The Broccoli Evangelist

On broccoli, delight, and grown-up screen time.

Hey friend,

“I put broccoli in a vase on the table like flowers to increase their exposure to it.”

“I tell my kids green food helps you fight off sickness.” 

Sometimes, you stumble into a conversation that a previous version of yourself would not understand. This was one my five year old self would not understand. I hated broccoli. Not only as a child but even as an adult. Strictures that broccoli would [insert benefit here] simply bounced off me, because “I feel fine,” and the vegetable withered on my plate. 

Photo by Hans Ripa on Unsplash.

On almost any weekday afternoon, you’ll find me standing in the kitchen, phone in one hand, absentmindedly eating a slice of cheese or an apple with my other hand. My phone is attached to the extra long charger, so I lurk in the kitchen. 

The posture is the same, but the tasks are always different. Paying bills; food shopping in the Woolies app; checking the Connect app for messages from the teacher; responding to work emails; texting Playgroup leaders in WhatsApp; writing a poem; reading a recipe in the Paprika app; or just texting friends back. Sometimes, it is less productive than that: casting my anxieties upon Google, who does not care for me, elbow-deep in the fourth page of search results.

I thought getting off social media five years ago would cut my screen time, but I was wrong. 

Sometimes I put on a load of washing, or rinse plates off and put them in the dishwasher. But it feels a little bit like everything-all-the-time, work-church-home-creativity all squished together in a teeming mass of overwhelm in my brain. 

Then there are my boys who orbit around me, little satellites to my sun, taking apples and oranges and bananas from the fridge, sometimes playing with boxes or Lego on the floor, or retreating outside to climb the tree fort or dig in the sandpit. Sometimes, they say, “Mum, come look,” or “Mum, come outside.” After a cursory glance, I say, “I’ll be back in a minute,” and retreat back inside to my position in the kitchen. 

*** 

I remember the cold tiles in the long hallway of the house we lived in from five years old to nine years old. There was a black-rimmed mirror on the wall, and underneath was a wrought iron hallway table with a glass top. Perched beneath the table was an ivory topped stool. This is where my Mum made phone calls.

I remember how excited she was when she no longer had to go to the Post Office to pay bills and could do it over the phone. She spent a lot of time on the phone to her best friend in the mornings. My enduring memory of the school run is her yelling every morning that she lost track of the time and burned her toast again because she was on the phone. She would stand at the sink, immaculately dressed, heels on and hair coiffed, while scraping burned bits off her toast with a butter knife into the sink. 

In most of my childhood memories, I follow my Mum around the house while she works. I ask questions while she hangs out the washing and tell her about school dramas while she cleans the bathroom. She asks me to come help her with the food shopping, because she hates making decisions about what to eat week in and week out. I chatter while she deliberates what cereal to buy at Woolies. 

Letters from school were in the red brick mailbox out the front of the house. She would open the mail while walking down the long hallway and deposit it in a little tray. Recipes were in cookbooks on the bookshelf. We did not get a computer with the internet until I was in high school, about the same time that I graced the world with the sexy_butterfly_7@hotmail.com email address. There was no way for either of my parents to access work emails unless they were at work. 

I always knew what job my Mum was doing, because I could see her doing it. 

***

One day, standing in the kitchen, I take a deep breath and tap send on a text to my Playgroup friends to see how on earth any of them get out of the house in the morning on time and with no yelling or nagging. I have one child in school and I am in awe of these women who have three and four children. Empathy and advice rolls in like a flood. 

“Start earlier, if we aren’t eating breakfast by 7.00am the whole morning is gone.”

“There’s no rule that says he has to dress himself, it’s better to do it with a happy heart the first time, than after prompting 20 times and doing it exasperated.” 

“Pack lunches the night before.” 

With my friends’ advice under my arm, I am resolved. I put my phone down, start our morning routine half an hour earlier, dress Henry with a happy heart the first time, and throw in a sticker chart for good measure. I am stunned at the quick success of this simple experiment. I have time to unpack the dishwasher, do a load of laundry, and eat a cooked breakfast with the family. We go out cheerfully to our respective mornings. 

Emboldened by this experiment, I look around at my days and start to think, what else is happening at the wrong time? 

I delete the Gmail app off my phone and start to check my emails on my laptop after lunch at 1pm. This is also when I send all the texts and check all the apps. Once we get in from the school run, I start to notice that I don’t have anything I need to be doing urgently in that afternoon block. The dishwasher is stacked, a load of laundry has been done, and I don’t need to start dinner until 5pm. 

One afternoon, I sit down and pour rice into roasting trays with some plastic dinosaurs. George upends the plastic tub filled with blue food dye water into the tray and turns the rice and his hands blue. Henry brings in leaves from the backyard and props them carefully up around his plastic tub of water, pretends to make the dinosaurs drink, and I watch. Another afternoon, I set up a tent in the backyard that my friend passed on. I bring out the teddies for a picnic and give the boys snack plates (bowls of popcorn and apple slices). We take two dollar coins to a little arcade where they play air hockey and race car driver games on a rainy afternoon. Another day we sit and draw. None of this is hard, or expensive, and it only takes an hour from 3.30pm - 4.30pm each day. 

One afternoon, Henry cuddles up to me in the tiny tent, while I lift my cup of tea to avoid spilling it on him, and he confesses to my legs, 

“My friend at school said that Jesus died and didn’t come back again. He said that Jesus is still dead.”

We get to have a conversation about the resurrection that I do not think we would have had if I had been tapping at my phone in the kitchen. 

*** 

I came across a recipe in An Everlasting Meal in my twenties that suggested blanching broccoli in boiling salty water, and then dressing it with olive oil and white wine vinegar. It’s delicate and punchy. The love is immediate. I repent of my broccoli smack-talk. I just didn’t know the right way to do it. I became a broccoli evangelist, telling everyone I know about the most amazing way to eat broccoli. My husband and I plant it in our veggie gardens and eat it as a side all through winter. As it turns out, even my children love broccoli. 

I’ve never told my children to eat broccoli because it is good for them. They see it all the time, growing from seeds that Zac plants, the leaves they are not allowed to pull, and the beds they are not allowed to dig in. They help us wash the broccoli at night-time and see it on the table. I tell them, “This is delicious,” and snag the last piece if they don’t get to it first. 

My children see me relishing what is good, and they want in. 

*** 

I realise that I will never return to the good old days before smartphones. Plus, there is so much that I love about my phone. I love texting. I love being able to jot thoughts into Google docs, or being in a writing group with women scattered across the US, the flexibility of being able to check work emails at home, or getting my groceries delivered. 

But I wonder, how much of my life is taken up with doing good things in the wrong way? 

It’s not bad for my children to see me working. But they can’t see what I’m doing on my phone - if I’m working or wasting time. And, mostly what I was doing from 3.30pm - 4.30pm was not urgent. It can wait. 

I want my kids to see me prioritising connection. But I’m learning that I can’t change my screen time habits by berating myself that I should. 

The only way I have ever made any real change is by pursuing what is good.