Doing Good Things Badly

I recently found a quote which I am embracing as my mantra for this current season of life. This is the fun stage of pregnancy where climbing a flight of stairs leaves me gasping for breath, and the idea of a walk around the block is just too daunting so instead I sit on the couch and eat ice cream. I feel tired, old, and sore, and we are counting down the days until this little one makes his appearance and gives me back my body! It’s a temporary trial, but still difficult. So, here is the quote that is encouraging me in the midst of my fatigue and pain:

“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” ~ G. K. Chesterton

Because of the afore-mentioned reasons, there are not many (any?) things that I am doing well right now. 99.9% of my small daily allotment of energy is taken up with keeping four small humans alive and attempting to do a bit of school with them. However, I love that this quote directly confronts the perfectionistic tendencies that we homeschool moms tend to have, and releases me from any self-imposed pressure to produce Instagram-worthy projects every day. It’s actually quite okay – good, even – to try something new, knowing full well that the result may not be a success. As an example, I would like to present to you… Our Vegetable Garden.

Please note the pitiful tomato specimen pictured below (one of many).

I am convinced that planting a garden is a good thing for myself and our children, which is why we have attempted one each and every summer. However, almost every summer for the past nine years I have been either pregnant or nursing a small baby, which means that every year our garden is rather pathetic. This year I had one small goal: to keep up with watering the plants so that they wouldn’t die.

I failed, and several died. Our tomato leaves are turning yellow and we’ve only gotten a handful of tomatoes. The thyme that I planted never grew at all and I still don’t know why. Our peas all withered after I neglected them during a dry spell. The chipmunks keep eating our strawberries before we can pick them because I haven’t bothered to put a fence around them. And of course, we haven’t done a single bit of weeding, fertilizing, or pruning. However, despite these many failures, planting our garden was still a good thing, and here’s why!

Why You Should Do Good Things, Even Badly

Our children are learning where their food comes from and how plants grow. You can read about these things in books, but there is nothing quite like the experience of choosing your own seeds, feeling the dirt under your fingernails, and watching those plants grow before your very eyes. This year, Big Brother chose to plant pumpkins and for some unknown reason they flourished. They started as small black seeds and grew and grew until now they are plants nearly the length of our house with leaves larger than my 8-month-pregnant belly. I have never seen plants grow so quickly! In the process, we learned that pumpkins have both male and female flowers and we learned how to tell them apart. We watched the bees diligently pollinating our flowers, and saw the small pumpkins forming underneath the female flowers. We marveled as these little pumpkins grew to the size of basketballs, and now we are eagerly waiting for the day when we can pick them and use them. And when I say “we,” I truly mean “we” – I had never grown pumpkins before, so we were equally learning all together this summer.

We have had a few small successes and learned a lot in the process. And for kids who don’t know any better, small successes are very exciting! Picking and eating something is much better than nothing. Our pumpkins are probably our greatest success this summer, but we have also had some other harvests. My two basil plants flourished and our boys loved having the job of picking handfuls of leaves to use in soups and salads throughout the summer. We didn’t get a lot of tomatoes, but each ripe one was carefully picked and quickly eaten. Our boys learned how much better freshly-picked green beans taste compared with store-bought ones. The children even learned something through observing our plants that failed – they saw, first-hand, what happens if you fail to water or if you don’t protect those juicy berries from hungry rodents.

However, I am once again thanking the good Lord above that we don’t have to actually live off our garden, because if we did we would certainly starve in short order. Either that or we would move in with my parents who have a very respectable garden which could actually feed a family of humans, not just chipmunks.

We have created the habit of planting a garden each spring. And this, I believe, is where lies the true wisdom of the above-mentioned quote. If we are once able to try something new – without worrying about mastering it immediately or doing it perfectly – it suddenly becomes easier to later try it again, and again. And if this activity is truly worth doing, then we are on our way to creating a very good and worthwhile habit! Our garden may be meager and under-watered and on the brink of death, but we have now come to view ourselves as People Who Plant a Garden Each Spring, which greatly increases our chances of having more (and better) gardens in the future.

Of course, our garden is not the only good thing that we are doing badly this year. Classical Conversations is another example. From all appearances, it is a very good thing, but we will probably be doing it rather badly at least until January or whenever Mom starts recovering from The Inevitable Newborn Fog. Will we review all of the memory work – Timeline, History, Science, Math, English, Latin and Geography – every day like we are supposed to? Probably not. Will we be doing elaborate projects at home to correspond with each week’s science and art theme? Definitely not. Will we memorize the lengthy Bible passage for the year? I have no idea. But, we are trying, and we are learning, and I hope that in time we will have the experience and the energy to do these things well – or at least, better than we are now. Let’s keep on doing good things, even if we fail, even if we don’t know how, with the confidence that our efforts are worth it – and the hope that maybe one day we’ll be proficient enough to keep all our plants alive for the whole summer.

Originally written August 29 2021