08/27/2026
This week on the blog I'm talking about The Bouquet Story and My Imperfection.
I want to tell you a story where I don’t come off looking good at all. It was Mother’s Day weekend and my son had made me a bouquet. Not just grabbed one from a grocery store bin, but actually made one for me. He brought it to me with care, and my immediate response was to criticize the flowers I didn’t like.
He would have been within his rights to have been angry and withdrawn. He could have said, “Fine, forget it,” and thrown the whole bouquet in the trash. He could have made my reactivity the whole story and thought that I was an ungrateful shrew. He could have said I was impossible to please.
Instead, he paused. Somehow, he saw that I was having a hard time. He took the bouquet away, removed the offending flowers, brought it back to me, and asked, “Is this better?” That moment still undoes me.
In couples work, I often see this moment go the other way. One person offers something, and the other person critiques it. Then the giver feels rejected and says, “Nothing I do is ever enough.” The receiver feels misunderstood and says, “You don’t even care how I feel.” Suddenly, the bouquet is in the garbage, and now we’re fighting about every bouquet that was ever offered and every flower that was ever wrong.
That’s the wildfire.
Read the blog post in full on my website: https://ashevillefamilycounseling.com/2026/08/the-bouquet-story-and-my-imperfection/
