What Happens When You Feed Your Headaches To A Plant

Seriously, it was my mother’s idea

Many years ago, my mother told me the story of one of her weekly bridge friends, Maggie, who had almost killed an indoor ficus by feeding it her headaches. The story goes that when she had a headache, she would visualize it as blue water swirling around inside her head. Then she’d find someplace to pour the water out, thereby pouring out the pain.

Maggie had a beautiful ficus in a sunny corner of her living room, where she hosted her weekly bridge games. My mother described it as having a ten-foot tall canopy of lovely, deep green leaves. It sat in an ornamental pot of blues and yellows, which made the green stand out. The tree invited all to stand beneath it.

Over the weeks, as my mother and her friends played bridge in Maggie’s house, they noticed that the ficus started to look poorly, as if it wasn’t getting enough love. The leaves started turning yellow and falling to the floor.

This went on until one week, when the ficus showed up on the patio. Maggie explained that she’d been dumping her headaches on it which had made it sick. So she moved it outside to get fresh air, better light, and maybe some rain, so it could be saved. She started dumping her headaches down the toilet instead.

I’m not sure I ever bought the ficus story my mom told me. There must have been something else wrong with that tree. I’ve tried to grow them indoors myself, with no luck.

But, I told this story to my daughter because she suffers from migraines, usually brought on by stress. I thought maybe the off-beat story would lighten her mood and help a little bit.

We remember my mom as loving astrology, mediums and alternative thinking, and still tell stories about the unusual beliefs she held. Although not a mainstream therapy, we decided to give visualization a try, laughing about it the whole time.

Both of us started visualizing our headaches as blue liquid pooled in our brains. We chose a poor indoor palm tree as our victim, thinking nothing bad would really happen. We even laughed at the absurdity of it all. Of course, laughter is medicine for anything, and I thought at least that might help the headaches.

After a few weeks of this, I kid you not, that palm began to deteriorate. It had been happily in the house for years. We put it in a perfect spot, talked to it, and even decorated it during the Christmas season. But, after dumping a significant number of headaches on it, some of its fronds died and others turned brown. We knew we’d done a bad thing.

What the hell had we been thinking by feeding it our headaches? We both admitted that we got a small amount of pain relief from the visualization exercise and that laughing about dumping the pain on a poor, unsuspecting plant helped a bit, but it wasn’t worth losing a valued member of the family.

I promptly moved the sweet little palm outside to the patio beside the vegetable garden outside of my office. I’ve been keeping an eye on it, talking to it and making sure the birds stay out of it.

It’s been a few weeks now and I’m happy to report that it has perked up significantly. It loved the recent rain and is almost ready to come back inside the house.

We promise to feed it only love, clean water, and appropriate plant food. We have decided that from now on, we will dump our headaches down the toilet as we should have done in the first place. I hope you all won’t judge me too harshly and I truly regret my bad behavior.

This story was inspired by two other stories I have read recently about houseplants:

Michele Maize talks about her love for plants and how to care for them so they will thrive. I’m sure she’d NEVER feed her plants any headaches.

Pene Hodge writes about how plants make a home with their lovely energy. I’m sure she would NEVER mistreat a plant as well.