Flowers for Mommy

Today is a special day in two ways! It marks my first post on my brand new author’s page and it’s also my 10th Mother’s Day as a mom! To celebrate I thought I’d share a piece I wrote a few years ago about why dandelions are my favorite flower.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Flowers for Mommy

Every spring a battle is waged in our backyard. My husband puts on his armor, faded tee-shirt and grass stained gym shoes, and then voyages out to the local lawn care store to pick out the weapons he will use against his age-old foe: the dandelion.

A stink’n dandelion!

Gardenguides.com defines a dandelion as: A perennial weed with a stout taproot. The leaves are invasive, growing outward pushing down the surrounding vegetation, such as lawn grass, killing them due to lack of sunlight. Or in other words- – great big giant pest!

Note the lack of dandelions….

Before becoming a home owner I was pretty ambivalent about these yellow flowering weeds. Let’s just say if the war against dandelions was a World War — I’d be Switzerland.

Then a few years ago we arrived at my son’s baseball game early. It’d been raining all week. The moisture combined with warm weather had encouraged those pesky little flowers to bloom like crazy. The outfield was covered in a bright blanket of dandelion flowers.

 

an approximation of what the outfield looked like

My kids were mesmerized by the alluring glow of yellow. It called to them like a sweet siren’s song. For the next half-hour they ran around the field picking flowers, hustling back to where I sat and then would toss them on my lap. It was a shower of flowers.

My youngest gazed over the field and at the growing pile of flowers in my lap. He laughed, very self-satisfied and said,”Look at ALL these flowers for mommy!!”

When I saw the pride in my kid’s eyes as they handed me their treasures, and the beauty they found in them, those weeds were suddenly as precious as roses and every one created just for me.

Since that day, dandelions are my favorite flower in the whole world! They are a cheerful yellow, a sign spring is finally here and my kids can yank them out of any patch of grass and be thanked for it. It is heavenly.

Every spring when the dandelions bloom I let my kids roam free. Walks that took minutes take hours as they pick and pick to their heart’s content and my heart never feels so content as when I watch them collect their bouquets.

Now I get dandelions by the handful. Some are offerings of love, some to decorate my clothes and hair and others to make into dandelion necklaces and crowns. And I’ve found that when picked with love and a little bit of imagination dandelions have a magical quality that can turn little boys into kings and princes and mommies into fairy queens.

One day, sooner than I realize, my boys will wage the war against dandelions in the yards of their own houses. On that day they’ll see these flowers as weeds and not treasures. But even if I live to be one hundred and one I’ll never look at a dandelion again without feeling like a queen. I’ll always remember that once three little boys believed every single one was made just for me.