Dietary Distinctions

In therapy this week I talked about food. There are lots bits obviously but I started with a memory about rotten food and food denial and secret eatting. When I was like 4 or maybe 5 – before the porch I lived in existed because this took place on the stoop it replaced – Mother tried making yogurt. She bought some sort of heated petri dish or whatever cheapo kitchen appliance was supposed to facilitate this process.

She loaded it up with dairy, but didn’t actually follow the instructions – as with many other foods she was happy to just skip anything we didn’t have, and to do things to “save worthless calories” like using skim milk and replacing butter with (at the time new and trendy) transfats and halving the amount if anything she considered too fatty or sugary or whatever. But she mixed it all up and left it chooching on the stoop, expecting it to become low-fat, uncultured, unflavored skim “yogurt” I guess.

The required time elapsed and she could tell just by shaking the thing that it hadn’t set up into anything like yogurt. At first this was only a minor concern, and she just left it to keep cooking. But by the time we got up to like double what the process suggested she was getting pretty worried about it. She didn’t want to open the container because she was convinced that lifting the lid would irrevocably contaminate the (what had started as) food. She hadn’t sterilized the container or food before starting (even though the process required it) but she had decided the opening it would ruin it. Eventually she decided that she could open one of the 4 seperate cooking containers to see how it was going.

It was of course going poorly. She hadn’t created anything that could become yogurt, but she had kept a pint of dairy products on a warming plate for like 2 days, and it was bad even by the standards of a 4-year-old who was hungry enough to eat grass. So bad in fact that she decided she couldn’t try it. That was my job. Eat this “yogurt” for her to prove it was food, so maybe she could convince herself to choke it down later. Even at the time I knew she would never eat it – this whole yogurt situation was her lying to herself about wanting to do some sort of fad diet – but she imagined that if I went first she could sort of work herself into it. Because in narc land making your toddler do soemthing you’re afraid of counts as practicing yourself.

I obviously refused to participate in this death soup experience. Which was a big deal for a 4-year-old under the control of a narc – asserting my individuality was a sure way to get punished, and was represented to me as immoral. But my body was pretty sure this wasn’t food, and I wasn’t hungry enough to try it right then. I complained that it smelled like death and I was afraid it would hurt me, like other rotten foods had hurt me in the past. She lied to me about how it couldn’t be bad because she followed the instructions. I pointed out that she hadn’t followed the instructions either in preparing the ingredients or in cooking and she lied to me about how I didn’t understand process.

I kept up my refusals until she eventually got bored or distracted or frustrated or anxious and she left to do something else. But I was to sit there on the stoop until I was prepared to eat that “yogurt”. She admitted it wasn’t done yet but told me she couldn’t afford to waste that whole pint that had been opened and I had to eat it because I liked yogurt. It was just running yogurt, she said. Once it cooled off it wouldn’t smell so bad. And so I sat there, holding a spoon, trying to work up the courage to eat this stuff.

I didn’t the first day. I skipped eatting and got sent to bed and after she was up the next day was stationed on the stoop again. She checked the other 3 containers, which were still sealed and heating. They were still runny and clearly not yogurt. And the 4th was still there, waiting for me. I continued to refuse, but on that second day, after she left, I finally gave into my hunger and ate some. I finally suppressed my disgust and belief in my own senses and instricnts and shoveled it into my face. I was ashamed to be so hungry. And ashamed to eat something I knew was bad. And ashamed to want something different. And ashamed for making Mother so upset. And ashamed to not be able to control my body or my mind to do what a real boy, a good boy, would willing do.

Obviously I threw it up not a long time later. Out behind the garage, in a tiny space between the building and the fence where she didn’t fit. A place I often went to be sick or silently cry or otherwise hide in my shame. So I could deal with all the disgusting things my body needed without her seeing me. Without being punished for it. She used to complain about cats using that space, and how gross they made it. I couldn’t always keep it from smelling. But she never went back there. Never even sprayed it with a hose from around the corner. So it was secret and safe, even if not totally invisible.

I didn’t know how I was going to handle the rest of those containers. Even before I threw up I was worried about how I was going to handle her seeing the empty container. I had decided to say that I wasted it and take the punishment for that. She couldn’t know that I ate it. Then I’d have to eat the rest when she finally decided she didn’t want them. And that could be days from now.

I didn’t have to though. Life… eh… found a way. The remaining containers, after days of heat-accelerated rotting, eventually started to explode. The 2nd or 3rd one flipped over the heating plate and spilled them all into a splattered puddle on the stoop and the back of the house. This too made her angry, and was my fault for being too slow. If I had just eaten it when she told me to this never would have happened. But once she was less panicked she let me use the house to clean it up ¹On many days I was allowed to use the hose for drinking water but because I was being punished about the yogurt this was not one of those days. It was a huge relief to get access to water after I had vomitted earlier that day., and she felt sufficiently bad about failing at the process that she never thought about the container I had been assigned to eat. She declared the appliance defective – retroactively absolving herself (and by narc extension, me) of any responsibility – and never tried to use it ²Eventually she traded it to someone in exchange for child care. They seemed to be able to use it without a problem. Luckily it was not worth enough days of child care for me to have to see the results. again.

So secret, shameful eating. It’s a thing I still do today. There are other bits of course, things that happened much more often. All the times I had to choose between feeding myself and taking care of the Kids, and when I failed that choice and stashed food for me to have later in secret even though I knew they needed more. Or the times I stared at food in the fridge and imagined how, though it wasn’t something I was allowed today, I could maybe eat it in a couple of days when it stated to mold. Because planning to have food in the future was the same as not being hungry. Or all the food tracking and diets I had to submit to, regardless of my weight, so that Mother could shame me about it to try to improve her mood and her own feelings about dieting.

And that’s why I’d like to stop. Stop eatting in secret. Stop being ashamed to be seen with food, or with too much food, or with the wrong food. Stop eatting the leftovers from a meal after everyone else gets their plate. Stop shoving a bit of food into my mouth while I’m standing in the kitchen, before picking up a second piece that is allowed to be observed. Stop believing that my hunger hurt people, that I can’t tell when food is bad, that I shouldn’t be sick just because I ate bad food, that I’m not allowed to like or not like foods, that other people knowing what I ate – even that I ate – will bring us both shame and harm. I don’t know how to do it, but it would make my life better if I could figure out how.

I got a message today in group chat. That all by itself was real good. And it came with colors that I feel connected to, which was even better. It was a good way to start the day after I spent last night bounding between feeling sick and starving, while my body dealt with my repression. You help more than you know.

I complained at my therapist that their closing prompts from LI were frustrating. LI is about the duality of being 4 and being 40, and connecting those pieces. It ends with leaving your past self, and trying to imagine they aren’t being abandoned to suffer line you actually were. And I can imagine current me leaving past me, without past me being too upset. Everyone always leaves and it was nice to just have a minute away from my life.

But past me doesn’t really imagine that anyone could help, even if they noticed. Eventually I got resentful about people not helping or leaving, but bit until I was older. So he is clam, like I was always calm. He doesn’t imagine that he can be comforted, not by himself or anyone else. Past me knows that for things to be okay I just have to learn to tolerate whatever is happening, and to not be upset by it, even if it’s keeping me from what I think I need. And current me knows that too – that comfort is a lie for the weak and giving up desire is the only path to calm. I still don’t imagine that I can be comforted, only that I can be better at ignoring the pain.

This is all one sad story. I’m not sure how to tell any that aren’t, or at least that’s how I feel when I’m here. But the goal of these is to share where I am, so I guess I should be okay with that. Or maybe that’s me enduring instead of pointing at what I want.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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