Restaurants nurture my inner child
Monday, March 15, 2010 at 10:25PM I found that after particularly tough therapy sessions, I tend to go to restaurants and order the most expensive meal, or the most exquisite, or the one that I have never tried before. I like going alone. I sit and wait for the food to arrive, I accept the "What would you like to drink?" and "How does everything taste?" with a smile and a nod. I nurture my inner child. It's a phase and it will pass, but I stopped beating myself up for spending money on ridiculously expensive dinners or lunches - I need this right now, it is the nurturing that I never got, and the starving child inside of me is still very hungry, and she is not done yet.
I grew up hungry, as far as I can remember - I always wanted something to eat. There was scarcely food in the house - I mostly ate bread and sugar and butter and milk. Or bread with condensed sugared milk on top. Or pasta fried in butter with sugar. Or bread with kefir. Or cereal with milk. Or dried pieces of bread, or butter cookies. Or, in some rare instances, I ate the insides of the soup bone (what do you call these in English?) spread over dark bread, with salt. Chicken was a miracle. I loved chicken and rice. My grandmother on my father's side once told me how strange I was - she brought a whole cooked chicken when she visited me, and I ate it all (!) in the park - I must have been 7 or 8. She tried stopping me, asked me to bring it home. I said, if I bring it home, I won't get any. It will be eaten by other starving women in the household, and the bones will be finished off by the dogs. She would tell me that story with a laugh - she thought my belly would burst. I laughed then too, when she told me (I must have been in my twenties). Now it is not funny to me anymore. I was starving.
Then my father took me into his family. My step-mom said I was very weird. She said I was hiding food under my pillow. I wasn't weird, I was used to being hungry all the time. I grew up in a huge city, and yet I knew how to eat things off the street. Did you know you can eat very young leaves from linden trees? They are delicious. Did you know you can eat most berries? I still eat all kinds of berries here, and passerbys look at me as if I'm about to die. I ate chalk at school, I think my body wanted calcium. I ate dirt - I think I needed minerals. I ate soap - to cleanse my mouth from my father's body, forced inside. After that happened, I stopped eating. I was hungry, but I was sitting and crying over the bowl of soup. I remember watching my tears drop into the droplets of round yellow floating fat - the fat would form a shimmering ring around my tear. It was fun. I guess I loved soup - as an alternative to bread and sugar, and I loved the rare pierogi that my grandma made, with cabbage and boiled eggs. So it was a lot of will to not eat that soup. That way, I could control my body. I could make it disappear - and that is exactly what I was doing. Nobody got my cry for help of course, I was only blamed again as a thin child that doesn't want to eat - how stubborn!
Once my mom, in a fit of rage, dumped the plate of soup on my head. I will never forgot that - it was humiliating, and I cried the whole time as she washed the cabbage out of my hair in the bathroom. I asked her last month, why she did that. She said, the food was so expensive, that they spent the last money on that soup, and I wasn't eating it. She was starving, and I was being coy. I forgave her.
I loved candy, until one day I started hating candy. My father would bring me candy and gum - I started hating it after he started using my body to his own pleasure. I still hate candy, just warming up to chocolate now, somewhat.
I buy enormous amounts of food at the store, I cook more than I can eat, I'm still learning how to cut down on this habit. I always have to battle the fear of being hungry and having nothing to eat. I used to stuff myself, and I used to think that I'm fat and need to lose weight. When I lost 10 pounds over January of this year, during almost 6 panic attacks, I looked like a skeleton. I gained 2 pounds over the past several weeks and I have never been happier in my life to gain weight. My relationship with the food is changing, as is the one with my body. I go to restaurants on purpose now - it is my therapy. I spend the money, and I feel good about myself. I feel happy, nurtured, whole. Today I had Thai salmon curry with sticky rice. Tomorrow I'm having sushi. And I just ate a handful of peaches in light sugar syrup - the rare favorite from my childhood. Yum.
Reader Comments (2)
Ksenia -
I hear a lot of pain around food in your post! Thank you for so courageously sharing it! I had a friend at lunch the other day remark that I didn't "experiment" with new types of food often. I realized that for me, food has a nurturing quality, and a safety about it, that when I am experiencing PTSD symptoms, I want the familiar - not something I've never tried before!
Thank you for sharing - you obviously touched something in my own history.
Dan
Dan,
I'm glad it helped - I was carrying around this pain for so long, I'm glad to be rid of it. It comes out in my posts.
Ksenia