When she was bad… she ate

My compulsion to eat started when I was very young. While I have no idea when it actually started, it may have been as early as when I was a baby.

Pregnant with me when she finally left my abusive father, my mother was not thrilled to go back home with 1.5 kids and live in a closet-sized room. She was also brilliant at avoiding reality, so when she started working, she never told her colleagues that she had been married and had kids. Of course, it was the fifties, so I’ll never know how much influence the culture had on her decision to do that.

Several decades later, my grandmother told me that my mother had never wanted me. It wasn’t a cruel thing to say - I’d already figured it out. Where she helped the most was giving me some of the background. Once when Mom was dating my stepdad, he came to pick her up from work with my brother and me in the car.

“Kind” colleagues took her aside and told her to be careful, since he must be married because they had seen him with kids in the car. When my mother told me the same story, she actually thought it was funny. Laughing at the fact that she pretended I didn’t exist.

Anyway, sometime in there I learned to eat to comfort myself when I felt like I was bad or unwanted or had done something not perfectly. The situation worsened in later years, because I developed a tendency to think I’d never completed any task well, and consequently wanted to eat pretty much every time I made a transition from one activity to the next. That can really pack on the pounds.

I don’t have any easy solutions for this, but I do think the urge will lessen when I have a lot more successful experiences at changing activities without wanting to eat over the imperfections. That’s what I’m working on now - finishing a task, saying “good enough,” meaning it, and talking myself through any urge to eat.