Full Circle

                            Me and My Mom – a few years back!

If only I knew then what I know now.  Maybe I would have run faster while playing soccer. I’d like to think that maybe I would have had better aim when kicking the ball as well, but I doubt it! I get it now: my mother was trying to fill me with love. She knew the consequences of eating prepackaged, non-organic foods, as well as the negative effects that sugar and fried foods would have on my body. My mother wasn’t trying to torture me, as I often claimed; she was sending me off to school on nutrients that would sustain my brain and physical body while learning throughout the day. In retrospect, the food really wasn’t all that bad, just different.

I’m not sure exactly when I came to the realization that my mom’s way is the best way, but I do know when everything came full circle – when I became pregnant with my first born, Liam. Funny how that works – I started thinking like a mom, more specifically, like my mom. A baby doesn’t know how to choose the foods that will benefit him/her both instantaneously and in the long term. I realized that eating organic really does matter; that you can make a delicious meal using whole, unprocessed foods. I began doing a lot of research on clean, non-chemically preserved, organic foods when I was pregnant and found that by not paying attention to reading labels I could literally be putting toxins into my child’s body. I find that a lot of people don’t realize this, as they think that if something is sold at the grocery store, then it must be okay because it had to be approved by some authority in order to be put on the shelves. Though I had a good foundation of choosing the right foods because of my mother, my research changed the way I cook for myself and for my family.  And though it took some time to get my husband on the same page, as proven by a random fast food bag in the outside trashcan every so often, eventually he came on board.

Now my kids are the ones who will bring their own “weird” lunch to school. Hopefully, since the “times are a changing,” they won’t be the only ones. I know there will be times when they too will stray from the nutritious path I am trying to pave for them, but I also know that because of the foundation I have given them, that they’ll come back and be better off for it.