There is perhaps no greater conversation stopper than, as a woman in your early-to-mid thirties, responding to the question ‘Do you have children?’ with a simple ‘No.’ Having dealt with the life admin of moving countries for the third time this year, it’s a question I have been asked a lot, and it has become increasingly apparent that answering with unadorned factual accuracy and nothing more is likely to kill the conversation before it even started. There’s no bonding over shared parental experiences; no easy sharing of candid family snaps on phones. There are only two possible follow-up responses on the part of the enquirer: ‘Oh, OK’ (R.I.P. conversation) or ‘Why not?’ (R.I.P. the person who asks this question). Thoroughly British at heart in terms of my heightened sensitivity to social awkwardness of any kind, I noticed I had taken to filling the uncomfortable silence with the jovial comment, ‘But I have 120 houseplants, so that’s almost the same!’
I’m not alone. One has only to glance at the way in which millennials and gen Z’ers talk about their houseplants to notice that this is a considerable trend. We fawn over our ‘plant babies’, referring to ourselves as ‘plant moms’ or, my personal epithet of choice, ‘crazy plant ladies’. We caption our urban jungle photos with ‘#PlantsAreTheNewPets’. The mainstream media ascribe this trend to the shocking rise in cost of living and the fact that younger people today may never enjoy the financial security required to own even a pet, let alone a home, and for whom procreating may be genuinely unaffordable, with data showing it costs over a quarter of a million dollars to raise a child. It’s perhaps no wonder, then, that we choose to be plant ladies, festooning our rented dwellings with little green dependents. It is also no coincidence, I think, that most of these self-confessed plant parents are women. Prepped from a young age by patriarchy for the role that is seen to be our birthright, socialised to gravitate towards caring for others, we have a whole lot of nurture coursing through our veins and nowhere financially viable to offload it. We turn to plants.
In much the same way as ‘cat lady’, these botanical monikers imply something slightly tragic in our decision to devote all our feminine nurture not to tiny humans, but to beings that our inherent speciesism and anthropocentrism still designate less worthy of care. And yet I find myself proud to be a #plantmom, to advertise the fact that where friends of mine swap stories of breast pumps and potty training, I swap cuttings of variegated monstera and calathea white fusion; where society tells me I should be a slave to my ever-quickening biological clock and desperately seek to ‘settle down’, I revel daily in the sheer bliss of waking up alone and spending my days in utmost calm, the house always just as I left it. I know I am not alone in choosing the gentle, gradual needs of plants - needs that coil themselves smoothly around the jagged shapes of our lives, slotting in seamlessly like vines between brickwork - over the all-consuming demands of progeny, nor in being happy to admit it in a world that still considers children to be a woman’s ultimate desire (even if she doesn’t know it yet). In identifying ourselves as plant parents, tending to our plant babies - or joining the ‘Cats Not Kids’ brigade and hashtagging our photos ‘CrazyCatLady’ - I would dare to suggest that we perform a gently subversive feminist act, ironically and proudly reclaiming titles that have certain hints of social condemnation and ridicule about them. We choose alternative pathways of care, to be different kinds of mothers.
This crazy cat lady recently tested her maternal instincts by fostering a mama cat and her two kittens for the local animal shelter. When asked how it was going, I would summarise the state of chaos that constituted my life with the simple statement, ‘Well, it has confirmed that I could never manage having children’. And, while facetious, it was true. In those wild days of running around after mischievous kittens while attending to the seemingly perpetually empty belly of a nursing mother (and not just because she’d occasionally vomit on my favourite rug), I was no longer able to attend to the quiet rhythms that usually gave a semblance of structure to my everyday. ‘If I ever want to have children,’ I said to people, ‘I realise I would have to give up everything I enjoy. There is just no time.’ Plants went unwatered, cuttings unplanted. Tomatoes unpicked. The aquarium wasn’t cleaned. The fridge resembled a game of very cold, somewhat stale tetris. Recipes I wanted to try were tossed aside for taking too long or being incompatible with three boisterous felines running around my feet. But, even worse, recipes I had already begun went neglected. My sourdough starter congealed in protest, seeping the grey liquor known to aficionados as ‘hooch’: an unmistakable, acetone-esque reminder that you’ve been lax with the feeding. Kombucha went unbottled, becoming increasingly sour with each passing day. The black radishes I had stockpiled from the farmers’ market sat in a bowl on the counter, whispering reproachfully in a voice only I could hear: ‘We should be kimchi by now.’
In the midst of pitter-pattering tiny feline feet crashing into plant stands, charging after toy mice and using my expensive new sofa as a climbing frame, I gained a new respect for the magic of fermentation and its unassuming dignity, requiring only the briefest of attentions. I missed the calm that came from having the time to stretch and fold dough, massage salt into jewel-bright ribbons of red cabbage or whisk gentle clouds of homemade ricotta. I missed Sunday mornings tending to my plant babies - snipping a cutting here, pulling off a wilting leaf there - while waiting for my sweetened tea to cool for the next batch of kombucha. Far from feeling broody watching Siena nurse her two chunky kittens on my lap, I looked forward to the day they would go to their forever homes and leave me with the simpler, calmer duties of parenting my easier charges: things in pots, and things in jars. I felt a visceral horror at the thought of giving all of that up, forever, for a tiny being who would demolish any semblance of calm and routine I had built up over my life so far; at the thought of making myself vulnerable to constant need and demand. Perhaps it’s the long hangover of what I now recognise to be burnout suffered in the past couple of years, but there is simply not enough of me to give, for that, right now. My care quota will not stretch to that kind of need. I am just too tired. In some ways I envy the jars of gradually fermenting pickles and preserves with which I have lined my kitchen shelves, as they slumber, unhurried, in the warmth and the dark.
It occurs to me that perhaps there is something to be said for prioritising fermentation over fertility. The quiet, understated needs of the ferment - like those of the plant - suit me just perfectly. The needs of the ferment are not dramatic or irruptive. They are, by and large, stable, aside from subtle variations caused by the heady, fluctuating soup of microorganisms in which they, and I, and all of us, are perpetually suspended. They just get on with it, with a minimum of fuss. Barely perceptible, bubbles form and dissolve, textures change, flavour deepens. A jar of sauerkraut is in fact all the better for being forgotten, the time allotted it by your neglect only allowing it to further mature its earthy tang. There are few emergencies with fermentation, unless you count exploding kombucha incidents that shower your kitchen in glass and leave nuggets of pineapple and ginger glued to the walls for months to come. Fermentation is rarely, if ever, urgent. It is the opposite: it demands patience, even neglect. It needs you only for very brief intervals, and even then it is fairly forgiving. Stir the hooch back into that starter and add more flour; it will be fine in a few days. Such is the slowness of the ferment that it will unobtrusively and politely fold itself into your weekly or monthly schedule, making only the gentlest demands.
There is, it seems to me, much to be said for an ethics of slow and sporadic care. The kind that comes in fits and starts, as and when, largely when it suits us. Stirring a teaspoon of revitalising flour into a sourdough starter that has lingered a little too long at the back of the fridge. Scooping the lively foam off the top of a jar of fizzing amber tepache. The careful ‘burping’ of a bottle of kombucha undergoing its secondary fermentation (one of the only similarities, it occurs to me, between booch and babies). A care that fits around the life you already have, rather than consuming it. A care that deliberately chooses slow, silent objects. It is understated, and never overwhelming, but it is nurture nonetheless. In an increasingly frenetic world, fermentation is an act of quiet resistance: slow down; take time. Care on your own terms, follow your own schedule. Have patience.
To claim I am a parent to four healthy scobies, a litre of kimchi, a genealogy of sourdough loaves dating back to 2010 and five jars of sauerkraut is patently absurd in a society that still accepts only one legitimate object for all of that patience, nourishment and time. Yet perhaps I will do so, going forward. Choosing to care slowly, and at my own pace, is a conscious rejection of a hegemonic narrative of nurture, patriarchal at its roots and linked predominantly to the reproductive capacity of my own body - a body that, incidentally, may not be capable of bearing children at all. The myriad of glowing bottles and jars on my kitchen shelves - alive in their own way, dependent on my nurture in understated quietude - are testament to my conviction that there are infinite ways to mother, though most of them go unrecognised. There is, I would go so far as to say, a radical freedom in being able to choose those that suit us best, at any particular moment in time.