Patience with ourselves.
Starting in April I would walk out to my rhododendron and stare. This winter has been weird, I would think. The spring has been awfully cold. Are they going to bloom? The calendar turned to May, the month that the blooms typically arrive, but the buds were giving no sign of opening up.
Finally, in the week leading up to Mother's Day, when I was doing my series on co-authors in motherhood, the purple started peeking out. The full bloom image above was taken on Mother's Day itself.
This flowering bush seemed to be sending me a message. I was impatient with it, checking and re-checking every day, doubting its ability to bloom, wondering if it would reach its potential, and prematurely lamenting that the blooms only stick around for a short time.
Sound familiar? I couldn't ignore the similarities with motherhood. We want to be a perfectly formed mother immediately, as soon as we're bringing baby home from the hospital. We get impatient with ourselves as we make mistakes in mothering. After a hard day with yelling and dirty dishes and toothpaste all over the sink we wonder whether we will ever flower into the mother we thought we would be.
You have to give yourself time. You have to be patient and work with the process instead of trying to speed it along. (Right?) Not just in motherhood, but in whatever your struggle might be. You need water and sunlight and food. The beautiful bloom is there inside of you. It will emerge when its ready. Then the process will start all over again.