Hunger

I have emotional issues around eating. Almost every diet I went on was at my mother’s urging, from the first one at age 17, when she had me lose 20 pounds so I could be a model. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if that first diet wasn't the beginning of a road to hell. Because I gradually gained that weight back when I decided modeling for my mother's minuscule agency was a dead end and another way for her to control me. And I added a little bit more weight on, as well. So I eventually dieted again. And the same happened. Over and over, a classic yo-yo-dieting routine. Gain it, lose it, regain it and then some.

What if I'd never started? My eating habits then were so much better than the ones I've subsequently formed through the confusing welter of diet programs. But then, America wasn't the land of the obese back then, either. 

Anyway. Not dieting became a form of rebellion against my mother. Stupid and self-damaging, maybe, but true. I want to eat whatever I want to eat! Screw you!

It took therapy for me to understand that Eating (with a capital E) wasn't just about rebellion and diets. It was about equating Food with Love and compensating for Loss; and it came from my earliest years…

Being a Navy family, we traveled a lot, of course. Every two or three years, we’d all pick up sticks and move to my dad’s—or stepdad’s—new posting. My three brothers and I would be parceled into the car along with the family dog and spend hours in relative inactivity, waiting to be let out for food or the restroom.

Moving so often meant that I got good at leaving things behind, whether it was school, home, friends, pets, cherished possessions, outgrown clothes, whatever. Sometimes Mother, who wasn’t sentimental about childhood possessions and had none from her own, would give away books or toys that I really cared about—without asking. She believed in traveling light. I don’t have my high school yearbook or my Beatles paraphernalia or the boxes of things I wrote as a teenager because somewhere, sometime, those mementos were perceived as superfluous by my mother and tossed out just before a move.

I mention in another blog how—years later—my mom's moving van caught fire. (Bad brakes.) That's when the slides of my childhood went up in flames. Pictures of me in my Easter dress, the trip to the Chicago zoo when I was two, the matching bathing suits mom and I wore at the beach, the ranch my grandfather ran as foreman…all gone. Fragile paper and celluloid. I have a half dozen photos of me at various ages in my baby book, which was with me at the time. That’s all.

So back to Eating. It turns out that people often have trouble losing weight when they have lost a lot of other things in their lives. This revelation smacked me between the eyes. I’ve lost more than most people own; some through process, like constantly moving and sloughing off relationships; some through my own choice, such as my two divorces or living in another state from my family, or keeping potential friendships at bay; and some through death.

My inner child is still compensating for those losses by eating whatever feels good at the moment. Not only that, she's asserting her control over her own life.

Then there's the Food=Love equation, something that—ironically—originated with my mother. Food was the social interaction I enjoyed most Mom. She was ahead of her time, raising a family and running a business when most women were waving their husbands off to work in an apron and pearls. She didn’t have to work, she just had too much energy and drive to sit at home, and domesticity was never her thing. Decorators, painters, seamstresses, housekeepers and nannies—these were the troops she was made to lead. Once a home was painted, furnished, unpacked and planted, she was not interested in being constrained inside its shell. The military life gave her outlets as an officer’s wife, and she often ran events for the O Club. Or she might get a job as a local radio celebrity, gossiping about social events. Or run a newsletter. Or start a charm school. She was the object of my childhood admiration: independent, glamorous, in the public eye. But she was also elusive and absent. Whether Dad was home or at sea, she had her own schedule. As children, we never knew when she would be home. The hours between the end of school and her appearance seemed interminable. We pestered the current housekeeper with questions about her schedule and return. Sometimes the housekeeper would cook our dinner, frying pork chops and onions in a black iron skillet, served at the kitchen table with biscuits and applesauce. Other times Mom would be home in time for dinner. The housekeeper would leave and we’d have to wait for Mother to have her cocktail before cooking would begin.

Having lunch out with my mother meant that I received a concentrated amount of her time, focused on me and her and whatever delicious dishes were being enjoyed. Sometimes she picked me up at school for a lunch out—then let me play hooky for the rest of the day! I really didn’t enjoy school that much once I was past third grade, so this was a tremendous treat. Having lunch out, school or no, was one of the ways Mom and I enjoyed life. Salads piled high with crabmeat, eaten looking out on the ocean (Atlantic or Pacific). Sautéed abalone. She crab soup. Sourdough bread with butter. Chopped chicken liver. Hot pastrami on pumpernickel. Chinese chicken salad. Shrimp tempura. Ice cream. Cheesecake. Iced tea and, when I was older, wine. Alone or with my mother's friends, these lunches were explorations, social occasions, hedonistic pleasures. (My brothers were rarely included in these girl outings.)

But if lunch was Pleasure, dinner was Deprivation, and it explains some of my frantic need to avoid hunger. As toddlers, we were fed early and gotten out of the way so our parents could have their nightly pre-dinner cocktails and then eat "adult food" later in the evening. As children/adolescents, this pattern continued—only without the early feeding. Mom made us wait until she'd had her cocktail(s) and got around to cooking.

Parties were the worst, and ours was a party house. Years of peering through railings or around door jambs, watching people laugh and drink and waiting for our food. The fug of alcohol and cigarettes. At some point my mother would throw open doors and windows to let out the smoke—no matter the time of year—and to those smells would be added currents of cold air. From outside would come the odor of heating charcoal and later the smell of sizzling steaks. Or, if it was Mexican food, the pervasive indoor smell of hot fat and tortillas and chiles.

Mother would laugh and say that the reason people thought she was such a good cook was because by the time they ate, they were so hungry anything would taste good! She also liked to say we ate “continental”—that is, like Europeans, late and leisurely. We retorted that we ate at the same time as the Continent, which was six hours ahead of us. Either way, it was sometimes nine or nine-thirty before we ate during those social gatherings. In the morning, booze bottles and beer cans would litter the house. Garlicky french bread would be hardening inside a napkin-lined basket. Salad would lie limp and wet in the fridge. And sometimes there would be slabs of rare grilled steak wrapped in foil. 

On occasion, someone would be snoring on the living room couch or under a table.

It’s no wonder I find both solace and independence in setting my own eating schedule, eating at the first sign of hunger, refusing to relive those times.

Despite my mother being an excellent cook (all joking aside), food was not a driver for her. She didn’t equate it with love. Often, when she was cooking for a party, she ended up not eating. “I’ve been smelling it all afternoon, I can’t stand to eat it,” she'd say. No surprise that, after a few Scotches or martinis, she was flirting and twirling her way through a room full of bachelor aviators or amorous commanders with tight-lipped wives. Mother didn’t think much of officers’ wives—“all they talk about is kids and recipes and their boring little lives”—and it’s no wonder they returned the opinion after watching their menfolk drool over the hot redhead with the deep cleavage. During one party, I saw my mother dance on top of the cocktail table.

My father must have drunk his share, too, he was a typical navy guy. But I never saw him drunk. He was quiet and deliberate, so maybe it just didn’t show up on him. Or maybe he was content to stay in the shadows and watch mom scintillate.

My brothers were stunned when I brought up my whole Food theory. It brought back an unexpected flood of their own memories, their own deprivations. We should have been nurtured. We should have been fed. As children, we should have been considered first. It was another sign of mom’s careless love.

My belief is that she didn’t really know how to love. I think that she was driven by her own deprivations, her own lack of being nurtured, and it caused her to try and fill up those holes by always putting herself first and central in any situation. She needed love and attention so desperately.

I wish I knew more about my mother’s real childhood and the dynamics in her family. She was a middle child and the only girl. My grandparents always seemed like nice people to me, but she fought bitterly with my grandmother. Clearly, something was amiss. I’ll never know, because mom continually rewrote her personal history and hung on to small slights with frightening tenacity. She was terrified of looking truly, clearly, at her life and her choices. She preferred the constructed mythology. It still mystifies me that she spent her life clarifying other people’s problems for them.

Mom did make beautiful homes for us. She put quality clothes on our backs. If she was around, she'd listen to our teenage problems (even sex) with a liberality that was rare in those times. If we needed money, she'd rob a bank to get it for us. And if we had to wait for our food, at least it was delicious. But she wanted too much, too desperately, to give without a lot of strings attached. So she remembered all those "gifts" and flogged us with them whenever we disagreed with her. She never considered them her maternal duty, something a mother does without thought of repayment.

It was truly a gift when she taught me to cook. My first dinner was roast chicken, and once I knew how to make that, food was on the table by seven o'clock. I learned how to cook lots of things through watching her and my own art. All my brothers can cook well.

Dinner continued to be unimportant to my mother for the rest of her life. She was a lunch gal, happy to fill up in the middle of the day then snack on ice cream and Scotch for dinner. Unless we went out for dinner, which happened more frequently when I worked and couldn't get away for lunch. Mom loved eating out. But if I came home from work and cooked dinner, she was as likely to turn it down or pick at it as eat it. It frustrated the hell out of me, and I wonder if it's because Food was Nurturing to me, and Mom wasn't letting me nurture her with it. I bet it dredged up old issues without my being aware of it and that's why I had such a strong emotional reaction. And it's like she knew it and would use it as a tool to irritate me, too—maybe a pattern she carried over from her own stormy childhood. So unhealthy! So complicated!

When I contemplate a diet, I break out in cold sweat. The fear. The deprivation. The hunger. Why go down that road when, ultimately, it will fail?

Food and pleasure entwine themselves from the first time we suck at the breast or bottle. Watching a baby feed, eyes closed in bliss, cries of hunger and need banished, little hand clasping and unclasping in instinctive sympathy...that's fulfillment. Strong stuff.

I wish I could say that these revelations have changed my relationship with food. That I understand and don't care about it anymore. But it hasn't. I continue to use food to compensate for loneliness, celibacy, sorrow, fear, as well as friendship, celebration, love. I still feel a burn of rebellion when I shove a cranberry-orange muffin in my face. Only...rebellion against who? Myself? Life? The ghost of my mother?

I understand this is my problem. I'm an adult, and whatever part my mother played in it is past. I'm not writing this to excuse myself and blame her. I'm just reflecting on my own roots.