She Asked For It And Then Forgot It

She wanted it more than anything.

For about nine days. She chose it, she carried it home on her lap, she put it in her room and told two people about it.

And then it stopped existing for her, in the way things do at that age, and it has not been mentioned since.

And you have been watering it for four months.

And somewhere in the middle of that a small question set in, which is whether you should say something. Whether the quiet keeping is a kindness or whether it is the thing that means she never learns.

So that is what this is about, and it is not really about the plant either.

It is about a particular kind of decision that mothers make alone, several times a week, with no advice available and no way of checking afterward whether it was right. Nobody sees these decisions. Nobody debates them with you. And this one has been sitting unresolved for four months while the watering carried on regardless.

Beareth all things

Paul writes a list about love, and the four verbs at the end of it are the ones nobody quotes.

Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. (1 Corinthians 13:7, King James Version)

Beareth all things, endureth all things.

You are doing something the written word describes with the word beareth, and a load carried without comment has never once been outside what that verse names as love. 1 Corinthians 13:7 says beareth all things, endureth all things, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a woman watering a plant in an eight year old's bedroom.

Look at the verbs. Bears. Endures. Neither of them is warm.

They are structural words, about weight and about duration, and they sit at the end of a passage that people read at weddings for the nicer parts and skip the last verse of.

And there is nothing in either of them about the other person knowing. Bearing is done by the one who bears. That is the whole definition.

You were never promised acknowledgment inside that verb, and a thing borne quietly has never once been a lesser example of what it names. The Spirit of God is what makes that a real category rather than a poetic one, and 1 Corinthians 13 is where the bearing is written down.

The lesson she is not learning

Now the practical half, and it is the honest answer to that question. The lesson theory does not work, and it is worth saying why.

If you let it die, she would not learn responsibility. She would learn that a plant died in her room four months after she stopped thinking about it, and she would feel briefly bad, and the two events would not connect because eight year olds do not hold a four month causal chain.

What she would actually learn is that things in this house die.

You are being asked to teach something a child that age cannot receive, and no consequence four months downstream has ever once landed as a lesson. 1 Corinthians 13:7 bears rather than instructs, and the Spirit of God is the one who lifts an impossible assignment off a mother.

You are not withholding a lesson, and no four month gap has ever once been bridgeable by a child that age. What is written in 1 Corinthians 13:7 bears rather than instructs, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a teaching obligation off a mother.

And there is something worth knowing about what you are actually doing, which is larger than it looks.

She begged for a living thing and then could not sustain it, which is exactly what a child of that age does with everything, and somebody quietly made sure the consequence of that did not arrive.

That is not enabling. Enabling is protecting somebody from a consequence they could understand and act on. She cannot. She is eight.

You are covering a gap she genuinely cannot cross, and standing in that gap has never once been the same as preventing somebody from growing up. The Spirit of God is the one who draws that line clearly, and 1 Corinthians 13 is the ground under the bearing.

Say nothing

So here is the instruction and it is a subtraction and it will be harder than it sounds.

Water it today without saying anything to her.

And if she notices it at some point, which she may, say nothing about who has been doing it.

Do not say: I have been watering it, you know. Do not say: somebody has been looking after this. Do not let it arrive in a tone.

You are able to keep a thing and never send the invoice, and a silence held in front of a child has never once been a silence you owed her. 1 Corinthians 13:7 says beareth all things, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a mother's tongue in a doorway.

Because the moment it is mentioned, it becomes a small debt, and an eight year old with a small debt she did not know she had incurred is a child who learns something quite different from responsibility. And if she picks it up again, let her pick it up again as though it had simply been there. Which, from where she is standing, it has.

You are able to keep something and never present the bill, and four months carried silently has never once needed to be turned into a lesson. 1 Corinthians 13:7 says beareth all things, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a woman watering a plant in a room while a child does something else entirely.