My son has been a vegetarian for three years.
Chewing his edamame or ravioli or cucumber, or lately (thank God) a bit of egg, he'll watch as the rest of us bite into burgers or salmon or some other, formerly alive creature that had eyes. "I know you're a good person," he says, chewing thoughtfully, carefully pushing the edamame out from their green pods. "So why would you want to hurt animals?"
He is six.
"We don't judge other people's food choices," we remind him, our mouths full of flesh, while I try not to think about how my lamb shwarma was once a cute, cuddly creature that bahhed sweetly. We don't eat a lot of meat in our house, but when we do, we brace ourselves for his inevitable judgement.
It's not just food though. He won't let us kill insects of any kind. At four, he saw my husband spraying an infestation of ants with insecticide. "Will it hurt them?" he asked, his voice already trembling with the tears that would soon engulf him. "Only their exoskeletons" I murmured behind clenched teeth. My husband glared at me.
He will chase us around the house as we swat flies, calling shrilly, "why would you hurt a poor 'defenless' fly?" I once killed an abomination of an insect - the centipede - and he responded by making me a life-sized centipede out of construction paper, which he placed by my desk so I could witness my sin every day for a week.
Hell hath no fury like an enlightened (and sometimes sanctimonious) six-year-old.
When he grows up, he says, he wants to be one of those veterinarians who treats wildlife, And then releases them back into the wild. He called it "a wildlife rescuer." Because as much as he loves animals (and he does - truly, madly, deeply) he knows they shouldn't be kept in captivity.* He wants to live on a nature preserve and protect them. When I tell him to make a wish on his birthday, he'll clench his eyes shut and make the same wish he always makes: That no one will kill any animals ever again.
I wish my own wishes were that generous - that big. To save the world. Or at the very least, most of the "defenless" creatures who inhabit it.
Really, children are good at this: reminding us how flawed we are. We like to think we can guide them, but often they are far wiser than we pretend to be.
Isn't that the point of parenting, though? We bring children up and quietly pray that they will repair the broken world we gave them. Maybe they will live up to the dreams we had when we were children ourselves. We just hope they'll do it better.
Maybe that's selfish. But at least it's honest. We want our kids to be happy and healthy, but we also want them to care more, to do more, to believe more deeply in their own power than we ever did. And maybe if we believe in them enough, they just might.
*One exception: The kids and I are pushing our "Dog Agenda" onto my unwilling husband, who is a neat freak that likes order and quiet. So far, no dice. But I will get him there, just as I pushed my Liberal Agenda on him for years until he caved and now basically Democrats the hell out of straight ticket voting. WE WILL WIN, EVENTUALLY.
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