Birthday Bios: Honeysuckle · 2:50pm May 5th, 2016
You know, with Mother’s Day just around the corner, I’m really happy to whip up a Birthday Bio for one of my favorite mom OCs—Flora’s mother, Honeysuckle. Lookit her, isn’t she such a darling? You can definitely tell where Flora got her looks from.
Let’s see what this supermom has to offer.
Honeysuckle was born in one of the outlying neighborhoods of Salt Lick City, being the third daughter of Blue Raspberry and Flower Power. She was an easygoing foal, always remaining pleasant for visitors and later wanting to show them what her home and family had to offer. It wasn’t much, but Honey always made it the best thing in the world.
She was four when she received her glasses—she did not like them. She was teased by some of the neighborhood foals for her glasses, and when she didn’t wear them, she was teased for confusing a wagon for a fat pony. Still, she avoided wearing the glasses outside of home, up until she ended up falling in the nearby river and nearly drowned during a family picnic. After being revived and comforted after her near-death experience, she was advised to keep the glasses on for her to see any dangers she’d end up stumbling into without them.
She was one of the smartest kids in her class, due to a mixture of reading a lot at home and listening to the teacher at school. She could figure out complex math equations in her head easily, and she was often the first one to understand newly introduced concepts. There were naturally bullies that wanted to target her for her smarts, but she just rolled her eyes at them, disappointed that they’d try to tear others down instead of lifting themselves up. She liked to tutor her struggling classmates, with most being humble enough to accept her help. For this reason, she made many more friends than enemies.
She was often modeling her own bedroom as a comfortable abode suited to whatever her needs were at her stage of life. Her hobbies were always meant to be productive in some way, whether it’d be knitting up a scarf for one of her five sisters or a potholder for her parents, sewing up some curtains, blankets or pillows, or arranging flowers for one of the empty vases. She liked to help her mother with the garden and helped cook. She was also the first to start whenever it was time for chores. She enjoyed a clean house, but she wasn’t nearly as obsessive about total sanitation as her sister Jasmine.
Achieving a task of preparing the guest bedroom for a couple that couldn’t afford a hotel room earned her both her cutie mark, and a chance to play with the couple’s baby.
As her cutie mark implies, she liked to live a simple life. While she was capable of achieving much (indeed, she could be considered an honor student), she wasn’t interested in any high life with power and money. Even when it was clear she’d be accepted into many prestigious universities around Equestria, she stuck with the one in Salt Lick City, her studies mainly gearing toward Home Economics, with a minor in Business. She took to tutoring a lot of her fellow students, making a bunch of new friends.
She wasn’t all too fond of dancing, but she obliged when one of her friends invited her. Sticking to the walls and drinking punch, she ended up having to deal with small talk from bored stallion. She ended up talking about various things with the stallion, March Redwood, including funny adventures, favorite foods, and what they were studying. After that, whenever Honey was at a dance, she was happy to see her new friend there, and they’d be the chatty wallflowers each time.
They had little get-togethers outside of those dances afterwards, with each one of those having them lightly tease each other and develop little in-jokes. They even got together to plan classes for the next semester, making sure that they shared at least one class. It didn’t hit them that they were in love until about a couple years after first meeting. They started calling the get-togethers “dates”, met each other’s families (turns out they lived on opposite sides of Salt Lick City), and then they decided to get married.
After marriage and graduation, they moved up to Salt Lick Valley’s Neighton, as an EUP base was stationed there. Honey wasn’t all that fond of March’s military career, especially when an assignment had him going away to help settle a violent dispute. It took longer than expected, which worried Honey—who was pregnant—about whether he’d live or die, or if he’d be able to come home in time to greet their foal. Thankfully, he returned home just before the due date, and Honey gave birth to a beautiful filly, which they named Flora Peace.
March was out at work a lot, which had Honey raising Flora mostly herself. When her husband did come home, it was much of a toss-up between a family outing, having him watch Flora, or a certain husband and wife bonding that soon made way to Flora’s brother Bananas, and later six other foals.
She had to learn to deal with the various personalities that came with having that many foals. Flora was victim to much of Honey’s scolding due to being pretty mean as a filly, only turning around after an awful accident had her harboring so much guilt and a drive for repentance. The victim of the accident, Bananas, was usually a hoofful that was bouncing off the walls and laughing at the drop of a hat—but the accident had him quiet and frightened for a time (while Honey was thankful that he was alive, she was also saddened that he didn’t have his usual spark). However, a few years of therapy and constant support of his sister had Bananas jumping back to his usual self, though with a lot more care and responsibility.
Ash Tree was grumpy and reclusive, and Honey often had to drag him to places in order to have him at least get used to other ponies and learn to interact with them. Olive was aggressive, and Honey had to pull her out of fights with other foals—especially with Flora—and often grounded her. Alfalfa was shy and easygoing, so she had to encourage him to be more social, with mixed results. Amber Waves was talkative, though her clashing with Alfalfa at times had Honey step in. Willow was quiet and very socially awkward, to the point where Honey had to put her in therapy. And Kernel, as a goofy toddler, was prone to be getting into mischief.
When her eldest daughter was eleven and the current youngest was one-year-old Alfalfa, Honeysuckle wanted to bring more income to the home. After a bit of thought, she decided to put both her homemaking talent and her education about business to use, and she had her brothers-in-law—both March’s brothers and her sisters’ husbands—start work on the house to convert it to an inn.
When March returned from an assignment to find the half-finished project, he was upset that she didn’t consult him about this decision, and he wasn’t sure if it was a good idea. The discussion turned into a quarrel, and both of them were pretty angry for a few months afterwards. Honeysuckle was pretty snappy towards her kids for that time, leaving the five of them on edge and worried about their parents splitting up.
It took her oldest sister Sego Lily pointing out that she was being kind of harsh to the kids and that “yes, you made a mistake in not telling your husband about this inn thing” that Honeysuckle rethought her stance on the issue. She was surprised that March apologized first, but said her apologies anyway. Seeing as they couldn’t waste the hard work that had been done on the house already, she went on ahead with the inn with his blessing, finishing it with all the furnishings and utilities, and then having Bananas run around town and put up advertisements for the inn.
Between her incredible multi-tasking abilities and plenty of help from the children (even as the number grew from five to eight), Honeysuckle’s inn was a success. She made use of all the kids’ talents, cutie mark related or otherwise, and encouraged them to be friendly to any guests. They often got their allowance by helping her around the inn.
However, she didn’t mind that sometimes the kids had their own interests that they like to pursue, some of which had the older ones earn money of their own. Flora even decided to go to college, in Manehattan of all places, which had everyone scraping together money for both the school and train fees. Honeysuckle is proud of all her hard-working kiddos.
It’s inevitable that all eight of her foals are going to grow up and live their own lives. She hopes that by the time the kids all leave, she’d have enough money to hire staff to help her run the place. She isn’t sure if it’ll help with her and March’s empty nest syndrome when Kernel grows up, but it’d be nice to have some company and keep herself busy during that time.
But for now, between family and business, she’s got a lot of things to do.
Not much to comment on with this one; you've already covered much of this with Honey's mother and kids. Still interesting to see it from her perspective, though. I can see why she's one of your favorites.