MEN, MONEY & FOOD
I’ve been hungry my whole life. Hungry for more. More was my mantra.
I’m six years old and I’m in my living room. I’m pulling the chairs from the dining table into the living room and arranging them facing together. I take the pink chenille bedspread from my twin bed, drag it down the hall and put it over the top of the chairs and crawl inside the dark safe cocoon. I’m alone. I wish they would get up soon. I want them to play with me. See me. Love me.
The silence is interrupted only by the loud singular ticking of the clock, click, click, click and I crawl out of my cave to go into the kitchen to find a friend. I find it on the Formica counter. I open the soft rectangle package wrapped in shiny white plastic covered with balloons and promising Wonder. Carefully and quietly, I remove two pieces of the soft fresh white bread and return to my sacred fort. My little hands squeeze the bread into two balls, and I bite into the comforting, gummy, textured dough and chew and chew and chew while I wait and wait and wait. As the minutes become an hour, I have retraced my steps to the kitchen many times and repeated the process of squishing the soft bread into hard little balls and shoving it into my little mouth, trying to fill the emptiness inside me.
Weekend mornings were the time my mother, feeling guilty over having had me illegitimately at age 17, would attempt to appease my stepfather for the baggage that she brought into the marriage. Namely me. This is the time I was expected to fend for myself and leave them alone. A latch key kid they called it.
Returning home alone after school and letting myself in with the key hidden under the potted plant at the front door, doing chores until my mother returned from work. Eating and watching TV alone until right before they were expected home, I would tear through the house emptying ash trays into trash cans, cleaning toilets, making beds and throwing dirty clothes into the overflowing hamper.
Once my parents were home it was time to prepare for dinner and the happy family would gather round the table and talk about their day. But those memories weren’t so happy. Food wasn’t a comfort then. I would listen to the bickering and the angry silence that followed it and I did not want to eat. I had lost my appetite. But I was forced to sit there until my plate was clean. And sat I did, alone, after they had left the room leaving me with three quarters of a plate of barely touched stuffed bell peppers and peas that even the dog wouldn’t eat.
Food has always been my friend. I’ve eaten when I’m hungry. I’ve eaten when I’m not hungry. Happy, sad, nervous, and depressed, food was always the answer for me. In my early years the food did not show on my body. I was blessed with a high metabolism and I was a skinny kid. However, with puberty and birth control pills my body and my breasts exploded. Everything I ate stuck on my hips and my stomach. This was a problem I did not know how to handle. But of course, my girlfriends did and they were happy to help. Take this pill and you won’t be hungry at all.
The good news about those pills is that they curbed my appetite, and they made me want to clean my apartment. The bad news is that after all of that housework I could and would, still eat.
My journey took me to many dark places. I tried every commercial diet there was. I tried psychologists. I even tried an eating disorder rehab facility. All of these worked for a minute.
Once I had the food under control and I was in a right-sized body I started getting attention from men. I did not know how to handle this attention. I felt vulnerable and exposed. To mask these feelings, I would spend money. Money that I didn’t have. Money to make myself feel better. Retail therapy. Lunches, spas and trips with my girlfriends. I often was the one treating others. Buying their love and approval. The old adage “Spending money I didn’t have to impress people I didn’t like” applied. The money always came and yet left so quickly.
What I learned is that a person with an addictive personality may present with one addiction, but when it is seemingly under control another one may crop up and take center stage.
Moderation was not in my vocabulary. If one was good, five were better. This applied to men, money & food.
