Dredging Up the Past

Unfortunately, a lot about healing involves actually having to hurt again.  This means talking about things in therapy that I just don't like to talk about.  Once of those things I don't like to talk about is my family and my relationships with just about every single one of them.  I think it would be fair to say that this can be a painful thing for everyone to have to go through at some point so people know what I'm talking about when I say this.

So, family comes up often.  Now, since most of my therapy involves my binge eating, family and my relationship with food comes up often.  You know, every visit.  One of the things I talked about with my therapist was how growing up there never seemed to be a lot of food in the house.  The fridge was never full, nor were the cabinets.  It seemed even worse after my parents were divorced because money was very tight for reasons I wont even go into here because it has nothing to do with this blog, but there was definitely less food in the house after my parents split.

Now, as a child I was always comparing what I had to what everyone else had.  I don't know why or when this started to happen, but I had friends who always had way more food in their kitchens, or toys in their bedrooms or clothes in their closets.  There was even one boy, I recall, in third grade who went out of his way to point out to me that we were poor, his parents bought him way more new clothes for him for the first day of school than mine did and I was a loser.  Thanks for that, Jason, I still remember who you are.  That might have been the start of the cycle, but since I'm not sure, I'm not going to commit to it.

Anyway, as I got older, it always stressed me out there was never anything in the house to eat.  It always felt like this to me.  When I got my first job when I was 15, you can bet most of my paycheck usually went to eating or food of some type, because this is what I believed.  There was never any food in the house.  Imagine going on for most of your life with this thought that there is hardly ever food in your house and that you're really poor and can't afford to keep your fridge stocked.  Stressful for a kid, right?

Imagine thinking this is true up through your adult years and struggling with eating and weight problems because of it.  Yeah, it sucks.  My relationship with food is so unhealthy because of it.  I feel like I can't stop eating at a meal if there is still food on my plate, even if I'm not hungry anymore, because what if there is no more food later?  Doesn't matter that I know there is food later.  It's not like I'm actually thinking this, really, it's just this underlying stress that it always there so when I'm eating, I'm actually stressed out.  Yeah.  When I'm eating.  Normally.

Now, I know this blog is less than two weeks old, but I've gone from rarely thinking about things outside of therapy to keeping a blog on a daily basis and thinking about therapy related things constantly and I came to a startling realization.  We weren't short on food when I was a kid.  Even when my parents split and money was tight, there was always food in the house.  Hell, I never went to school without breakfast unless I chose to skip it, mom always had lunch money for me as long as I didn't forget to ask for it and every damn night that woman had something on the table for me for dinner.  It sure as hell might not have been steak, but it was food and it wasn't terrible and it was usually healthy.  Mom wasn't a health nut, but she wasn't a junk food fan.

She made sure there were fresh vegetables and fruits and most of the meat in the house was usually chicken because that was inexpensive.  So what was I thinking?  Well, the house wasn't stocked with junk food.  Money just wasn't wasted on crap like that, because money was tight.  And maybe we were struggling but we weren't starving and we definitely weren't poor.  There were people doing much worse than us.

What it doesn't fix is years of warped perspective brought on by outside influence.  However, it does give me something to think about as I'm working on changing my behavior going forward.  It also helps me work on playing the blame game with my parents for my current condition.  I'm sure I'll find some other way to do that in the future, but I'm working on one thing at a time.

So, before I go, I would just like to say one final thing.  To the little boy who I never forgot that said hurtful and hateful things to me because you thought you were better than I was simply because you had more money:  I hope you didn't grow up to be that way as an adult.  My heart hurts for you if you turned out to be that type of person.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Did You Get Enough to Eat?

Recently I've been having this conversation with a friend about how my husband always asks me about my dinner and it drives me crazy and makes me extremely uncomfortable.  It's always made me uncomfortable because even before I knew of binge eating, I had the weight problem so I did not like talking about the food or eating the food. 

The questions were innocent enough:

"How's the food?"

"Did you get enough to eat?"

"Would you like some more?"

However, they drove me crazy.  Just stop asking and let me eat my meal in peace because you are irritating the crap out of me and making me even more self conscious than I already am.  It got to the point that I even asked him to stop asking.  He would forget, I would politely remind him not to ask me again.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

Now, I could just be remembering incorrectly but I recall when growing up in New York, it didn't seem to matter who we had dinner with - Mom, Nana and Grandpa, Dad, Uncle and Aunt, you get the idea - that you sat down, mentioned how good everything smelled and ate while having some sort of conversation.  At the end of the meal, everyone then made it a point to mention the meal was great or how they really enjoyed a specific dish.  No one was bothering anyone two seconds after taking a bite and asking how the food was.

Back to my conversation with my friend, who can both commiserate that she dislikes when this happens to her then admits that she does the same thing to her family which drew from me a hearty laugh.  She goes on to point out that it may be a Southern thing.  Both she and my husband are from southern states while I grew up so close to the Canadian border I could toss a rock at it would almost reach. 

Cultural differences?  Would that be a correct term in this instance?  I believe it applies.  It gave me something to think about, and to laugh about because my friend explained when it is she doing the asking, it just comes out.  The question is just part of the ritual of mealtime without really giving it much thought despite how it makes her feel when she's asked.  Though even without her telling me that, I've figured out that he just does this and it isn't malicious nor is it when she asks, or when her family asks.

I did end up asking him if this was a common question in his house, since I could only vaguely recall experiencing it once or twice while I had visited my mother-in-law in the past.  He said it was.

Well, the issue is my own and something I need to work on. There is no reason for me to let food stress me out or the innocent questions that are posed to me about it.  I will go ahead and remind myself the next time my husband asks me how my food is that it's ok to answer him that my food is ok instead of getting upset over it and let it go so I don't get upset or possibly angry about it later.  This will just take a little bit of work.

P.S. Are you sure you got enough to eat?  Because I have plenty more...