Becoming a veg head

At age 12 I chose to become vegetarian – what a blow to my parents. They were farming people. They raised me well on a meat & 3 veg kind of diet. I’d loved my chops & my sausages as any other kid does. They had no reason to expect this backlash of rebellion would come. But it did.


At first they tried to accept and laugh it off (“she’ll forget by dinner time”). Then after a few weeks it started to annoy them. Hardly surprising – it was almost a slap in the face with regard to the lifestyle they had raised me with and expected me to join. Mum started to serve me up a piece of meat with each meal, and demand that I sit there until it was eaten. Unfortunately for her, she had raised me to have a keen sense of my own self and I steadfastly refused.


After some months, they settled back into a disgruntled sense of acceptance, but they spent many years with a tinge of anger hovering over the subject, and even as a young adult I was treated to the occasional sarcastic barb about my “freakishness”. Their refusal to fully accept this part of me still had the power to hurt me well into my twenties.


Somehow, time has mellowed us both. They no longer see it as a personal statement against them, and mum can even sometimes see the merit in a veg diet for health reasons (although my reasons are ethical). Dad simply gets on with things and doesn’t mention it – in fact I don’t think he gives it much thought at all these days. On my part – I can finally see how it might have hurt them on a personal level – although it was a good many years before that even occurred to me.


Now I have raised my son as a vegetarian. It’s only normal that we raise our children in the lifestyle we have chosen for ourselves. Obviously we think it the best.


Will he choose to eat meat? Will it strike me in the heart as my choice struck my parents? Will I accept his choice and cope with it better than they did? I hope so. I hope we can learn from the mistakes of the generations before us… And in the name of a good relationship with my son, I hope I can avoid the trauma of trying to hang on to a dream or belief that might be mine, but may not be his.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
by OakleyOriginals