Pulling up flowers

I had a scary moment yesterday.

I had taken the day off to do a bunch of gardening, so I headed to a local plant nursery to pick up a few things.  While I was there, I saw a plant that I also have growing in my garden but have never identified, a tall, purple flower that is apparently called Monkshood.

It had been given to me by a woman who admired my garden in passing and offered some of her perennials toward my cause.  She had given me detailed instructions about how to grow it, said it was very particular about water levels, but never told me its name.

When I saw it in the nursery, I said to the owner, with not a little pride, that I had managed

the water levels for it correctly and that it was currently blooming beautifully.

She glanced at my children and asked, “With your kids around?”

“Sure,” I said.  “Why?”

“It’s extremely toxic,” she answered, obviously alarmed.  “Ingesting a very small amount could easily kill a child.  Even just getting the sap on their hands could make them violently sick.  People used to tip arrows with it.”

“Oh,” I said, and promptly went home to pull it all out with a nice heavy pair of leather gloves.

As I was removing it, I was struck once again by how many dangers pass us by unknown and unrecognized.  As parents, we like to think that we can protect our children from the things that might harm them, but just riding in the car or swimming at the beach or even picking the wrong flower for Mom might put them in danger.

The truth is that we can never entirely protect them, and trying to do so only prevents them from living living their lives fully.  All we can do is pull up the Monkshood when we find it and be thankful for each day that we can put them to bed alive and relatively unscathed.

Luke is a stay-at-home father of three boys, aged nine, seven, and three.  He has fathered, fostered, adopted, or provided a temporary home for kids anywhere between birth and university.  He has taught college courses, adoption seminars, camp groups, Sunday School classes, rugby teams, not to mention his own homeschooled kids.