How I overcame my fear of tomatoes

I'm a tomato and I rock. 

Bunch in tight people, this is a personal one.

 I loved tomatoes. Wait. I used to love tomatoes. Not a day would go by when I didn’t munch on the red blast of sunshine.

Fast forward to when my mum was in Critical Care, barely hanging on. She’d gone from feeling mildly unwell to hooked up to tubes in a matter of days. I asked the lovely doctor what could have happened.

“Could be something like a tomato pip that got stuck in her bowel.”

One tiny, tiny tomato seed could do that?

Whoa.

The strawberry vacherin I will never make

Tomatoes and I parted ways. Over the years I missed them, but, the old ‘what if…” hung in my brain. I couldn’t take the risk. I had children. I hadn’t cooked even one of the five thousand recipes I’d painstakingly cut out.  I had so much still to do.

Then one day, not long ago, I ate a cherry tomato. It was heaven. It was delicious. I’d been torturing myself and missing out because of ‘what if’.

What if has turned into ‘why worry about stuff that I have no control over’.

I could be felled by a tomato. I am more likely to get run over by a bus (I always look the wrong way – I blame my Kiwi roots.) The likelihood is the stress my children induce will bring me closer to hanging with my mum.

So, for me, no worrying about ‘what if’ instead I’m going to concentrate on ‘no more worrying about what I can’t control and have a blast while I’m here’.

Me and mum hanging with Skippy.