I Hate the Latest Lego Flower Bouquet
and I'm going to be extremely weird about it
My history with the LEGO (hereafter: Lego, because the all-caps thing makes me feel tired) Botanical Collection dates back to what was, for me, the worst part of the pandemic: January 2021. Nobody was vaccinated yet. Everything felt so exhausting and terrifying and hard. But nothing felt harder than keeping my neurodivergent seven-year-old on her Zoom therapy calls.
We had set her up with a therapist in 2019, when my ex transitioned and we decided to get divorced. We hoped a therapist would help explain what gender was and give her a neutral adult with whom she could, I don’t know, share all of her mommy (now times two!) issues? That was the theory, at least. Or maybe I just thought if I signed her up for a therapist, I was Doing The Work and being a Good-Enough Mom and could finally earn that A minus in parenting1 I’ve been desperately hoping someone would award me?
This is too real. I’ll try to bring it back to flowers made of plastic.
During the pandemic, her therapy sessions were on Zoom, and that hour quickly became the most dreaded hour of my entire week. You see, my child haaaaaated talking about her feelings then – she’s much better now, so I guess it worked?2 – so she would spend the entire hour getting distracted and stimming.
I poured so much goddamn creative energy into trying to figure out the right combination of sensory inputs that might be conducive to keeping her engaged and curious. What if she took the entire session from inside the giant cardboard box that my ex had purchased when she moved into the downstairs guest room and needed a new mattress, and that my daughter then drew all over with markers and repurposed as a fort? What if we got her one of those soft sleeping bag/straitjacket things that are constantly getting advertised to me on Instagram? What if hot chocolate and stuffed animals and fidget spinners and background music and spritzes of perfume? (Hopefully not all at the same time, because wow can my nervous system not handle that.)
And then I would sit for the hour, far enough away to give her space and privacy but close enough that the therapist could have her quickly summon me if a body double seemed required, and I could still hear her loudly spouting random decontextualized quotes from the Captain Underpants TV show for an hour in a sing-songy voice before eventually emerging to hand me the iPad and head up to her room so I could interface with the therapist and wonder if she’d judge my parenting more or less if I was openly weeping.
At first, I tried to get shit done during her therapy calls, but that turned to be LOL. Puzzles were better. And on one particularly bad day, I started working on a Lego flower bouquet. A little bit at my kid, to be perfectly honest. She absolutely loves Legos, and she and I have been doing thousand-plus piece sets together since she was five, but I’d already decided she was NOT invited to participate in this one that was supposed to be self-care because I was slowly going insane. So I constructed the flowers and tried not to notice the total dead silence emanating from the mattress box in the guest room.
At the end of the session, I had several flowers done, and it turned out that the ominous silence was actually a bit of a breakthrough. My daughter and her therapist had been experimenting with using Zoom’s chat window and typing to each other, which I guess felt easier than the video call for talking about big feelings. Her therapist was positively thrilled. I was so relieved and happy that I actually did invite my daughter to finish the bouquet together with me, and we had a blast.
When I showed off a picture of it to my mom, she loved it so much that I decided we should make one for her too. It was ready almost exactly two weeks after my mom got her second dose of the vaccine, so we delivered the flowers and I hugged her for the first time in a year.
What I’m trying to say is, I’ve got big feelings about Lego flowers.
Three years later, Lego flowers are now the dominant non-lifeform in my house. The orchid lives (ish) on my kitchen island. There are daffodils in a mason jar on my windowsill. Bouquets on side tables. A bonsai tree on my partner’s desk and succulents on mine. Whenever a new set came out, it was an automatic purchase for me.
Until the latest set: a goddamn bouquet of a dozen red roses with baby’s breath that offends me so much that I’m here writing thousands of words about it.
Why am I so enraged by this new set? Other than the fact that I’m a weirdo with bizarre fixations. I feel like I already covered that at length in my croissant plush newsletter.
I suspect that my feeling of betrayal has something to do with how these sets have been marketed. If you look at the sets on Amazon – where they boast thousands of 5-star reviews – and on the Lego website, a picture emerges. It starts with that very first bouquet:
Looking at these two pictures, it seems pretty clear that they expected their market to be older ladies who maybe were on the website looking to buy something for their grandsons but then thought, “Look at those snapdragons! How lovely!”
Although… even that very first bouquet came with a sleek black box and an “18+” rating. An 18+ rating makes it seem like the set should either be huge and complex, like the Colosseum or the Death Star sets, or otherwise inappropriate for kids. And, yes, from a certain perspective I suppose flowers are just colorful and fragrant plant gonads blah blah Georgia O’Keeffe etc. etc. But that’s clearly not what’s going on here. The point was to signal to stressed-out pandemic moms that they could do Lego sets just for themselves and not include their stress-inducing kids. That was certainly my experience! Sure, I’m a little younger than the women in the pictures, but I felt decades older than my actual age during the pandemic, so who cares. All that separates me from that second lady is that I don’t have one of those glasses necklaces, so my glasses get lost a lot.
But at some point, their sense of what their core demographic was shifted from people more like my mom to people more like me:
This is just SUCH a rich text! A highly photogenic well-moisturized interracial millennial couple wearing complementary but not matchy-matchy button-down shirts and headphones, listening to a branded “ASMR-inspired playlist” while putting together their Lego succulents. It’s right at the intersection of “that’s the dream” and “is there an amount of cringe that is actually fatal” for me.
Also, I just need to share that the Bonsai tree set is marketed with this image:
Just look at this guy, with his man bun and his finger tattoos3 and his real bonsai tree sitting next to the Lego one he’s constructing outside, for some reason. Incredible work.
So why does the bouquet of red roses feel like such a misfire? Well, first: the Lego roses kind of suck, ok? They’ve included one or two as a component in several different sets, most recently this autumnal centerpiece. And while that one mauve rose does look nice among the dried wheat and miniature pumpkins and such, it’s a bitch to get those petals – which, if I recall correctly from the instruction booklet of the very first bouquet, were a piece that was repurposed after it was initially designed as the hood of a car in a much-earlier set – to overlap correctly. And of all the individual flowers, the roses are the most likely to fall apart if my kids jostle the vase or frankly even look at it wrong.
Second, and more important: what a basic-bitch flower choice! If my partner got me a dozen red roses with baby’s breath for Valentine’s Day, I would reconsider whether he was the person for me. Red roses have been so heavily marketed as the definition of romance that the cliché of it all feels like it precludes the option of any actual romance. I like my romance a little less trite and uninspired. The only thing a bouquet of red roses and baby’s breath has going for it is that it will eventually die, and you can throw it out and try to forget that your partner didn’t put in the effort to think of a truly meaningful and touching gift for you. Unless they’re made out of plastic, in which case, the bouquet will sit around forever, haunting you.
As I write this, I’m wondering if I’m coming down too hard on red roses. I myself have enjoyed some romantic clichés in the past. I have eaten a fresh macaron in Paris while looking at the Eiffel Tower, and it ruled. And if you want to enjoy these Lego roses in that spirit, I salute you. But I can’t help feeling like they represent the brutally low bar we set for heterosexual men to show they care. They symbolize the dude who ignores all of his wife’s labor, but maybe if she’s lucky, three times a year – Valentine’s, her birthday, and their anniversary – he’ll stop by the supermarket and pick up the most depressing combination of plants possible: some flowers with spikes that want to hurt you, and some white fluffy filler that smells like nothing.
Also: this is the only Lego flower set I wouldn’t get for my mom. A dozen red roses is definitely not the right vibe. And when I showed the set to my daughter, who is now nearly 11, she let out a deep, lengthy sigh in the way that only a preteen can.
Am I going to stop buying Legos? No, obviously not. I’m completely locked in. The Lego Star Wars advent calendar is an annual tradition in my house, and the Starry Night set makes me happy every time I look at it. But please, Lego: do better next time.
Side note: do I need this Lego flower wall? Stay tuned.
Yes, an A minus specifically, because my own mother drilled into me that a B plus is an abject failure and you do whatever you fucking have to in order to pull your average up to 90, oh wait, this is about mommy issues again
Honestly, we’ve created a monster who LOVES advocating for herself, it’s the best/worst
The anchor is upside-down, right? Or am I just crazy?!
It probably says something about me when I read footnote 3 and looked at the finger tattoo in question that my immediate reaction was “That’s an IUD.” 😂