Carol’s Column

Meet my daughter the plant monitor

She hit me between the eyeballs with the news as she climbed into the car.

“Hi, Ma.” I could see she was excited. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparkled like dew-kissed pansies. “You’ll never guess what happened at school today?”

I immediately guessed what had happened.

“Jamie was expelled for wearing his purple takkies with pink laces? Jamie lost his headgear? You got a detention because you danced on the desk? You threw a ruler at your teacher? Someone stuck chewing gum in your hair?”

“Aw, Ma, c’mon? Why do you always think the worst?”

“Rubbish, who thinks the worst? Oh Lord, they’re expelling you both!”

She sighed, long and loud, in a way that only nine-year-old daughters can sigh.

“OK,” she said resignedly, “I’ll tell you because you’ll never guess. I’ve been made the plant monitor.”

“The plant monitor?”

My daughter the plant monitor – this is what I slave for day after day, hoarding five-cent pieces, stinting on the Swiss chocolates, eating bread and water, so that my daughter will become a plant monitor?

“That’s wonderful,” I exclaimed. This wasn’t the time to tell her I’d hoped for greater things. My daughter the astronaut, my daughter the physicist, my daughter the doctor, my daughter the Prime Minister – but my daughter the plant monitor?

It wasn’t on my list of approved careers for pushy mothers.

“Oh, Mummy, all my life I’ve wanted to be a plant monitor,” she said, “and now my dream’s come true.”

It was a delicate subject.

“Er, tell me,” I asked tentatively while grating the gear as my foot slipped off the clutch at Thrupps corner, “what actually is a plant monitor?”

“I’ve got to monitor the plants,” she answered, “what did you think I had to do?”

“Oh, monitor the plants.” Silence. “How exactly does one go about monitoring plants? Do you make them sit in straight lines and give them merit stamps if they eat all their delicious fertiliser like good little plants.”

Nicky looked at me disparagingly. “Ma, this is serious, stop being facetious.”

Two days later, my daughter the plant monitor, looked decidedly downhearted at breakfast.

“I’ve got a problem,” she admitted on being questioned, “it’s all very well being a plant monitor, but I haven’t any plants to monit.”

“You can take one of mine,” I offered generously I thought.

Nicky was disconsolate. “Ma, one plant is not enough. I need a roomful of plants, a herbarium I can only fulfil my potential as a plant monitor if I have a sea of plants to nurture.”

“A field,” I corrected automatically.

“So put an advertisement in the classifieds,” suggested her brother Jamie.

It didn’t occur to us that she would.

Until the 274th plant was delivered to our door.

Last night we heard strange sounds coming from her room.

“I’m singing them to sleep,” she said as we burst in, “they only sleep if I sing soprano.”

Indeed, since her appointment, life has changed around here.

It’s not that I mind the fact that our house has disappeared under a forest of waving, creeping plants.

It’s not even the seven-metre pile of chicken manure on the front patio I object to – my daughter assures me it’s the only thing for pot plants.

So it’s no good stinting on a little bit of manure here and there.

No, I’d got used to the idea that Nicky’s ambition in life had been realised.

Which was why I was shocked when this morning she said: “You know, Ma, if I’m really lucky – next term I might become the window monitor.”

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