When I asked my 11-year-old son, Tristan, to help me unload a few loads of dirt from our small pickup truck into his mother’s new garden boxes, I expected some resistance — but his reaction was classic.
“Umm… I’m busy right now,” he muttered without looking up.
He was sprawled on the living room sofa, wearing old sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt, completely absorbed in a Roblox game on the family laptop. His feet were up on the coffee table, the very picture of preteen relaxation.
I raised an eyebrow. “No, you’re not,” I said flatly.
Cue the groaning, the sighing, the dragging feet. You’d think I had just asked him to move a mountain instead of a few shovelfuls of dirt. After a brief but predictable back-and-forth, we found ourselves standing side by side next to a wheelbarrow, shovels in hand.
He looked at me with that unmistakable “Why are we doing this?” expression. Hood up, shoulders slumped, the definition of reluctant effort. Finally, he voiced the question that was already written all over his face.
“Why do we have to do this?”
I paused. It was, honestly, a fair question. Neither of us cared much for gardening. I don’t have the patience for plants, and Tristan couldn’t care less about flowers or vegetables. But my wife, Mel, loves it. Gardening is her peace, her passion, her happy place.
So I thought for a moment, and then said something that surprised even me.
“When you love someone, you serve them.”
He frowned slightly, as if testing the weight of those words. I continued, hoping it would sink in.
“I want you to grow up to be the kind of man who serves his family, his friends, and his community. Love isn’t just a word, or a feeling — it’s what you do for the people you care about.”
I gestured to the dirt, the wheelbarrow, the garden boxes I’d built the weekend before. “This,” I said, pointing around us, “is what love looks like.”
He didn’t respond. He just sighed, picked up his shovel again, and started working — slowly, begrudgingly. It wasn’t a breakthrough moment. It was just us, side by side, finishing the job.
When we finally unloaded the last bit of dirt, I thanked him. He nodded without much enthusiasm and disappeared back into his world of video games. I figured that was that.
But the next day, while I was at work, my phone buzzed with a message from Mel. She sent me a photo — Tristan standing by the pickup truck, shoveling dirt into the garden boxes, alone.
She told me that she’d gone to get another load of dirt, and before she could even grab a shovel, Tristan had already started unloading it himself. When she asked why, he just shrugged and said, “Because I love you.”
That’s when it hit me. He had been listening.
That one small act — unprompted, sincere — said more than any conversation ever could. In that moment, my 11-year-old son understood something that takes many people a lifetime to learn:
Love isn’t shown through words or gifts. It’s shown through service, through small acts of kindness, through showing up — even when you don’t feel like it.
That afternoon, I sat at my desk with tears in my eyes, feeling prouder of my son than ever before. He had learned what love really looks like… and so had I.