Keep it real

You can blame your parents for lots of things — the nagging, the spanking, the bad behaviors and the "I can't" messages we internalize — but can you point the finger at them for passing on bad genes, specifically those that would not only send you out to buy artificial flowers but actually display them proudly in your home?

Actually, I'm OK with most of what I got out of the gene pool. I have my mom's butt (this is good), I have my dad's blue-green eyes (ditto), I have the thick hair of both (cumbersome at times, but, generally no complaints) as well as their artistic sensibility (meaning I, too, am drawn to those professions that give me great joy but no income).

Now I am fearful there's some recessive gene that is going to pop up as I age and make me toss out all my green plants and orchids and replace them with the fake stuff — as I recently discovered my Mom did.

I'm not sure when it happened. I hadn't been home in around a year, and even though I speak to my parents weekly, we're usually not talking about the state of her houseplants.

And she was a prolific grower, too. She had plants in the kitchen, in the living room, on the book shelves in the den, in the guest room, in their bedroom and all over the patio. She even tried to grow them in the windowless bathroom. And she was always taking cuttings from one or the other to create even more — they grew exponentially, like bunnies!

The shock came, however, when I went back home recently. At first glance, nothing looked different. But as I got closer, I uncovered the deception. Everywhere I looked — fake flowers, fake plants, fake orchids, fake cacti of all ridiculous things. Plastic, silk and dried, she has them all.

"Why, Mom?" I beseeched her. "What happened?"

"They took so much time to water and there was always dirt everywhere," she said in defense of her rash (well, in my mind) decision. "I got tired of them. The fake ones are so much easier to handle."

"But I thought you loved them."

"Love goes away sometimes."

I thought about that for a while. Love does go away sometimes — I know this from experience. And it's often messy, too. I also acknowledge that it's verrry tempting to want something easier.

But there's just no way that anything fake, no matter how realistic it may look and feel, can truly replace the real thing — plants or love.

When you look closely at either, it's not too hard to figure out which is which.