Unspoken

I was eating a pre-packed chicken caesar salad for lunch when I decided I wanted to be vegetarian five years ago. It was the first week of my freshman year of high school and I suppose I wanted to reinvent myself.

My poor mother, who already struggled to cater to a picky, mostly-carnivorous son, was less than enthused about the idea. We bickered back and forth for weeks before it became evident she would have to force feed me for me to ever put meat in my mouth again. She decided that task was well above her paygrade.

Her disdain for my vegetarian diet never went away. Even now, I’m sure she still clings to the hope I might just bite into a piece of bacon one of these days. But after months of my stubbornness, I could see her giving in in certain ways. She came home with a box of frozen vegetarian sausage patties she’d found at the grocery story. She sent me a link to an article on how to eat vegetarian at Tacobell. When she made our family-favourite stir fry dinner, she switched from chicken flavoured ramen noodles to soy sauce flavoured ramen noodles. I didn’t ask her to do any of these things.

A couple years into my vegetarian diet, fake meats and meat substitutes started to become more advanced. Restaurants and fast food places began adding vegetarian alternatives. And meat eater or not, I’d always loved burgers. We made a point of visiting numerous different places so I could try all the veggie burgers that the world had to offer. My father and I were blown away by what we found; he was still an omnivore, the same as the rest of my family, but he claimed the veggie burgers tasted just as good as the regular ones. Whether he meant it or not, I think he knew how happy it made me.

My mother, on the other hand, had always had a more refined palate. She swore up and down she could taste the difference between real and fake meat, and wasn’t very fond of the latter. Although disappointing, my mother had her own way of providing me reassurance.

I developed somewhat of a nervous ritual when it came to trying new veggie burgers. I would always take a bite, think the flavour uncannily similar to real meat, and then end up beside myself with nerves thinking there had been a mix up and I had, in fact, just eaten meat. My father would try to reassure me, but it was difficult to quell my anxious thoughts. My mother developed her own way of dealing with it. Her and her sophisticated taste buds would offer to take a bite of my veggie burger, and she wouldn’t like it because it wasn’t meat, and I’d suddenly feel a lot better about eating it. She would do this for me every time, sort of like one of those medieval taste testers that made sure the king’s food wasn’t poisoned.

I don’t know that I’ve ever expressed to my mother how grateful I was for this little exchange of ours.

Every year in her Mother’s Day cards I’ll write something along the lines of “thank you for raising me, for loving me, for keeping me safe.” All of these things are true, but if you ask me what I truly appreciate most about my mother, I don’t think about the fact that she puts a roof over my head or clothes on my back. Rather, I think about all the small ways she’s learned to uniquely support me. Love is in the little things.