior of big sisters, took her rejection with a shrug and said, “I’ll keep it then.”

But that wasn’t enough for Caroline.

“Come on, Frank,” she said. “Don’t you know it’s just a weed?”

“Oh,” Frank said. “Then I don’t want it either.” And he dropped it in the gutter before I could rescue it.

When, I wondered, did my little girl become sophisticated enough to reject a thing of beauty (all right, maybe you don’t want them in your lawn, but dandelions really are pretty) just because other people saw no value in them? And why was Frank so quick to accept her judgment?

Frank wants nothing more than Caroline’s approval—and if he can’t get that, he’ll settle for her attention in any way he can get it. That means he’s a master at pestering and perturbing her, often disagreeing, contradicting or correcting her. But in this case, agreement was so easy, it seemed.

And Caroline is desperate to grow up, to act older than she is—sometimes. Other times, she’s perfectly content to blow the fluff off dandelions that have gone to seed. When her attempts to act like a grown-up collide with Frank’s eagerness for approval, I sometimes feel like the youngest person in the car.

But it doesn’t last long. Frank still turns to his dad and me for information (especially if he can use it to correct his sister) and Caroline uses us as a sounding board for confusing questions.

Not many days after the incident of the dandelion, she heard my husband and me talking about the violets that have encroached on our lawn, displacing the grass as they go. Dandelions she knew were weeds; the thought that the pretty little purple flowers might be weeds too came as a surprise.

“Mom,” she asked, “how do you know if something is a flower or a weed?”

Weeds often are flowers, I told her. They’re just flowers that are growing where people don’t want them. The difference isn’t so much in what they are as the way they are seen.


Martin is a staff writer for The Catholic New World.

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