The waitress had just set down my food, the vegetarian combination, and my husband’s Doro Wat when she looked at my daughter and told her, “I’ll be right back with your lamb.” My child’s eyes grew large and filled with tears.
“I told you I don’t eat anything cute!”
It’s true. My daughter does not consume the flesh of any creature that might appear as a plush friend in an Easter basket.
My husband had been so happy to find something on the menu mild enough for our daughter, so that we could come as a family to this neighborhood Ethiopian restaurant where she does not like the way the vegetables are prepared.
The first time my daughter tasted the meat off her father’s plate, he didn’t tell her what it was. I wasn’t paying attention, I assumed it was beef. The Husband told me later that it was lamb and he hadn’t told her because he wanted to be able to go back to that restaurant as a family. I suppose I should have told him, that this would be perceived as betrayal. But, I thought he knew. How many episodes of The Simpson’s have my husband and daughter watched together.
How often does Lisa’s vegetarianism come up? Why didn’t my husband see this coming?
My own road to becoming a vegetarian began in elementary school the first time I refused to eat anything I had seen dead.
It was not long after we had moved to Montana and my father shot Bambi and hung the corpse in the garage to cure before he and my mother butchered the meat like some kind of pioneers, or Sweeney Todd, or Hannibal Lecter.
Some kid argued with me, “You eat cows don’t you?”
“Not anymore!” was my answer as a 7th grader and I still haven’t.
When the waitress returned with the lamb stew, she took one look at my daughter, turned right around, and returned the Ye Beg Alicha back to the kitchen. When we got our check it had been crossed off the bill.
I don’t know how this incident will to shake out for us as far as the timing of my daughter becoming a vegetarian. But, I’m pretty sure we won’t be going back to that particular restaurant any time soon.
This is an original NYC Moms Blog post.