Letter: On Becoming a Princess – Eat Your Peas

At three years old she hated peas.

Especially a side-dish of just peas and only peas while the rest of dinner was being prepared. As if somehow peas placed alone on a separate plate should be therefore prized?

By a three year old?

Nope.

No matter what her mother said or did she wouldn’t eat the little round green things.

Not cooked, not raw, not ‘hidden’ in stir-fry, or casserole, or salad, peas were espied and plucked from the plate and pushed aside.

“We’re going to have peas for your birthday!” her mother said with great enthusiasm, thinking associating peas with presents would bring a smile to the pouter-face.

Nope.

“Please do not, by any means, eat your peas!”

A terribly worried expression on her face, her brows furrowed, her hands pressed against the side of her cheeks, her mother tried reverse psychology too.

Nope. That didn’t work either.

Sighing and turning away to attend to the liver and onions frying in the large skillet on the stove, the mother expounded aloud – half to herself, half for the benefit of her recalcitrant, obstreperous, and otherwise defiant won’t-eat-her-peas daughter – upon the benefit of eating your peas.

“Did you know peas are a useful source of starch? And they have so many letters of the alphabet as vitamins! A, B, C and E! Minerals too, like zinc, antioxidants, and phytonutrients that keep your eyes healthy!” mother waxing eloquent now.

“Why did you know,” mother continued, “that just three years ago, the very year you were born, a study showed that if you eat just a handful of peas every day you will lower the risk of cancer by 50 percent?”

“Peas even help you poop!” her mom exclaimed. “Peas are high in fiber which helps move liver and onions through your gut for easier digestion!”

That must have been the clincher because when mom turned back to the table the peas were gone. So was her little one. Maybe she had to use the bathroom.

Smiling, the mother picked up the side dish where the peas had been and there, beneath the lip of the plate, in a perfect circle, were all the peas.

That night she slipped quietly into the bedroom where her daughter had gone to sleep, and as the soft nightlight of a little lamb played the last of the lullabies and then itself went quiet, the light blinking out, her mother paused, and prayed, as she did every night, that this precious little treasure of hers would one day become all she dreamed she would be.

She did.

Last night she graduated.

She had gone through so much, and learned so much.

Including learning to like peas.