Why I'm Not a Florist

Just like that, I am 12 days into November, and I haven't written a thing. Funny how that happens.

Today I'm writing for stress relief. I just finished up my homework for the week (it was brutal, thanks for asking) so I need to unwind a bit. Both TVs are occupied by children (I had to separate Zoe and Daisy because they were going to kill each other, and Scotty is out of town, so yeah, I deserve to let the TVs babysit for a while) (but if Scotty were here, they'd probably still be watching TV because it's Saturday night, and we give up on parenting on Thursday).

I can think of nothing I'd rather do right now than tell you a story about my growing years.

It involves one of my favorite past times of my youth... LYING.

I'm just going to go ahead and put this out there: Young Britt was a big liar.

I don't know why I lied so much, but don't worry... I'm now relatively honest and raising a daughter who has mega issues with lying, so what goes around comes around.

Anyway, when I was a junior in high school, we had to take all of those personality assessments that are supposed to help you start thinking about what you want to be when you grow up. Those tests weren't helpful for me because I didn't answer them honestly (maybe that's why I didn't know what I wanted to be until I was in my thirties, and I'm just now earning my bachelor's degree), but that's not the lie I'm going to tell you about today. To be honest (if you even trust me at this point) I didn't think I was really answering my personality profiles with any form of untruth. It's only now, with my grown-up perspective, that I can see that error, and part of my mistake was that I didn't really know who I was. But that is, perhaps, a topic for another day.

At some point, I decided that I wanted to be a florist. Scotty had a distant cousin who owned a floral shop, and it was my dream to work there. I thought they had the most beautiful flowers (they really did, actually), and I wanted to be a part of it. I thought that maybe someday I could take over the business or maybe open a second location.

One of the interesting parts of this is that I had no idea that the owners of the flower shop didn't like me, and they had actually tried to get Scotty to break up with me and date a girl that worked there.

Um... awkward. But whatever. I was naive enough to assume they loved me and wanted me, with no experience whatsoever, to work for them and take over their shop someday.

(Just remember my prefrontal cortex wasn't fully developed yet).

Anyway, I thought I'd be a really good florist, and I assumed I could just walk into it at some point and totally rock it. I shared my "vision" with Scotty's mom and she suggested that I take some floral classes through community education. I had no idea what community education was, and I thought it was the same as the Community College (this will be relevant later). It didn't matter, though, because I didn't need to be taught!

At some point, I was in charge of planning an activity for Young Women (the youth group in my Church for teen girls). I told my YW leader that I was going to teach floral arranging. She was surprised and asked how I knew about floral arranging, so I told her that I had taken a class at the Community College (LIE).

Unexpectedly, this YW leader casually mentioned to my mom that I was teaching a floral arranging class based on my acquired Community College knowledge. My mom approached me about it and asked when I had taken a floral design class. I admit, I panicked a little. I didn't foresee that any of this would get back to my mom, but I told her that Scotty and I had taken a floral design class together at the Community College (LIE). She asked some questions, like, "How did you pay for it?" and "When did you take it?" and I told her that Scotty had paid for it (LIE), it had cost $10 (LIE), and it was just a one-night class on a random Tuesday night (LIE). I had no idea that the Community College doesn't offer one-night floral design classes for $10 per person.

Eventually the night of the class came. I searched for some info on the internet so I could fake like I knew what I was doing, and I went and taught the class. My YW leader had bought some dried flowers and a bunch of baskets and green foam from the thrift store. I did my thing and told my lies and played florist for the night. It went okay, but I realized, as I faked my way through the event, that arranging flowers was harder than I'd ever thought.

About eight years later, I worked at a special education school that did vocational training. We had a floral shop in the school where students were able to make floral arrangements to sell to earn money to fund our program (in addition to gaining job skills). One day, someone from the district needed an emergency flower arrangement, but the floral class teacher wasn't there, and her students were with a substitute working in another area of the school. Our administrator asked me to go to our flower vendor and grab some flowers, then come back to the school and design an arrangement.

I bought some flowers and put the arrangement together, and it looked terrible. I fiddled with it and redid it several times, and I couldn't get it to look right. I asked a few co-workers for help, and none of them knew what to do. We all knew it looked wrong, but we didn't know what to do to fix it. When my administrator saw the arrangement, his face froze in utter shock, and I could tell he was trying to formulate what he should say to me. I finally broke the silence with, "I'm sorry. It sucks." Then we all started laughing, and my administrator confessed that he was trying to figure out how to tell me.

Apparently, I had only bought "filler" flowers and was lacking "focal flowers." But beyond that, I really struggled with shaping the piece and making it proportional to the vase. I realized, for the second time, that I had no natural ability to work in floral design. I really stunk at it! Enough so that my co-workers began to say things like, "Just don't let Brittany near the flowers."

Despite what I originally thought, floral design takes actual knowledge and skills. The same might be said for being honest.

I've since acquired one of these skills but not the other.

(I guess I'm not going to be a florist, after all).