Guides on Caring for Living Things
Article & Art by Margot Swetich
How to take care of someone’s plants when you have a decidedly not green thumb:
Accept the job begrudgingly. Your housemate sort of said yes for you, or you can tell that the need for help is greater than your fear of failure. In the case of this summer, a former tenant of the house I moved into left all of her plants behind for two months. It was just me, a mostly empty house, and an unfamiliar jungle.
Approach the job with dignity, but beg for highly specific instructions. You know yourself — if it’s not written down, it won’t be “instinctual” or “obvious.”
You may be terrified by the sheer number of plants — imagine, say, 12. Take a deep breath. You can’t kill them all, surely, but you know they won’t all come out ahead. Remember you’re doing someone a favor.
Mark the plants with sticky notes: Last watered on 06/06, water again on 06/13. Put reminders in your calendar app: Repeat every other Sunday: WATER BIWEEKLY PLANTS. There’s no shame in preparing for your forgetfulness.
Once you’ve gotten into the swing of things, it’s important to panic constantly about whether you’re doing things right. Some questions you might ask yourself:
Did I switch the plant groupings, and I’m watering the wrong plants at the wrong times? That would be very bad. What if I’m drowning half the plants and turning the other half into winter-dry dead things?
Did the plant that looks like a stick in a pot of dirt always look like a stick in a pot of dirt? Or did it have leaves at some point?
Is there enough sun in this room? Is there enough sun in any room of this house? Did I just move into a house that’s going to exacerbate my seasonal depression in a few months? What will I do when I have to give all these plants back and there’s no greenery left to give me purpose?
Move the plants around constantly. Into the sun, away from the direct sunlight, leaning against the fridge for support, onto the floor, onto the kitchen counter, on top of the fireplace where the ivy hangs down. Never feel peace nor certainty. You’re doing it all wrong.
Celebrate the successes: a new leaf! Purple flowers on the windowsill!
When the time comes, the owner will take them all away. You’ll be relieved and if you look closely, a little sad, but it’s important not to get attached to such a stressful lifestyle. Keep your head on straight; the sparks of joy aren’t worth the trouble, nor the shame of failure.
Dwell in the irony that your success in sustaining life has left you experiencing the loss of life, when all the plants are gone. The reminders are everywhere: the circular leaves of the plant you couldn’t quite keep healthy have drifted under the dinner table. The blossoms you were so proud of got knocked loose and fell as the owner lifted the plant out of its place in the sun, and now they are rotting next to the window pane. On her way out the door, the plant thief dropped one of the cactuses and you can’t stop finding the little pebbles it was potted in. You’ll find it's impossible to sweep them all up, like they’re a part of the century-old house: a mess you can’t bear to look at and a ghost you can’t expel.
How to take care of someone else’s children when you’ve been doing it since you were 11:
Accept the job eagerly if it’s a recurring gig. If it’s a one-time thing, take it if you need your groceries paid for, but skip it otherwise. After you’ve been nannying for 10 years, it makes less sense to spend hours learning the rules of a family just to never need them again.
Encourage the kids to be interested in bugs. When the kids like bugs, you don’t have to be the one leading the charge for any rescue missions or murders. “Wow, you should be an entomologist!” you say, as you lead the child with their dead bug to the backyard for a proper burial, or as they chase a wasp with a jar. If only some babysitter had fostered your confidence with bugs, you think, you’d have a much easier time living alone.
Help them with their forward rolls and their cartwheels, even though you swore to yourself you’d never let your own kids be gymnasts. Body confidence and body control are important!
Remember that any messes the kids make will be yours to clean up, even if the parents insist not to worry about it. Because yes, your parents raised you not to make messes for other people, and that includes people you work for. This means you have to be stubborn as hell with the children too, insisting they help you put the clutter away even when they cry. It’s not your job to spoil them; that’s what grandparents are for.
Don’t make any promises you can’t keep. The kids will remember the passing mention of putting on a lemonade stand, and when the air quality is too low to even play outside because of a wildfire in Canada, they will still beg and insist that people will walk by and pay $4 for a cup of grocery-store lemonade.
If you give them a gift, be prepared: it will disappear within the week. Or a day.
Children can sense when you’re in a rush and they will only take longer and be more distracted. Don’t let on that you’ve got an appointment to make or that you want to be home from the playground before their parents are back so you can leave. That’s a secret you must guard while acting as if you have all the time in the world. Child-rearing involves a lot of acting.
Thinking of distractions is a superpower.
Don’t be surprised when you start hearing the voices of your parents or guardians in your head. “I’m not your referee,” you’ll say one day to a pair of siblings, and flashback to the brawls you had in the back of the car with your brother, when your mom wouldn’t decide who was in the wrong. “Don’t pull up the grass, how would you like it if I pulled your hair?” you’ll ask, and remember your grandmother chastising you for the same thing, how you had to learn that the earth is part of your family. “Being kind can be brave,” you tell a child after someone is mean to them on a playground, and you know your old choir director would be proud to know you heard them after all. It all comes back to us in adulthood: our words matter.
Play along. Always, always, always play along. The seed of a creative life comes naturally in childhood but only grows with collaboration — we have to see adults be silly and make pretend too. Be the queen with the British accent that the kids love and hate at the same time, and be the monster that searches through a fort for baby tigers with magical powers. Sometimes it's hard to play as an adult, but it's a privilege to see the imagination as raw as it is in childhood. Find a way to cherish it.
How to care for yourself when you’re living alone for the first time:
You’re your own parent now. Do you feel prepared to test your self-control?
Put yourself on a schedule: regular meals and regular movement. You are the most important thing you can keep alive.
Sleep is the key to functioning, which seems obvious but can be difficult to enforce. The evenings never feel long enough when you work 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and by the time bedtime rolls around you don’t even feel relieved about resting, because you have to be awake at 7 a.m. and mornings have never been easy for you. Know that going to bed an hour earlier may be the difference between a day at work that you slog through versus a day full of energy and play.
Consistently listen to happy music for the first time in your life and romanticize living alone and summertime. It’s the happiest goddamn time of the year, forget Christmas. Sit on the porch and drink a summer shandy, read a Sally Rooney novel, and try to look away from your loneliness.
Decorate your new bedroom and learn how to cook something other than mac and cheese or quesadillas. Look for novelty in cleaning the bathroom and the stove burners. Imagine a future with more permanence and drool over the idea of living in a place for longer than a year at a time.
Pay your bills on time and save some money for emergencies. Maybe you can outrun the financial distress that haunted your childhood, if you give it your best effort.
Don’t forget to leave the house! Wear the new sundress to the coffee shop. Sit by the river in the canyon where you can never get far enough away from the road. Take the chance to skinny dip in the woods; the ice-cold plunge will create something hot and sharp in you. Go on the date, and the second date; notice how it feels to have someone finally want to hold your hand.
Remind yourself that you exist. Ways to do this include calling a friend who’s far away or taking a long bath with a candle lit on the windowsill. You must act early, lest you forget and drift into ghostliness. It is worthwhile to make meaning aggressively.