I was tangled yesterday, suffering from a mess of disappointment and fallout from fuck-ups past. I drove to my new home in tears, sobbing occasionally as my bumper inched slowly south of Seattle.

I got home, pulled on the same mud-covered jeans I’d worn the weekend before and a crummy T-shirt. I grabbed a beer, pulled my hair back, put on some gloves, and began digging.

For a moment, I understood my father completely.

When we moved into this house, the yard was a wreck of overgrown flowerbeds, confusingly placed shrubs, and rotting wooden furniture. With spring in full swing, it had become an even denser mess of dandelions, thistle, and tall grass. Last weekend, my husband and I headed to our nearest big box store for the tools my dad had recommended and set to work.

My husband, ever the demolition-man, had been quick to dismantle the furniture and trim back the bushes. I took to the beds.

When I was young, weeding consisted of a small bucket and a hand rake. Assigned to clear a small bed, I would stuff my chubby little fingers into gloves and meticulously pull at every little plant, barely filling my bucket halfway before becoming bored and instead picking the dandelions, making bouquets and wishes as I blew the seeds into the wind.

I would kick baby Jami given the chance now. Did she have any idea how truly horrible and pernicious dandelions could become?

Grown-up Jami now does. Over the weekend, I pulled out weeds with roots measuring a nearly an inch at their thickest, those damned dandelions easily being most stubborn of the different varieties.

I’d begun with the intention of clearing it as meticulously as my mother requested of me when I was a child. I started in the corner, first raking up fallen rhododendron leaves, then pulling the weeds with shallow roots, and then digging out the entrenched invaders with a shovel, turning the tired soil over in pursuit of the deeply buried roots.

Perfection in the first shot — that’s always the goal. And usually, when I don’t get there, I decide the hobby was never really for me anyway. If it doesn’t come naturally, it must not be worth pursuing.

Applying this mentality to my task at hand, I quickly became overwhelmed and began to just mow the plants down with my hands, pulling out the grasses and weeds that grew more than a foot tall with my hands, desperate to have some kind of impact to show for my hard work.

We wrapped up Sunday with half of the biggest bed at least somewhat cleared of the tallest, most odious of weeds. We filled three garbage bags and a new trash can with the carcasses, the torn leaves, and debris I’d managed to uproot.

And I wasn’t discouraged, even looking at the trail of smaller weeds I’d missed in my first bed, the growing mess in the remaining beds, and the utter dearth of knowledge of what to do after I did eventually clear them of weeds.

From the beginning, I knew this would be a work in progress — just like me.

So when I got home yesterday, tear-stained and tangled, I got to work. The routine — a change of clothes, a beer, and hard work bent over, turning soil and digging up weeds — it was the same routine my dad had followed when I was growing up. I would watch him from the windows, sweaty and swearing as he wrangled with foliage and tools, wondering what he got out of the self-imposed torture.

I get it now. That digging, that pulling, the work, the learning, and the struggle to make something so overwhelmingly wild into something beautiful — it’s part of the process. It’s part of life. But, unlike the messy process of growing up and constantly trying to be a better person, you can see the progress of the garden. You can see the beds as they clear, the junk that gets tossed, and eventually, you end up with a bare patch of earth and a blank slate.