Picking blueberries with my family showed me I needed to be a less anxious parent
I wish I had taken the time to savour the sweet season
This is a First Person column by Francis Chang, who lives in Vancouver. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.
In the mid-2000s, when my wife and I returned to Vancouver after a stint working in Hong Kong, going to local blueberry farms in the late summer helped us settle back again. Something about the outdoors and the spacious isolation one gets in the Pacific Northwest compared to East Asia was like a homing call for me.
We'd arrive at the U-pick farms eager with the anticipation of another sweet harvest. We'd pull the wagon carrying our little kids down the reddish brown dusty walkway towards the rows and rows of bushes clustered with the blue harvest.
"Get the biggest, juiciest ones you can find!"
My late mother-in-law's voice still rings out to me over the rows of blueberry bushes in my memory. Her voice was followed by our young children's peals of laughter.
In my sepia-toned recollections, I see my kids, then toddler-sized, just eye-level to clusters of blueberries. Their small hands were just the right size to spot and pick the largest, marble-sized berries that would pass muster with their PoPo's (their maternal grandmother's) exacting standards. Only the largest and juiciest blueberries they could find would do.
Regarding food and children, I believe mothers always know best. Like raising children, harvesting blueberries requires patience to spot those that have ripened and are ready to move on. One also learns to give the smaller ones more time, to bask a bit longer in the increased sunlight and space so they can grow into bigger, sweeter versions of themselves.
In those first few years back, the blueberry season was a cacophony of little kids — ours together with nieces, nephews and kids extended through bonds of friendship. The younger ones would light up with delight, running around, asking "Is this big enough?" or "What about this one?"
My wise mother-in-law would proffer her generous approval to the youngest kids while the rest of the extended family chuckled as three generations of women — my wife and her sisters, my mother-in-law and my daughters — lambasted the smaller berries I picked.
"You're in too much of a hurry," I would hear frequently. "You need patience."
Looking back, I realize that my blueberry-picking approach was reflective of my parenting style. I was too task-oriented — too focused on filling up my basket or getting my children ready and out of the house as soon as possible without really taking the time to appreciate each berry — or child — within the present moment.
During my own childhood, my parents pushed me to graduate high school when I was 16, and quickly get a degree and a job they could brag about to their friends. But being pushed too early, I stumbled. When I was 21, I dropped out of the second year of a PhD program in finance and took some time off to teach English in Taiwan. In the meantime, my parents remained silent when asked by their friends what I was up to.
Now, as a father, blueberry picking was perhaps one avenue for me to try and not make the same mistakes with my own kids. To not just focus on the end result – whether filling up the bucket of blueberries as fast as possible or constantly worrying about whether our grade-school kids would get into college and get decent enough jobs to be financially independent.
So much has changed since those early blueberry outings. The once small children are now young adults, some of them too busy in front of screens and with no time to go out to the blueberry farms. Many of the smaller blueberry farms that we used to go to have been replaced by condo developments and grocery chains where one can buy pre-packaged boxes of blueberries.
Since my mother-in-law's passing, we've intended to pick blueberries to bring to her grave for her death day in August as an offering, but nowadays blueberry season arrives earlier as the dry-heat summer season starts in June, even May sometimes. We sometimes have to buy blueberries from one of those grocery chain stores and then we pour them out of a plastic box into a bowl to place before her gravesite.
Lately, I have been looking back at those earlier summers of blueberry picking and wish I could have better appreciated my mother-in-law's subtle parenting lessons by way of blueberry picking. I wish I could have better savoured that brief moment of my own children's childhoods.
I know that I have passed on my earlier parental anxiousness as each of my children has been diligently moving forward with college, graduate school and first jobs. I don't know how to explain to them to try and linger a bit longer to enjoy this summertime of their lives.
I don't know how many more times our now-adult children will come blueberry picking with us in the future, if at all. I wonder if they will one day have their own children to pull in wagons down to the rows of bushes and clusters of blue fruit on them. Or, if they will look at rows and rows of townhouses, built in a heritage country style as a nod to what was once there, anxious about whether they can afford to buy one.
Through the lens of retrospect, I realize that as a parent, childhood goes by much too quickly and, that as a middle-aged man, youth is fleeting. I can only hope they will still have their childhood memories of blueberry picking and the lessons from their PoPo. That they won't worry so much about reaching the milestones of adulthood, and instead savour the moments of their own blueberry season.
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