Why I'm Like This About Plants.
There is a monstera in my living room that I have spoken to more kindly than my mother has ever spoken to me.
I'm not saying that for shock value. I'm saying it because I noticed it last week and had to sit down.
If you've been around me for more than ten minutes, you know about the plants. There are a lot of them. There are more on the way. There is a propagation station that has its own personality at this point. My daughter has accepted that "we are not getting another one" is a sentence that means absolutely nothing in this house. I have a watering schedule. I have opinions about grow lights. I have caught myself rotating a pothos and whispering "there you go, baby" like a deranged Victorian governess.
For a long time I thought it was just a hobby. A cute little quirk. The kind of thing you put in your bio next to the coffee emoji and the sun sign nobody asked about.
It is not just a hobby.
I figured this out the way most things in my life have been figured out: accidentally, while talking to someone else, in the middle of an emotionally chaotic afternoon. I was unpacking something hard, and I said something like the plants give my brain somewhere to exist that isn't survival mode, and then I had to put my phone down because, oh. Oh, that's the whole thing, isn't it.
Here is what I mean.
I grew up in a house where care was a transaction. Where love came with a receipt you'd be handed back later when it was inconvenient. Where the rules of cause and effect were whatever the adult in the room decided they were that day. You did everything right and got punished anyway. You did everything wrong and got hugged. You remembered something one way and were told, with full confidence, that it happened differently. You learned, very young, that your version of reality was up for negotiation at all times.
That does something to a nervous system. It teaches you to scan. To anticipate. To manage other people's weather so the storm doesn't land on you. To soften yourself preemptively. To be useful, because useful was the only safe thing to be.
You become very good at this. So good, in fact, that by the time you're an adult, you don't even know you're doing it. You just notice you're tired. All the time. About everything. For seemingly no reason.
Enter: the plants.
A plant does not argue with you about what happened. A plant does not rewrite your memories to be more comfortable for it. A plant does not require you to perform smallness so it can feel big. A plant has needs, and the needs are legible. Water. Light. Soil that drains. A little attention. That's it. That's the contract.
And here is the part that broke my brain a little: when you meet those needs, the plant responds. Not in three weeks, after a lot of arguing. Not conditionally, depending on what kind of mood it's in. It just — grows. It puts out a new leaf. It turns its face toward the window. It does the plant version of saying thank you, I see you, I am thriving because of you.
Cause and effect. Functioning the way it's supposed to. Possibly for the first time in your entire life.
If you grew up in a stable home, this might sound dramatic. That's okay. I am being a little dramatic. But also I'm not, because here's the truth: for some of us, the most radical, healing, nervous-system-rewiring thing in the world is being able to give care to something and have it land. Have it not be twisted. Have it not be weaponized. Have it not be redefined later as something you owed and didn't deliver enough of.
The plants don't do that. The plants just grow.
There's a girl who lives in me. She's small. She wanted to nurture things and have it be safe to do that. She wanted to love something openly without it being held over her head later. She wanted to come home to a house where things were alive and staying that way. She did not get any of that. What she got instead was a list of jobs and a lot of unspoken rules and the kind of childhood that ends with a guardianship hearing and a state custody file.
She's still here. She lives in my chest. And these days, she has soil under her nails.
When I water my plants, I am, on some level, watering her. When I notice a leaf curling and move the pot two feet to the left and watch it perk up by morning, some part of me that has been holding its breath since approximately 2008 exhales. See, I tell her. Look. You can take care of something and it will not punish you for it. You can give, and it can grow. You are not too much. You were never too much.
This is also why I get so unreasonably defensive when someone calls plants "just a hobby" or makes a joke about plant ladies being a personality type. Like — yes, ma'am. It is a personality type. It is my personality type. It is also the closest thing to a regulation tool I have ever owned, and I have tried a lot of things. Therapy (ongoing, mixed results, but bless her). Journaling (I write three entries and abandon the notebook in a dramatic act of self-betrayal). Meditation apps (I have downloaded six and used zero). Breathwork (I forget). Yoga (my hips are crime scenes).
But plants? Plants I remember. Plants I show up for. Plants get watered on a schedule even when I am personally falling apart, because the schedule is not optional, because they are alive and they need me, and somewhere in the wiring of a brain that learned too early that being needed was the price of being kept around, that frame still works on me. The difference is — and this is the difference that matters — the plants don't punish me when I have nothing else to give. They just wait. They drop a leaf, maybe. They get a little crispy. And when I come back, they come back too.
That, it turns out, is what unconditional looks like. I had to learn it from chlorophyll.
So when I bring home another plant — and I will, probably this week, don't bother — I want you to understand it's not because I have a problem. Or, fine, it is, but the problem is that I spent twenty-something years in survival mode and I am now, at last, learning what it feels like to give care to something living and have it just… work. To have my attention be welcome. To have my softness be safe. To watch a thing thrive specifically because I'm here.
You grew up in a place that didn't know how to keep things alive.
And now —
you do.
That's not a hobby. That's repair. That's quiet rebellion with roots.
So yeah. I'm going to keep buying the plants.
For the shorter, chest-version of this thought, read Quiet Rebellion With Roots.