"Sometimes I feel small, weak, and insignificant."

Sometimes I am a struggling sprout trying to grow strong again.

Photo credit: Geri Jean on Unsplash

If you glance at

Breeann Adam

‘s Substack home page, this is what you will discover: she shares “imperfect stories about unconventional motherhood, foster care, adoption, parenting, creativity, and life that are just right for imperfect people.” As a former special education teacher, Breeann shares her heart in this essay she originally called The Sprout, which I see as a metaphor: a watermelon plant growing steadily until it is suddenly snapped with a pair of child’s scissors.

Her story asks each of us, how do we grow again once we have been shattered by the brutalities of life? These don’t have to be startling or sensational. We all experience hardship, setbacks, obstacles, and adversity.

Once again, I invite you to be generous and gratuitous in your comments for Breeann, and do check out her Substack—follow and subscribe. Re-stacks are appreciated, too.

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Resilience reminds me of a mutilated watermelon sprout, a thin-lipped and red-faced teacher, and Melissa’s endless tears.

The wilted watermelon sprout lay on the laminate countertop like an abandoned green frown. With tears rolling down her round cheeks, my classmate Melissa stood next to the counter, staring at the already-shriveling sprout. A pair of purple children’s scissors lay in front of the row of milk carton planter boxes lined up on the windowsill.

Several weeks earlier, I, along with each first-grader in our class, had written our names on an emptied cafeteria milk carton. We used miniature garden trowels to fill the cartons with soil and watermelon sprouts in the dark crumbly earth. Our cartons stood like proud, stout soldiers, each tiny sprout reaching toward the Montana spring sunshine gleaming through the large window.

Every day, we lined up at the drinking fountain, filled Dixie cups with water, and poured the water over our individual plants. Using wooden rulers to measure our sprouts, we marked the increasing lengths on graph paper with markers. Mrs. R. slid clear transparencies onto the overhead projector and taught us about photosynthesis and the life cycle of a plant.

After those first weeks passed, Melissa’s sprout had grown the strongest, a sturdy thick rope growing amidst a collection of floundering floss-like wisps. Unbeknownst to anyone else, another girl, Jane, was growing jealous of Melissa’s superior sprout on the windowsill.

How do I know Jane was jealous? Because she took her pair of scissors and chopped Melissa’s sprout off, leaving the sprout to die on the sticky countertop.

I don’t know if it made Jane feel better when she felt the fibrous cord between her dull scissor blades suddenly snap. I don’t know if she thought about her scissors left on the countertop, the scissors marked with her name, as being incriminating evidence.

I don’t know how Jane felt when Melissa found the plant and burst into tears.

I know Jane’s episode of plant murder didn’t make her own plant grow. Even if it magically had done that for her, nobody would have been happy for her, anyway, after what she did.

Sometimes now, my attempts at growth feel like a puny, stringy sprout, and then I feel like seven-year-old Jane envying the stronger sprouts around me. These fragile sprouts are rejected job applications and still not knowing how to style my hair after 7,345 YouTube videos and 35 years on planet Earth. They are another squabble with my spouse, misfires instead of connections with my kids, and a book manuscript draft going on Year Six of writing, stopping, editing, and doubting. When I am Jane, my own green-eyed monster sometimes feels like hacking others’ sprouts to bits because, despite my best efforts, my plant isn’t growing like theirs.

Photo credit: Zach Reiner on Unsplash

Sometimes, I am not Jane, but a struggling sprout myself. I feel small, weak, and insignificant next to other plants. I am trying to grow, change, and reach the sun, but something like the pair of purple scissors chops me to bits. These scissors are physical illness and chronic exhaustion. These scissors are struggles and disabilities and trauma my children have gone through and will continue to endure. These scissors are life’s endless mundanities of paying bills, cleaning a house that never quite gets clean, and figuring out what the hell to make for dinner for all these people, again. These scissors are anxiety, depression, regret, and scrolling too much news.

Sometimes I am not Jane, nor am I the tiny sprout. I am not using the scissors, nor am I being cut down by the scissors. Sometimes I am Melissa’s watermelon spout, in its first days of growing strong.

When I am like Melissa’s budding sprout, I am resilient, despite humble beginnings. I am unconcerned with how the other plants are growing or what dangers may be waiting around the corner to destroy me. I am simply growing strong, absorbing the goodness around me of water, sunshine, love, and proper care.

I am healthy, thriving, and full of hope.

Too often in these hard days of middle-aged life and endless caretaking and the hours that blur into days and then into weeks and months and with metaphorical scissors lurking to cut up my precious new sprouts, my mind and heart can emanate the spirit of Jane. I become cynical and sad, wondering why I would even try to grow at all.

But then I take a deep breath. I set my scissors down. I remember each plant grows in its own time. Destroying one plant doesn’t make another grow. Nor does being destroyed mean you can’t try and grow again. Therefore, when I am my grittiest, most determined, and best self, I pick up my cup of water and pour it on my own plant. I do not measure it or compare it to anything else. I simply watch the sunlight stream in, and wait for my own beautiful plant to grow strong again, just like I believe it can.