When our kids were little, I failed at gardening. I had ideas about what it meant to be a good mom, which included a vegetable garden and hand-crafted Halloween costumes. I thought I would inherit domesticity along with the hormones that come with pregnancy. But then I discovered that with gardening comes weeding, and excess produce, and bugs. This episode of the Reading Small Talk podcast describes that initial sense of failure and the unexpected gifts that came when I didn’t live up to my own expectations for motherhood.

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