A few months ago, a lovely neighbor gave us a young pomegranate tree. It had been given to her as a thank you gift, but she had no space to fit it into her lush back yard, and as I have more recently begun to try my hand at gardening, she thought of me. It was given with no pressure or expectation to ensure it's survival - helpful when one is already responsible for the lives of two young children.
And so the summer came and went, and we faithfully watered the tree in the little plastic pot in which it had come to us. We knew we needed to transplant it to the ground soon, but we kept putting it off - traveling, other projects, children, gatherings. All very good things. Besides, the tree seemed to be doing just fine - we kept watering it and moving it to new locations in the yard so as to not kill the grass and to make sure it received enough sunlight.
And then, earlier this week, even with a downpour of rain all day on Tuesday, we noticed several of the leaves turning yellow, brown, and finally falling.
The precious tree, cooped up and contained all summer, is dying. We have kept it in too small of a container for it to flourish, and so instead it is shrinking back, hopeless, withering. In thinking we were taking care of it, we neglected to remember that it is in preparing and then planting it into the larger soil bed of the earth that it truly will grow. A container protects for only so long before it becomes a prison.
My children are like this young tree. I have them for a season - at times it feels long, at times so incredibly short. But this is a constant process that will eventually result in them needing, needing to find their way out of the container that is our home and that is parental protection so they can flourish in the richness of what is outside of it.
I can water, move, even prune them as they grow, but eventually I must remove the container, rustle up the roots a bit, plant them where their roots can find even deeper ground, to tap into the groundwater.
I try as I am able to allow my children a steady, consistent but uncontained life. Uncontained by the boxes our world will place them into, uncontained by the boxes even friends at church may put them into, uncontained by the boxes they may place themselves into. But the boxes that are most difficult for me to recognize are those into which I put them. I didn't recognize that because I was leaving the tree in the container for so long, I was actually hurting it. I didn't know how quickly things would turn south when those roots came up against an impenetrable surface. I knew I would likely need to transplant it eventually, but the day crept up so quickly. I don't want to do that to my children. The next decade and a half will be gone before I know it, and I don't want to be grasping for time when it comes time for my children to be transplanted.
I want them to know that I feel as ready as I can. That I might grieve the passing of the ease that comes from knowing they will sleep in my own house every night, the passing of our days together where we can count on seeing each other's faces at the dinner table, the noise that right now feels like too much but will leave far more silence in its wake. But that I will not grieve their leaving of this place to grow beyond what I can provide for them. I will not grieve the removal of the container before it becomes something that would suffocate. I will not grieve the fact that this is always what it will have supposed to have been - having them for a season so they could mature in safety, in love, in nurture and comfort, and finally setting them free toward the world, always with a soft place to land behind them. Prolonged containment is far from safe. It can be the death of us.