The prompt this time was about Sea Turtles. I read the group a page of information about these creatures. A few excerpts are:
They spend their entire lives at sea, except when adult females come ashore to lay eggs several times per season every 2 to 5 years.
After laying her egg, she returns to the sea, leaving her eggs to develop on their own. The hatchlings do not have sex chromosomes, so their gender is determined by the temperature within the nest.
Experts say only one out of a thousand will survive to adulthood under natural conditions.
What I wrote is below
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We were all settled in at Rockaway by the Bay, napkins on our laps and sourdough bread piping hot, water glasses full, when Sarah cleared her throat and announced that she had “something very important to say.” I felt a familiar tightness in my chest anticipating what this might be about. It had been a tough year with the kids. Since she had turned fourteen, Sarah was always upset with me about something; my middle child, Jamie, had become obsessed with getting nothing less than straight A’s, and recently my youngest, Bobby, had come out to us as trans, at age seven.
Something to announce? I prayed this wasn’t about her support for the Tea Party again. “I can see where they’re coming from,” she had argued with me one afternoon, right there in the kitchen. Or maybe she was going to defend Putin’s behavior in Chechnya (that pig!). Here we were on a Sunday evening in Pacifica, the sun was setting on the water turning everything steel and rose, and she suddenly had to make an announcement?
“Okay, Sarah,” Robert said, just like the therapist had taught us, “What is it you would like to say?” She stood up, flicked her strawberry blonde mane over each shoulder and said, “I am now a vegetarian, and I think you all should be as well. Every bite of flesh that you put in your mouth is contributing to environmental disaster and the suffering of innocent creatures.”
Jamie was already wearing the paper lobster bib the waiter had given us, and I was trying to decide between a New York strip or a Crab Louie. ”
“Can we eat seafood?” Jamie asked.
“No, Jamie!” Sarah hollered. “If it has eyes, don’t eat it! Meat is murder!”
“All right, Sarah,” I said. “We hear you loud and clear.”
“But I want to talk about it!” she said. “We need to dialogue as a family about this.”
“Okay. I know. But will you please sit down?”
The waiter came over to tell us about the King Crab special: a grilled sandwich with a side of coleslaw and steak fries. Bobby started to cry. “We’ll just need a few more minutes,” Robert told the waiter.
“I won’t sit here and watch you all eat dead animals!” Sarah said, gripping the edge of the table dramatically.
“What about hormone-free meat?” Bobby asked, tearfully. Since she began her transition, she was obsessed with the concept of hormones.
“Murder is murder,” Sarah said, sternly. She crossed her arms and looked straight at me. I could never look at her without thinking about how different we were physically: me with my dark features and she all peaches and cream. Those blue eyes like the sky in Iceland. I remember seeing her the first time in the hospital and thinking, Where did this baby come from? Defiant she was, and ice queen beautiful. Smart and strong, but impulsive too.
“I suppose you’re having a steak, Mother, just to spite me.” I never liked it when she called me by my first name, but when she called me “Mother,” I felt like Faye Dunaway in Mommy Dearest.
“I think I might just have dessert,” I said, surprising myself. “Their coconut cream pie is out of this world.”
The Catalyst 