How Can You Stay Close to Your Children After They Become Adults?

Today is Mother’s Day, and I want to discuss, from the perspective of a child who is now an adult, why I admire and respect my mother as a person. By respect and admiration, I mean the respect and admiration one equal has for another.

Clearly, my relationship with my mother underwent a transformation between my childhood and today. When I was a child, we were not equals. She performed the functions of a caregiver and educator for me; I was a child being raised by my mother. Now, as an adult looking back on that relationship, I respect and admire the choices she made.

I no longer need my mother to take care of or educate me. That relationship of dependence between us has ended, so I am now able to judge the choices she made with regard to me in the past, as well as everything she gave and sacrificed. My judgment is that she is an excellent mother. What I want to discuss is why I, as an adult, have reached that conclusion.

Before laying out my views and observations, I want to say that I am not offering a template. I am simply presenting a case, and it is a highly personal one.

My mother is a pediatrician in a county town. One thing she often tells other parents is that, in her view, education is like illness: there is no single model you can apply. The reason you fall ill today is not necessarily the same as the reason you fell ill yesterday. Everyone starts from a different physical baseline, the external environmental conditions are different, and the strain of influenza virus is different.

One thing my mother absolutely never did while educating me was follow trends. That made my education unique, at least within the county-town environment where I lived.

When you treat people’s illnesses, you know that no two people fall ill for exactly the same reasons. You have to consider not only the patient’s physical condition but also the external circumstances. Applying this observation from my mother’s medical career to the education of children is a kind of wisdom.

Much of parents’ futile yet fearless educational busywork comes from not understanding what is suitable for their own child and simply following trends, and from not understanding what the external conditions facing that child will actually allow them to accomplish. So this chapter cannot provide specific advice for educating any particular child. Do not imitate. Do not follow trends.

That may sound negative, but it is already enough to filter out a great many parents. Much of the unhappiness parents cause their children comes precisely from imitation and trend-following.

Refusing to imitate and follow trends

Imitation and trend-following operate on two levels. The larger level is the prevailing spirit of the age; the smaller is the prevailing ethos of your own social circle.

Parents belong to different social strata and wealth classes, and their capacity and willingness to invest in their children vary. Yet no matter what social circle they inhabit, the negative stance of refusing to imitate and follow trends is extremely rare.

That is why, when I see parents proclaiming themselves education gurus and passing on their successful educational experience, I wonder what they could possibly teach. Let us set aside for the moment whether the people teaching it are actually education gurus. Even if they have some kind of successful experience to pass on, that experience is already outdated, isn’t it?

By the time they are in a position to pass it on, the prevailing ethos has changed. Every era has a different ethos, and parents from every social class, with every level of exposure, are trapped within the limits of their own horizons.

From my current vantage point, for example, I can see many parents who are themselves members of an international elite. Their obsession is to make their children become outstanding figures of their era, just as they themselves did. There are also many parents who are teachers or doctors in a closed [unclear] setting, and their obsession is to make their children bring them pride and prestige within their own social circle.

Then there are parents who have been very unsuccessful in their careers and are chronically unhappy, and who sacrificed their own careers because of their children. Their obsession is for their children to fulfill their dreams and provide them with the more comfortable life they believe they originally could have had. These parents never managed to flaunt wealth successfully or rise above the crowd, so they want their children, during the later years of their lives, to help them do what they believe they themselves should have done and help them rise above the crowd.

All these messy obsessions come from the parents’ own immaturity and from their dependence on the values represented by the limited environment they inhabit.

I know rural parents who are farmers and whose obsession is to have their children come home and build them a four-story house, so that they can finally hold their heads high in the village. I also know elite parents who are lawyers and whose obsession is to make their children obtain legal qualifications just as they did, work at a major law firm, and become partners, so that they too can hold their heads high within their own social circles.

These obsessions, standards, and templates are all external standards from the environments those parents inhabit. The parents are imitating them.

Beyond the obsessions and expectations created by the parents’ own environments, there is a larger environment: the general social climate, or the spirit of the age. The spirit of the age is always changing too.

If, at this very moment, we could adopt the independent perspective of a historian and examine how the spirit of the age has changed over the course of our own lifetimes, we would discover that the negative stance of refusing to follow it, that kind of independence, is already extremely, extremely difficult to achieve.

When you live inside the spirit of the present age, you look around and discover that everyone seems to be doing the same thing. Surely that thing must be right. If you do not follow the trend, then you must be the one with the problem.

The spirit of the age creates an illusion of what ought to be done: you are supposed to do this. Why? Because everyone is doing it.

Refusing to follow the trend therefore plunges many people into anxiety, fear, and dread. At the very bottom of this fear is still everyone’s desire for happiness, right? How do you become happy? How do you attain happiness?

In many people’s eyes, all you need to do to attain happiness is succeed. If you follow the path to success created for you by the spirit of the age, it seems that you might be able to reach happiness. Since the desire for happiness is only human, and is both the deepest and the highest human aspiration, once you believe that happiness is tied to success, refusing to follow the trend becomes an act that runs counter to human nature.

My mother’s ability to refrain completely from following trends or imitating others, both within her class environment, the middle-class stratum of a small county town, and within the spirit of the age in which she lived, may look like she was doing nothing. In fact, it was quite rare.

After I grew up, I asked her about it.

“You know, in my eyes, your approach to education was a kind of negative education. How were you able, in such a closed environment, to remain completely unmoved by imitation and trend-following, and even treat them with disdain?”

The era in which I grew up was overflowing with child prodigies. The spirit of the age may have changed somewhat now, and all the child prodigies who were active in public have grown old, but in China in the late 1990s and [unclear], the media hyped up a great many child prodigies. Behind those child prodigies stood a great many education gurus.

In our county town, all kinds of children’s classes sprang up to cultivate child prodigies. In reality, they were not cultivating child prodigies. They were cultivating children who knew how to sell themselves.

When I was in primary school, the parents of the overwhelming majority of children would spend tens of thousands of yuan to send their children to classes for “little presenters.” There, the children were taught how to express themselves and, at a very young age, acquire the ability to sell themselves like insurance salespeople.

Many other children attended composition-training classes and entered the New Concept Writing Competition, hoping to shoot to fame overnight and become the next Han Han. They also had to train for Mathematical Olympiads and be cultivated into mathematical prodigies.

Later, carrying the kind of anxiety associated with parents in Beijing’s Haidian District, because I later came to know many parents from Haidian, I asked my mother, “Back then, in the county town, everyone was doing this. Why weren’t you anxious? Why did you never try to cultivate me into a child prodigy?”

I am not saying that I should have become a child prodigy. I am merely saying that the spirit of our era was all about cultivating child prodigies, and there were a lot of child prodigies around me. So many parents were acting as education gurus and spreading stories about what their own child prodigies had done. That was simply the spirit of the age back then, wasn’t it?

My mother said that she had observed those child prodigies too. Why were they considered prodigies? Because they had prizes, certificates, and graded qualifications.

“I wasn’t capable enough to actually send you onto some major provincial- or national-level stage,” she said. “In other words, the only things I could have had you do were win a few presentable prizes, obtain a few graded certificates that looked impressive, and give me some awards I could brag about. I wasn’t capable of enabling you to do anything greater than that.”

In her view, many of those presentable-looking awards aimed at children were all for show.

“You loved singing when you were little, and everyone thought you had a lovely voice. But it wasn’t that good. The skills you had and displayed were directly tied to your effort. You didn’t have any extraordinary, exceptional talent. It’s not as though I never took the measure of what you were capable of. However nice your singing voice was, it wasn’t all that special.

“Suppose I sent you to singing competitions and you won prizes. So what? For what? What would you gain from winning a prize? Would winning a prize give you a happy life? Suppose I threw money at getting you a solo performance at the Golden Hall in Vienna when you were ten. Of course, I couldn’t afford that anyway. But what would I gain from it? Apart from satisfying my own vanity, would it truly prove that you were a child prodigy? And even if it did, so what?”

She simply felt there was no point.

When I say that my mother’s education was a kind of negative education, I mean that she never projected her own anxiety or desires onto me. Looking back at the prevailing ethos of the child-prodigy era of my childhood, we now know that the so-called child prodigies were all ordinary people. The supposedly genius qualities they displayed in that era were projections of their parents’ desires.

True Mozarts are very rare. One appears only every few centuries. That does not mean they do not exist, but if one genuinely appears, everyone can see it. The parents do not need to prove it. All the rest are ordinary people.

Parents who project their own desires onto children who have not yet developed independent views are not mature people. They are not happy people. Why should they rely on other people to realize their own desires?

Recently, I continued interrogating my mother.

“But a lot of parents believe that if you don’t push your child, if you don’t make your child compete intensely, and if you don’t cultivate these essential abilities in advance, such as learning Mathematical Olympiad material from a young age, starting bilingual education in kindergarten, or developing all kinds of talents and abilities, then you might hold back a promising child. What if, when this child grows up, they can’t compete with other people?”

Underlying this fear of holding back a promising child is another form of fear. I asked my mother why she had not been afraid.

Let us take another step back. Looking back now, I can fairly say that, in the eyes of many Chinese parents who insist on pushing their children into competition and constantly spurring them on, my mother’s education did not merely risk holding me back. It was practically lawless.

The freedom I had during childhood was a wild, lawless kind of freedom that would terrify Chinese parents.

When I was in primary school, I played video games on my own, including Fantasy Westward Journey. The computer was not locked. When I was in third grade, I even looked for a husband in the game. Not only did I find one, but I bought him roses.

I also hung out in QQ Zone chatrooms and typed in “Martian script.” I stole photographs of non-mainstream women in their twenties from the internet, pretended they were pictures of me, and chatted with other people.

In middle school, every night after lights-out, I would crouch over a squat toilet with a flashlight and read books that had nothing to do with school. Then the dorm supervisor would catch me and make me write a self-criticism.

Focusing on the big things and letting the small things go

My mother said that she only looked as if she were doing nothing. What she was actually doing all along was focusing on the big things and letting the small things go.

That meant looking at whether I was generally doing well, whether I was working hard, and whether I was positive. She would observe whether I had recently become listless. To put my mother’s attitude into today’s psychological terminology, what she called “focusing on the big things and letting the small things go” meant watching to see whether I showed signs of depression.

She wanted to know whether I faced life positively, brightly, and enthusiastically; whether I was striving energetically in some direction; whether I still had motivation and goals; and whether I was full of fighting spirit every day, as happy as a gamecock.

Of course, you could say that my mother was able to maintain this attitude because of her self-awareness. The difference between my mother and many other parents is that she does not consider herself a wise, successful person. She considers her own vision extremely limited. She does not believe she is qualified to teach me how to succeed or how to conduct myself as a human being.

Her self-awareness meant that she never tried to instruct me. For a very long time, I essentially had to muddle through on my own in working out which direction I should strive and grow toward. She did not even explicitly tell me that I had to obey the school and society, or that following the direction laid down by the school and society was the only route to happiness.

Although I think I was like the overwhelming majority of adolescents, feeling my way forward in a muddle and working along a conventional, step-by-step path, there was never a voice from my parents or family buzzing constantly beside my ear and telling me, “You absolutely have to do this or that. You have to come first in your class, then get into such-and-such a school, and then do such-and-such a job.”

That voice simply did not exist for me. What I should do was something I was always exploring for myself.

My mother later explained that if she saw that my daily state was positive, full of fighting spirit, energetic, and full of vitality, she would leave the small things alone. This sounds very abstract, right? But everyone basically knows what I mean.

She observed whether I had recently become depressed, lost my fighting spirit, or developed extremely negative ideas about school, the people around me, and my future. Had I become so hopeless that I did not want to do my homework or even go to school? Had I become particularly cynical, thinking, “This teacher is a bastard. The teacher treats me badly. The system is extraordinarily unfair, so working hard is useless anyway”?

If there had been changes in those larger matters, meaning my overall direction and mentality, she certainly would have intervened more actively in my education. But if there were no such changes, she would turn a blind eye to the small matters.

“You’ve finished your homework again. Your grades are quite good again. You’ve already met society’s basic external expectations for you. I know you’ll definitely be able to get into a university. And you’re living every day with plenty of energy and drive. So why should I control you over small things too? Why should I tell you that you have to come first and aren’t allowed to come tenth?”

What comes next is something my mother actually said, word for word. She told me that, as long as a person had that kind of spirit, even if I did not go to university, she believed I would still live a very good life. That would have been all right with her. It would all have been all right with my mother.

I kept pressing her.

“What people now describe as controlling East Asian parents do is almost exactly the opposite of focusing on the big things and letting the small things go.”

Controlling parents, East Asian parents, project their own desires and society’s expectations onto their children, so that throughout childhood, those children are swept along by all kinds of external standards. This attitude is almost completely opposed to focusing on the big things and letting the small things go.

Parents who consider themselves responsible and want to raise obedient little darlings and good children become controlling parents because they cannot control themselves. They cannot control their urge to beat down and suppress their children, or to project their desires and expectations onto them.

For parents like that, the type of child they find hardest to accept is a child with a defiant, unmanageable look on their face. I knew that when people disciplined me, even when the discipline was not oppressive, I wore an extremely rebellious and obnoxious expression.

“When you were confronted by that defiant expression on my face, what did you reflect on?” I asked my mother. “How did you reflect on your own state of mind? Did you regret anything? How did you restrain your urge to suppress me?”

My mother said that parental suppression can produce only three outcomes. Clearly, she had thought much more deeply about this question than I had.

The first outcome is resistance. The second is outward compliance combined with inward defiance. The third is submission. Those are the only three outcomes.

A controlling parent who desperately suppresses their own child may be dealing with a child who starts from different preconditions or has a different physical constitution. Because children begin from different preconditions, they will either resist, outwardly comply while inwardly defying, or submit.

For an oppressive parent, the first two outcomes are obviously bad. What they probably want is the third: submission. As long as the child submits, the suppression appears to have succeeded, and the child has become obedient.

At this point, you might think the reason my mother desperately restrained herself from suppressing me was that she thought I would resist extremely violently. Because I may be very capable of resistance, perhaps I could sever ties in one stroke with anyone who oppressed me, leave both sides wounded, do it again and again, split everything into pieces, scatter us to the four corners of the world, and ultimately go our separate ways.

But my mother gave another reason. No matter which result suppressing a child produces, whether resistance, outward compliance combined with inward defiance, or submission, all three cause alienation: a separation between one heart and another.

When a child’s heart goes cold

My mother’s relationship with her own mother became an alienated relationship. She can trace that separation of one heart from another back to a very specific point in time, when she was either in her first or second year of middle school.

My maternal grandmother was also an irascible, controlling parent, an oppressive mother. At the time, my mother was defiant too. My grandmother would curse at her, and my mother would put on a resistant, defiant expression. Every time she looked defiant like that, her mother would curse or beat her.

Then, when my mother was in her first or second year of middle school, my grandmother became so enraged while berating her that she submerged my mother’s whole body in water. She kept the water just below her nose. She pushed my mother’s entire body into the water, held her down by the head, and repeatedly asked, “Are you going to submit? Are you going to submit? Are you going to obey me?”

That experience made my mother afraid of water from then on.

Being afraid of water may not sound particularly strange in a noncoastal region, but I lived by the sea. Out in the countryside, we really would go fishing in fishing boats. For someone from the coast to be afraid of water struck me as very abnormal.

When I was little, I could never understand why my mother was so afraid of water. She did not dare go into the water and could not swim. Because we often took boats out to sea to fish in the summer, swimming in the water was perfectly normal. But my mother was extremely, extremely afraid of it.

She told me that her fear began after my grandmother pushed her into the water and asked, “Are you going to submit? Are you going to obey me?”

On the surface, my mother did submit. She still called my grandmother “Mom.” She was even very obedient and appeared quite filial. But after that, she said, her heart left her mother.

She never trusted my grandmother again. She was unwilling to open herself up to her. Her heart had gone cold. She no longer regarded her mother as someone she could be close to or trust.

Their relationship did not break down. My mother continued taking care of my grandmother. My grandmother was hit and sent flying by cars three times within the space of a single year, and my mother took care of her throughout it all.

But my mother said that this relationship was merely the fulfillment of a responsibility within the limits of her abilities. Her life was not open to my grandmother. She would not tell her about her happiness, anger, sorrow, or joy. From the moment my grandmother pushed her head under the water, her heart went cold.

Many controlling parents believe that the parent-child relationship can be taken for granted because it is natural. Of course, the blood bond between children and parents is natural. But that does not mean closeness between two people is automatically generated by blood.

“Because I’m your mother, you’re naturally supposed to love me.”

“I control you for your own good.”

“How can a blood relationship ever be severed?”

“No matter how desperately I suppress you, you still have to call me Mom.”

These statements are extremely, extremely common. But because my mother personally experienced the feeling of her heart gradually growing cold and pulling away, she realized very early that closeness built on blood ties has to be maintained. It is very fragile.

After being suppressed by her mother, she no longer wanted to give her real self to her. Yet my grandmother would smugly think, “Oh, my discipline worked very well,” because my mother had submitted.

So there are three possible outcomes when an oppressive parent suppresses a child: fierce resistance, outward compliance combined with inward defiance, and submission. Even though the overwhelming majority of parents who suppress their children are seeking the third outcome, submission, that submission can only ever be superficial. It is merely outward compliance and inward defiance to a greater or lesser degree, because all suppression causes hearts to draw apart.

For some people, the alienation is dramatic. Once they become adults, they directly cut off the relationship and sever ties once and for all.

For others, the alienation is silent. They continue going home for Lunar New Year, transferring money, taking care of their parents, and fulfilling their obligations. They may even look quite filial to other people.

My mother is like that. But she will never reveal herself to her parents again. Why would she reveal herself? No, she will never reveal herself again. She will not tell you who she is. She will not tell you whom she loves.

My mother’s apparent nonchalance, her seemingly extremely carefree lack of ambition, actually concealed an ambition underlying her approach to my education, an ambition she had arrived at through her own reflection. She hoped that she would not repeat her own mother’s failure.

The reason she could turn a blind eye to small matters and focus only on the big ones was that she hoped I would still allow her to enter my world after I became an adult.

Those are my first two observations: do not follow trends or imitate others, and focus on the big things while letting the small things go.

My third observation is another retrospective summary of my mother’s attitude toward me, and it is also a phrase she constantly repeats: when you grow flowers, all you can do is tend the soil.

Education as an outcome to display

There are many parents around us who care only about results. They claim that they care about education, but the overwhelming majority of parents who care about education do not actually care about education itself. They care about educational outcomes.

They want to reason backward from an outcome.

“Oh, I see a successful child. Here is a child prodigy. Here is someone who attended a prestigious school. Here is an outstanding person, a dragon or phoenix among human beings. So now I’m going to study education.”

But what they are studying is not education. They want to reason backward from the outcome because their goal is still to obtain that ultimate outcome.

For those parents, if I did not currently have so many labels they consider good, then what I am saying would have absolutely no persuasive force. But even if I did not now have this level of public influence, and even if I were not doing so many things they want to imitate, my mother’s education would still have been successful.

First, she enabled me to support myself. Second, she gave me healthy living habits. Finally, my mother is able to enter my life and remain close to me.

I know that, in the eyes of people who fawn on those above them and trample on those below, this would not count as a successful education. In their eyes, I would have to earn a certain amount of money, achieve something truly enormous, or possess a great many elite labels before my education could be called successful.

But even if I were not now qualified to appear in public and chatter away about education, my mother’s education would still have been successful. Even if no one else could hear about this relationship, she still would have given me a successful education, because she still would have raised a child who could support herself, had healthy living habits, and remained close to her after becoming an adult.

That is a good education.

Now that I do have this public influence, one reason I frequently discuss education is that I want to step forward and provide a counterweight to those education gurus.

How many children of education gurus have you seen step forward themselves and say, over and over again, how much they love their mother and father, how grateful they are to them, and how good their parents’ education was? How many?

I know many people my age, many friends, who carry a great many elite labels. They attended prestigious schools all the way through and then got very good jobs. Their parents are all education gurus within their own circles, constantly telling other people how they pushed their children until they succeeded and became superior human beings, and how other people can replicate their educational path.

Go and ask those children. Ask them: Are they happy? Do they trust their parents? Do they love their parents? Are they willing to protect their parents?

When they hear their education-guru parents chattering away in public and promoting their theories about how successfully they pushed their children, are the memories that arise inside them memories of pain or happiness? If they had a choice, would they choose to be born into the families of those education-guru parents?

Among the friends around me, many have mothers and fathers who consider themselves education gurus. These education gurus are now approaching retirement, and they spend every day promoting their educational philosophy within their own social circles, saying that their children have all become superior human beings and achieved success in the conventional worldly sense.

I invite these education-guru parents to search their own consciences and ask themselves: Is your child’s world open to you?

One thing I particularly despise about them is that parents who advertise how successfully they pushed their children, tying their own education to their children’s achievements in the conventional worldly sense, all wear the same expression: they fawn on those above them and trample on those below.

They are convinced that an education that does not produce worldly success is a failed education. What they call successful education means obtaining certain labels. Did the child get into a prestigious school? Did they join a major tech company? What is their annual salary? Do they have a respectable marriage? Do they have a résumé their parents can show off?

Parents who display their children as the products of their education, education gurus who believe their children “won,” and parents who use their own children as case studies in WeChat Moments posts and lectures: search your own consciences and ask yourselves whether your child would use your education as a case study in good parenting.

I truly know so many education gurus who constantly promote their educational philosophies. Those people are unable to accept their children becoming so-called ordinary people. They cannot accept an educational outcome that does not become a medal they can show off.

In other words, they do not care at all whether their children are happy. What they care about is whether the child makes them look good, right? What selfish parents they are.

Their children’s lives and happiness are entirely instrumentalized. The children become proof for the outside world: proof that the parents themselves are successful, proof that they themselves are superior human beings. How selfish is that?

When you grow flowers, tend the soil

My mother’s hobby is growing flowers, and she is a pediatrician by profession. Sometimes, when she encounters anxious parents in the county town, she tells them, “When you grow flowers, all you can do is tend the soil.”

Anyone who has ever grown flowers knows that you cannot control whether a flower will bloom. You cannot control when it will bloom, because whether and when it blooms depend far too heavily on the weather, the right timing, favorable conditions, and human harmony.

The summers where we live are too hot, over forty degrees Celsius, and extremely, extremely humid. That means even the best seed may develop root rot during the plum-rain season. The air does not circulate, the potting soil remains wet for a long time, and the plant cannot breathe. As a result, the seedling’s roots rot.

During the plum-rain season, the weather is too damp and the humidity too high. If you desperately water and fertilize certain flowers during that season, what damn use is it? That is simply what the climate is like.

Last summer, I took my mother to Yunnan. She looked at the flowers there and marveled at them.

“When the weather is good, you don’t even need to tend the flowers,” she said. “You don’t need to do anything, and all the flowers just burst into bloom.”

Where we live, the summer sun is too intense. Some flowers cannot tolerate exposure to blazing sunlight. They should not be taken outside and left in it, because they can easily be scorched.

Then there are people who do not know how to grow flowers. What do those people do? They move the pot around every day. One moment they complain that the flower is being exposed to the wind and sun; the next, they complain that it is not getting enough sunlight.

But if you constantly move the pot and change its environment, the flower has to keep adapting to new surroundings. If it is constantly adapting to its environment, it cannot settle down and grow steadily.

What does it mean to say that when you grow flowers, all you can do is tend the soil?

Any experienced flower grower or flower enthusiast knows that you cannot force a flower to grow. Staring at it every day, just as you lie on a bed and stare at your child doing exercises every day, will not make the child perform any better.

If you water desperately, the flower’s roots may rot. If you move it around constantly, it may spend all its time adapting to new environments.

What is the problem with the overwhelming majority of novice flower growers? You want to see changes immediately, so you keep intervening. You insist on seeing a result. If you grow flowers with the mentality that you absolutely have to see a result, then you are finished. You will not be able to grow them well.

You fertilize today and repot tomorrow. In today’s society, these flowers are not dying from neglect. They are dying from overmanagement.

Some flowers simply need time to acclimate after being transplanted. You just need to leave them alone. They may look half-dead and appear to be developing unobtrusively, but underneath the soil, they are secretly growing roots.

Yet every day, you pull the flower out. You harass it, monitor it, and inspect it, saying, “Oh, have you grown yet? Have you grown yet?” You dig it out of the soil all day long to examine it.

If you keep pulling it out, how can it put down roots and sprout?

Finally, even if you did none of those things and did absolutely everything right, the flower may simply not bloom in a way other people admire. You cannot even decide whether it will bloom at all. But that does not mean the flower has no vitality.

In the end, the most basic expectation we have of a flower, the most basic expectation a flower grower has, is that it survives, that it can put down roots, and that it still possesses vitality.

So what can you do?

When you grow flowers, all you can do is tend the soil. That is a piece of wisdom shared by everyone who loves growing flowers. You cannot control what shape a flower will ultimately take.

All a parent can do is keep the child’s roots from rotting, allow them to develop the ability to put down roots and sprout on their own, ensure that they respond to sunlight, and allow them to become willing to bloom by themselves.

As for when they bloom, or whether they bloom at all, no matter how much you try to intervene and control them, it is useless.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers.