The Nemo Talk

I'm a vegetarian. I have been since I was 15. Jacob is a vegetarian, or rather, he eats a vegetarian diet. I think what defines a vegetarian is mostly the choice part of it. And right now Jacob doesn't have much of a choice. Zach is not a vegetarian. In the beginning Zach didn't like the fact that I was going the herbivore route with our son. He's pretty much let it go by now. I think he's just glad I've never pressured him to go without meat. When it comes to making decisions we are generally pretty good about letting the one who feels more strongly in one direction have the say. I just want Jacob to fully understand what meat is and what it means to be a meat eater and the implications of the meat industry before he makes his own decision about it.

Well, so Zach eats meat in front of Jacob and Jacob asks questions about it and we answer them honestly, except the part about where the meat came from. I use words like 'beef', or 'poultry' to describe the decrepid flesh on Zach's plate. And Jacob loves going around telling people that we are vegetarians. They unanimously turn to me for clarification because that's kind of a hard word to pronounce. At this point Jacob basically understands what it means to be a vegetarian. I'm just not ready to get into the part about killing animals to eat them. I think that would freak him out a little. So I've been waiting.

Let me interject here to tell one more part of the story: Jacob does eat salmon. There. I said it. At some point he asked to eat it and I decided that if I was going to have him eat one kind of animal flesh, salmon was the healthiest way to go. So we made an exception. I made Zach promise me that he wouldn't tell anyone we were giving him salmon because I was so afraid of being judged a hypocrite. I already get judged enough for all the other non-mainstream parenting ways of mine. Anyway, I cook it and Jacob eats it. But the part I don't do is the taking out of the packaging and putting into the pan. So when it comes time for that I call Zach into the room. Tonight I called Zach downstairs to do the dirty work. Jacob responded: "You stay up here (still in the bathroom) and work. I'w go down to hewp Mommy." It was so darn cute that I didn't have the heart to tell him he couldn't provide the assistance I needed. So together we finagled that nasty, raw fish onto the broiler pan. Then the questions began.

I had been to the grocery store just before then to buy the fish and I also got Jacob some Nemo bubble bath because the stuff I've been trying to make bubbles with hasn't been cutting it in his bath. There were plenty of choices that Jacob would be happy with but somehow I thought Nemo seemed appropriate because fish = water (bath), you know? So it's ironic that I was buying a friendly fish to play with and another to eat.

There we stood, at the stove, and Jacob asked what it was. With Nemo fresh on my mind, I took a deep breath and before I had the chance to stop myself, I blurted, "It's a fish, like Nemo." You should have seen the look on his face. I could have taken one of several directions from here, the worst being, "Yeah, it's a fish. You're eating Nemo...How do you feel about that?" I would have guilted him into a lifetime of non-fish eating, or at the very least, he would have an eye tick (from the repressed trauma) every time he ate fish. But I chose the high road and calmly talked him down from the shock of it. We talked about it a little more, the first of many conversations on this topic, I'm sure, and then without warning, Jacob changed the subject. I guess he's going to play ignorant on this one a little while longer.