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March 2009
Sowing the Seeds
Dear Friends,
As parents, it is easy to become frustrated when our children do not immediately embrace our sentiments, our values and our behavior, except when we don’t want them to. We want our children to be "finished" and perfect at a very early age. We want them to be what we are not. We forget how we acted when we were young.
With planting time around the corner, I recall as a kid heading to the garden with my grandmother, preparing the ground, making rows with the hoe and helping her seed her garden. She was very particular in how things were planted and where they were planted.
After planting, she took great care to keep the garden weed-free. She spent hours in the garden, pulling weeds. Dad and I tilled between the rows of beans and lettuce and carrots, until the vegetables grew too big. Then all the weeding was done by hand.
In those days, I really didn’t care much for eggplant, spinach and broccoli. I didn’t like tomatoes, except in ketchup, and green beans and peas were not my favorite foods. I complained about having to hoe the garden, snap beans and pick tomatoes, because I wasn’t the one who enjoyed those things on the table.
I thought at the time that I would never love vegetables. Of course, I thought wrong.
The same could be said for chickens. I was often saddled with the Saturday morning ritual of cleaning the chicken barn. In those days, we had around 400 laying hens and about 250 broilers. I hated picking eggs at night and washing them up so we could sell them to the grocery store or to neighbors. It was no fun at all. And cleaning the barns was even worse.
Dad made sure that every hired man who stayed out too late on a Friday night, had the job of cleaning out the chicken barn on Saturday morning. I was the one who always tagged along to help out. When I left for college, I was sure that if I ever returned to farm this place, the first thing I would get rid of would be the laying hens.
My, how time changes attitudes? After Donna and I were married, some of the first "livestock" we purchased, were hens. I missed the taste of home-raised eggs. Of course, our current flock has been whittled down to about twenty hens, and is a more manageable size. But the eggs from those hens taste as good as those from our flock years ago; it is just that my attitude toward caring for them has changed dramatically.
I guess my folks knew something about raising children. They knew that the "seed" of good things in our lives – faith, values, healthy living, honesty, courage and hard work – had to be sown time and time again when my brother and I were young. The harvest of that planting and investment comes only when we grew up and had families of our own.
We want our children to be perfect, even if we weren’t perfect in our own youth. But it seems that patience and persistence in our messages with our children are what pay the greatest dividends later on.
Hope you have a good week.
W.K. Kellogg Foundation
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