mother hunger
CW: eating disorder, childhood trauma
There’s this photo of me as a toddler, chubby fingers gripping the sides of my white plastic highchair, chunks of bananas smooshed in my duckling hair, my 90s-print bib. A hand, disembodied, looms close with a spoonful of banana mush, my baby face forever frozen in time with a dour expression.
“You always hated bananas,” my mother told me once when I cracked open the old family photo album during a Christmas party. “Even when you were little. I’d spoon them in your mouth and you’d screw up your face, like this…” here she took a sip of wine, made a convincing mimic of me in the photo, and then- “But in the end, you ate what I gave you.”
Never mind the fact that a recent overseas trip and a meal lost in translation revealed that I was, in fact, allergic to bananas- but a simple retelling of my anaphylactic symptoms wasn’t enough proof for my mother. What did it matter, if I had eaten what she gave me anyways?
I was always a hungry kid, even if it was for the wrong things.
In the golden age of my childhood, the few precious years it was just my mother and me, we feasted. Pizzas from the diner down the street that would swallow napkins whole with its grease layer; a venti Starbucks cookie Frappuccino split two ways; late night mac and cheese made over the stovetop of our tiny one-bedroom apartment.
When we both grew up a bit, and my mother remarried, our habits shifted. Now there were three people at the table, and side salads to consider. Old cookbooks were dusted off to line our new kitchen shelf. My mother taught me how to fold fabric napkins into swans, the way they looked on her honeymoon cruise ship; she taught me how to salt boiling water, how to thinly slice veggies, how to know when a chicken was cooked.
At her new husband’s church, my mother joined leadership groups, attended staff meetings, women’s bible study. She left her role as kickboxing instructor at our local gym to instead host a Christian-based Zumba class in the church basement. She started early-morning jogging.
I wasn’t worried, at first. I was happy to welcome change, because with it came her obvious, radiant joy. But as the new church and new husband required more and more devotion, she started to lose parts of herself- or at least, the parts I had always known.
My mother tried fasting- at first, citing scripture, then, citing an article with the supposed health benefits. My mother bought new books, with titles like “Surprising Ways You Gain Weight” and “You Won’t Die from a Diet”. She packaged our old cookbooks for the attic, and kept spiral-bound folders for her new low-cal, sugar-free, diet-friendly-themed recipe cards. My mother did yoga in the morning, Jillian Michaels’ 90-minute shred tape in the afternoon, 4-mile dog walks at night.
Sometimes I’d take my homework to the couch closest to her workout mat, the sound of her sharp exhales punctuating the air. “You know Jillian Michaels is a lesbian, right, mom?” She switched to Billy Blanks Cardio and never looked back.
My mother and her husband had a life-changing experience on some new elimination diet, and in the efforts of curing my high school-activated depression, they decided I should also see the wonders of a rigorous month-long “clean food” binge.
Girl-who-ate-what-she-was-given that I was, I stuck to it. Even at the fair, when my friends were eating corndogs and potato wedges and I had to snack on an apple. Even though most nights I was so hungry that I cried myself to sleep, my arms wrapped around the hollow pit of my stomach.
“Don’t you just feel… lighter? Better?” my mother asked me at the end of the 30 days of hell, appraising herself in the bathroom mirror. “Don’t you feel like your clothes fit better?”
(My future therapist would ask where I got the idea that skinny people were happier, and I would reply that I didn’t know, because I had no idea what else to think.)
I became hungrier. As my mother had more children, pledged more of her time and energy to her church and husband, I searched elsewhere. I spent weekends away with friends where we sat on the kitchen counter eating frozen Oreos, M&M’s, mini Snickers by the handful. I begged my father for things my mother would never keep in her house, and in his efforts to be the Cool Divorced Dad he bought me Nutella, candy straws, peanut butter pretzels. He made fatty bacon burritos on Saturdays, cinnamon rolls and warm bread pudding on Sundays. He made sure I never went to bed hungry.
My mother read that my brother’s staph infections could be cured with a gluten-free diet, that dairy was the root of my sister’s chronic anxiety. I tossed Pop-Tarts defiantly into her shopping basket until she started gripping my arm hard enough to hurt. Our fights started quiet but ended loud, flushed, and with the slamming of doors- I threatened to live with my father for my senior year. She yelled that maybe I should, if that’s the way I felt.
But I stayed in her house until I graduated, always hungry for the wrong things.
Once I moved out for good, I broke apart into a million pieces and got a solid year of therapy under my belt, which felt like enough room to start dining with my mother again. We settled into a tentative adult friendship, and I saw softer parts of her that reminded me of our golden age. We split a jug of margaritas and giggled like drunk schoolgirls in front of her less-than-amused husband; she took us out for coffee and ate a whole cookie by herself.
I felt softer towards her, hungry for her love, her trust. On the way home from my 21st birthday celebration (which included a two-hour rundown of my mother and grandmother’s new diet, loudly discussed over the restaurant music), I dove in headfirst.
“So, you know how I’m seeing a new eating disorder specialist, right?”
I remember hearing her hands tighten on the steering wheel. I swam on.
“I’m just wondering if you knew. Like, I seriously wrote “Don’t eat” on the back of my hands in Sharpie, mom. How could you not have noticed I was doing that bad?”
I was so hungry for a loud answer that I almost didn’t catch her whisper the confession- “I didn’t know what to do.”
On Christmas Eve that year, my mother cooked up a storm. I greeted her over the stove, a sweaty cheek kiss, her arms stirring two different pots. “Chop up the beans, honey?”
I remember thinking she didn’t look well, which was upsetting, because I needed her to be ready for the I-Don’t-Think-I-Believe-In-Church-Anymore news I planned on breaking later. Her hand was clammy when I held it for prayer, and she shook as she spooned prosciutto-wrapped dates on her own plate. “Sorry. I’m okay. I just haven’t eaten anything today, that’s all.”
I tried to drink it all in, the foggy windows, the Christmas music, the rosy glow of a family dinner. The church’s Christmas Eve service was special, precious, the pinnacle of our year- possibly my last one. My mother ate everything on her plate, had another helping, then disappeared into the bathroom. Ten minutes passed, twenty. Her husband went to check on her, then reported back, cloth napkin across his khaki pants- “Your mom’s not feeling too well. She’s gonna miss tonight’s service.”
I pushed the asparagus around on my plate. I thought about the story my mother told me- her and cousin May sitting cross-legged in their college dorm, popping chocolate into their mouths and then slapping each other across the face. Shock therapy.
I thought of Goldfish Soup- a “meal” served by my mother’s husband to the sibling that was deemed bad enough to warrant goldfish crackers in water while the rest of the table ate real food.
I thought of the time I was 14 and crushing on a youth group boy, and my mother told me “Just remember, honey, boys are always attracted to your body first. You might need to lose weight in the future.”
I got up from the table, didn’t say goodbye, got in my car, and drove straight home. I never set foot in church again.
My ED specialist told me that my mother couldn’t help me because she couldn’t help herself. My mother’s problem was that she was raised by her mother. And so on. My ED specialist also taught me that I hungered for things beyond food, and held my hand down a long, shitty road of still-patchy recovery.
There’s this memory I have of my mother, the last time I saw a bit of the old days in her. We walked down a fresh-rain sidewalk, sharing a bag of M&M’s, and played a game to see who could hold one chocolate in their mouth the longest without it melting.
She played every round with her eyes closed, head tilted to heaven, face glowing in the sun: like she was drinking in the last bit of golden sweetness that she would feel for a long time.
Postscript: if you are struggling with ED/disordered eating behaviors and don’t know where to start, talk to your therapist/trusted person about it and browse https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/help-support/contact-helpline for more options.
Stay safe, take care of yourself. You deserve some gentleness.