I haven’t even been able to verbalize my experience with my mother’s visiting nurse last week because every time I begin to write about it, words fail me. In fact, I can barely speak of the incident without sputtering, waving my arms about, and making strange strangled sounds that can barely be woven into a sentence. I don’t want to let it go, so I’ll just stick with this final, woefully inadequate account.

When I arrived to my parents’ home on Sunday morning, my mother’s nurse was sitting with my mother in the kitchen, chatting about this and that. She’s a loud suburban type. She thinks Bush is a great President. She’s considering moving even farther from the city into an even whiter neighborhood. She loves talking about her daughter at Ohio State. She’s nice enough, but in real life, I would never want to talk to someone like her.

She was speaking with my sister, Kelly, about the cheesesteak sandwiches that Kelly was planning on making for dinner, and then she turned to me.

“You don’t eat meat, do you?” She burst, looking at me like I had three heads.

“No,” I replied politely.

And that’s as much of the dialogue that I can replicate accurately, because as soon as she started laughing at me and patting my mother on the arm and telling her not to worry, “it was just a phase” and most people go through the whole “vegetarian thing” at some part of their lives, I sort of lost track of the conversation. I think that the only thing that I managed to squeak out at that point was, “I’m thirty years old.” I don’t think that she understood exactly what I meant, which was more akin to, “I’m a grown woman. I haven’t eaten meat in years. I made this decision after a great deal of research and reflection. It’s a part of who I am. It’s a choice that reflects my morals, my beliefs, my ideals. How would you feel if I laughed at you for going to church, if I told you that Jesus was just a myth, like Santa Claus? If I patronized and embarrassed you and made you uncomfortable?”

I couldn’t say those things. She’s not the type of woman that cares a bit about what anyone has to say, and she wouldn’t have listened anyway. Besides, I was worried about making my family any more uncomfortable than they already were (my mother kept trying to change the subject to talk about her brother’s dog and Kelly left the room quite hastily). I didn’t want to be rude, so I kept quiet while she continued to patronize me. She asked me if I sat down for a holiday dinner of steamed vegetables while my family ate “normal” food. She laughed some more. She advised me that if her husband could visit a chicken farm and still eat chicken, then I could learn to eat meat again.

I just *love* exchanges like this. Some day, perhaps, I’ll write a bit more about it. But not today. Today I study for midterms.