Millenial Plant Moms as Beacons of Healing

I come from a long line of women who have struggled to keep indoor plants alive. Nearly every time that I water a plant, it is in an effort to revive it - to compensate for my past negligence. Needless to say, I am not a millennial plant mom. But my best friend is. Her Toronto condo presents like a tasteful greenhouse: plants hanging from macrame swings, green accents climbing each corner and sprawling on each surface.

This is in stark contrast to the few plants in my terraced house. My macrame hanging basket hosts a faux Eucalyptus-like plant, and the only live plants are those that we received as gifts. The single gifted plant still clinging onto life blooms beautiful coral flowers. I have put very little effort into its care since I received it two years ago. I give it the occasional splash of water when it looks dry, and intermittently pick away its sun scorched leaves and petals. During today’s ad-hoc assessment, I saw that it was particularly dry. I noticed the rigid light-brown soil, which I knew should be dark and moist. I observed that some of the blooms had yellowed, a reflection of unquenched thirst. And after conducting this triage, I felt an overwhelming, instinctual urge to, in a single watering, give the plant all of the water that it had likely needed in the time since my last spontaneous check-in. And while this impulse may be what has always driven my ad-hoc plant case, today, I viewed this urge differently than I ever had before. Today, this instinct gave me pause. I couldn’t help but consider how a heavy watering might impact the plant; how it might shock this plant after a prolonged period of unquenched thirst. I was moved by compassion towards the plant and determined that giving it so much water all at once didn’t seem fair to it.

When I stopped to think about it, I realised that my instinct wasn’t motivated by the plant’s needs. Rather, I was responding to my needs. I wanted to give the plant a heavy watering to alleviate the shame that I felt for not having given it the attention that it needed. The guilt I felt for my neglect, which was the catalyst for its present condition. I was taken aback by the selfishness in that impulse, the collateral damage I was driven to inflict to satisfy my emotional need. I became mindful that my actions were motivated by what would make me feel better about my perceived lack, not what the plant needed from me.

And I could see how I was, in my care for that plant, so clearly playing out the same pattern that I have been repeating for years: responding to needs with judgement to compensate for my perceived lack. My approach towards caring for the sweet budding plant in front of me was the same approach that I have long taken towards caring for my body.* I have a hard time accepting my body’s needs. I can acknowledge my hunger, exhaustion, or loneliness, but often choose to judge those needs rather than meet them. I saw my needs as a hindrance to the success that I wished to achieve and resolved that I could outgrow those pesky needs if I simply refused to meet them.

*Increasingly, people find it helpful to refer to their body using their preferred pronouns because it helps them to humanise their body and treat it with more care. I don’t take issue with that approach, but it doesn’t feel comfortable for me. I prefer to call my body “body” and use that title to address it in my life; to myself, and the people who are in my close circle. This approach helps me to view and treat my body as a part of myself, rather than as a separate being or something that exists to serve me. I’d encourage you to consider the kind of relationship that you want to have with your body and determine what kind of language helps you to build that relationship.

My pattern of intermittent, irregular self-care crescendoed in my second year of law school. I spent that year largely denying myself food and sleep; permitting myself to indulge in these necessities that I considered extravagant only once I had earned them. I deserved to eat only when my to-do list permitted or once I had achieved some kind of tangible success that diminished my need to achieve self-worth by way of thinness. When those successes didn’t come, or my to-do list only grew, my limited self-care would be justified as necessary to secure my future productivity - my spiteful gallon of water following a week-long self-imposed drought. I met my body’s bothersome needs on my own schedule and to serve my own purposes.

Around this time, I paid my first visit to my best friend’s apartment after she got really into plants. On a Saturday morning, I sat on her couch while she went through her weekly watering routine. She topped up her soiled plants, misted her succulents, and wrapped her air plants in wet towels and left them on the counter for a few hours before returning them to their glass, teardrop shaped containers strewn across her living room. This routine struck me as a lot. I felt overwhelmed by all of the different kinds of plants, their varying needs, and keeping track of when you’ve watered each. I couldn’t fathom dedicating this much time and energy to learning about the varying needs of each plant and tending to them carefully. It seemed to me a task requiring an extensive spreadsheet, and I couldn’t understand why she would actively choose to take on what I perceived as this additional burden. After watching for a while, I expressed my amazement at how she managed this, omitting my commentary on her choice to order her life in such a way. I asked her how she knew how to care for each plant and where she found the time to provide that care. She replied “I just try to pay attention and figure out what they need based on how they look, and have made that part of my routine”. 

In the same way that my plant care reflects my patterns of self-care, I think hers does too. She has been an example to me of someone who accepts and responds to her body’s needs. In the summer after my second year of law school, we spent 3 weeks travelling in Europe together. We explored other-worldly terrain on Greek islands, traversed Lake Bled in a row boat pointed in the wrong direction, and walked what felt like the entirety of Budapest. But what stood out to me most about that trip was the pace with which she travelled. I had always travelled like a consumer: squeezing every last moment of sunlight out of a day and leaving no itinerary item unticked. She travelled differently. She would make these humane suggestions like going back to the hotel to change before dinner, or taking a nap after a particularly strenuous morning. When we were in Rome, she turned to me about two hours after we’d eaten gelato and said “I think I’m ready for another one”. Her pace was directed by her needs, whereas mine had been dictated by an agenda.

That agenda was to prove my worth. My relationship with my body has long been one where I seek to will it into compliance with my overarching objective of conforming to standards of success that I thought would insulate me from judgement: thinness, academic accolades, prestigious employment. I sought to overcome or transcend my body so that I could do more, be more, prove more.  I let an app determine my caloric intake, my grades decide whether I could socialise, my to-do list determine whether I could rest. I built a life where I looked to factors outside of myself to assess whether I would meet my needs. This approach drew me closer to meeting the standards that I revered, but further from my intuition. My every action was propelled by the desire to have an image, experiences, or achievements that countered the messages playing in my head telling me that I’m lazy, mediocre, and unworthy. I wanted to be able to point to my accomplishments to provide objective proof that countered these messages. Pushing  myself, punishing myself, and striving for success as socially defined was the only way that I knew how to meet my overriding need for acceptance.

But as I stared at my sad, parched plant, I found myself reflecting on my best friend’s second gelato and the way I watched her tend to dozens of little green creatures. I realised that the compassion that I felt for it reflected a deeper change that I had experienced in my relationship to my own needs. The compassion that I felt for the plant reminded me of the first time that I really extended my body compassion for the trauma that it has suffered as a result of my unwillingness to accept and meet its needs.

Shortly after moving to Belfast, I joined a group of friends for a hike up cave hill as a part of a birthday celebration which would end at an Indian restaurant. At this point in my life, I was still counting calories, and the Indian food that would follow the hike would likely make me exceed my caloric intake for the day, so the hike to offset this later splurge was welcomed. The hike turned out to be more challenging than I had expected. Because of the forthcoming Indian food, I refused the cookies that my friends were eating to replenish our energy, dismissing my growling stomach. I also pushed myself to try to keep pace with a group of hikers much more experienced and less cardio-vasularly challenged than I was. But, I made it through the hike, and was ready for the feast that I counted as my reward for a day spent staving off my needs. I joyously walked through the doors of this restaurant with my gaggle of mates. As soon as I stepped across the threshold, I got a migraine. My vision suddenly became spotty and blurred, in line with the aura that has accompanied my migraines for as long as I can remember.

Migraines have long been my body’s way of forcing me to rest. They are how my body responds to trauma: surgery, harsh sunlight, particular foods. On this day, I had forced my body to shut down by repeatedly and consistently denying its needs for food and rest. For 29 years, I had regarded migraines as an annoyance; a thorn in my side. I raged against my body for the weeks of my life that I felt they had robbed from me. For responding so severely to minor incidents like the shock of hitting the ground when the boy I had a crush on pulled my chair out from under me, or a rogue gleam of sunlight catching my eye. For the weeks of my life that I had lost because my body was too weak to handle what I perceived to be the ins and outs of normal life. I cried through many migraines not out of pain, but out of frustration, disappointment, a longing to be in the spaces that my severe symptoms had removed me from.

But on this day, once I made it safely to my bed, I cried for the disregard that I had shown my body. For how I had forced it to shut down because I had refused to meet its most fundamental needs. I cried for the years that I spent devaluing it, dismissing it, and resenting it. My tears were moved by the kind of self-compassion that I hadn’t before experienced. The kind that shifted my perspective and drew me into a deeper, new kind of relationship with my body - one of respect and reverence.

I finally felt for myself the compassion that I saw my best friend extend to herself, and which shone through her care for her plants. I saw the compassion in: “I think my body is ready for another gelato!” The compassion in: “I found this morning tiring. Let’s nap.” The compassion in: “This plant is looking a little brown. I’ll keep an eye on that and adjust.” With that infusion of compassion, my tune had changed from “how could you”, to “how could I do this to you”? From “look at what you’ve taken from me” to “I’m sorry that I pushed you past your limit and delayed your needs to suit my agenda”.

In the same way that I could only learn how to appropriately and compassionately water the plant once I acknowledged that my desire to drench it was an emotional response to my perceived failure, I could only learn to listen to my body’s needs once I was able to separate them from my emotional needs to prove myself and compensate for my perceived inadequacy. 

I’m trying to get back to the rhythm of life that I think can exist when I’m not trying to earn my worth. I’m learning to find a lifestyle centred around intuition rather than smart watch statistics, to value wholeness over thinness, and to embrace a rhythm propelled by integrity, not fear.

I still wouldn’t consider myself a plant mom. I continue to water plants irregularly, am slow to re-pot plants, and still tend to fit their care around my schedule. But those patterns no longer reflect my self-care. I’ve gradually learned to accept and honour my own light brown soil, sun scorched leaves, and discoloured petals. I’m learning to care for myself like a millennial plant mom.