At 31, I Took a Minimum-Wage Gardening Job to Survive Parenting Loneliness — Today One Act of Kindness Led Me to Happiness

Owen was born July 9, way too early. We got four days with him. I’m not going to talk about those. Daniel was gone by the end of August, he said, “You failed on giving me a real son.” That thing was the last thing he said to me. I believed it.

By September, I was behind on rent and I couldn’t sit in my apartment anymore. I signed up for a yard-work app at $15 an hour, which is Missouri’s minimum. I liked gardening because nobody expects you to talk.

On Saturday, September 26, I got a job in Brookside, a few blocks from the Loose Park rose garden. Fall cleanup, start a compost bin, plant three hydrangeas. The owner was a woman named Joan, 61. She brought me iced tea and asked if I had kids. I told her the truth. She just nodded.

One of her marked hydrangea spots crowded an old hydrangea, so I moved it two feet. About a foot down, my shovel hit something soft. It was wrapped in a small cotton cloth with ducks on it. I unwrapped it.

A tiny white knit hat and a gown with a little blue fox on the front. Owen’s clothes. The exact ones. The NICU volunteers knit them, and I put that hat on him myself.

I called Joan over. She came out, saw what I was holding, and went white.

“Stop, I can explain! You’re not the only one,” she said. “My daughter lived here before me. She lost a baby too. In July. Same year as you.”

Her daughter is Emily. She’s 29. Her son, Leo, was born at the same hospital, same NICU, in July. Every baby there that month got the same handmade set from the volunteers. Emily couldn’t stand being in this house afterward, so in August she moved to Denver to be near her dad.

Before she left, she buried Leo’s clothes under the hydrangea he would’ve seen from the nursery window. Joan moved in to take care of the place. She’d forgotten that was the spot.

When I got home that night, I opened my drawer. Owen’s hat and gown were still there. Same fox. I sat on the floor and cried for an hour, but it was a different kind of crying.

Joan called Emily the next morning and asked if she’d talk to me. We FaceTimed for almost two hours. She’d been there the same week I was. We figured out we’d probably passed each other at the vending machines on the third floor. I told her what Daniel said.

She said, “That’s not true and you know it.” Nobody had said that to me. That kind of empathy only comes from someone who’s been through the same thing.

That’s when I started practicing a little self-compassion. Not all at once. I just stopped repeating Daniel’s words in my head every night.

Emily flew back for a weekend in October. The three of us did some tree planting in Joan's backyard: a small red maple, right next to Leo's hydrangea. We put Leo's clothes back where they were. Then Emily asked if I wanted to bury Owen's next to them. I said not yet. She said that's fine, there's room.

I still work for Joan every Saturday. I turned her yard into a real garden: compost bin, three new hydrangeas, a bed of tulips we'll see in April. She tells every neighbor about me, and I love her for it. I now have 7 regular clients in Brookside and charge $25 an hour.

Emily and I text almost every day. Last week she mailed me a packet of sunflower seed with a note: “Plant these wherever you end up. Love, Em.”

I'm keeping the seed until spring. Emily says planting it will be an act of self-compassion. I don't know where I'll be by then. But I know who I'll call.