Beneath the Mason Jar

Beneath the Mason Jar       

By John W. Vander Velden

 

It is only natural that we wish to be spared the difficult, the dirty, the painful parts of life.  The years pile up and we often dwell on the pain and disappointments in our wake.  Yet we understand that life is like that.  There are tough times in everyone’s existence.  We have dealt with all manner of hard things and endured, so surely we can deal with the tough times ahead.  Hard times can’t be helped.  It’s just the way things are.

But all bets are off when we become parents.  We become like mother hens doing our best to protect our brood, keeping them safe beneath our wings, and to shelter them from all the difficulties and disappointments that come their way.  We want to keep them in a safe bubble, like young tomato plants beneath the Mason jars.

Mom was a gardener, but she was an old world gardener.  Her gardens were compact, each inch vital.  But just down the road from where I grew up, Mr. Buss had a gigantic garden.  Mr. Welcome Buss always had time for curious kids from the neighborhood.  He set his tomato plants out early.  Tiny things beneath canning jars.  The mason jars acted like mini greenhouses, protecting the fragile plants from frost, wind, and even the driving rains, in other word, protecting them from the world.

But though the plants thrived within their glass bottle home, they would soon fill the space and find themselves trapped.  However Mr. Buss took away those jars long before the leaves began to press against the sides.  He told us shielded that way, the plant stretched within its protected environment, and if he waited too long the stem would have no strength to survive, simply falling over or breaking with the first wind.

It’s that way with our kids.  We would like to seal them away from all the bad things in the world.  To keep them in a strong plastic bubble separated from disease, pain, and of course loss.  And there is a time when they are most vulnerable, like small tomato plants, but like the tomato, the time comes when they must be exposed to LIFE.  For just like those plants Mr. Buss grew more than fifty years ago, our children cannot become strong enough to endure the tribulations of the everyday, if they have too long been spared exposure to the wind and rain.

We do not take away the Mason jar in one quick motion, like the gardener, but we as parents begin to step back little by little.  We give those small ones we love a space where, though not out of reach of pain, we maintain a filter of just how much pain we allow.  The years pass and the space grows larger and our protection wanes.  We continue to stand as near as we dare, while offering young wings the room to fly, always ready to reach in to support and, in need, to protect.

I have had many tasks throughout my years, but none as difficult as being a parent.  For I would wish to keep my son beneath the Mason jar, but know to do would be to fail him.  And the knowing the best way not to failing him…that’s the hardest part.  So I struggle.  I walk an invisible line between the protector and the observer.  Even now the jar has not been completely removed.  Perhaps it will have some presence as long as I have breath.  But I step back a bit year by year.  The line I walk drifts further toward the observer.  And I follow that line not out of self-concerns but forcing myself to allow him to gain the strengths he needs.  It is difficult, but I would not want my son to be like a tomato plant trapped beneath a mason jar…

(643 Words)  11/1/2017