My delight at the ultrasound tech’s declaration, “It’s a girl,” was immediately followed by a heaviness and fear I associated with that specific gender reveal: the food thing. I did not feel this panic a year ago when the sex of my son was announced.
Food things were girl things.
At the age of thirty, I knew intellectually that restricting gave way to binging. I knew how I was supposed to eat, but in my non-pregnant state, the pull toward enviable thinness still won out over three meals and two healthy snacks a day. I weighed myself most days and lived on the edge of caloric restriction. I doubted whether I could model responsible eating and body-positive parenting for a post-millennial daughter.
When she was six months old, I returned from an early evening out to a red-faced, crying baby. My parents had watched her. “We’ve got a problem honey,” my dad said with as much tenderness as he could muster. “Your little girl isn’t getting enough to eat.”
I was breastfeeding while trying to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight. Restricting food intake while trying to supply nutrients to another human was a paradox my body couldn’t hold. I took the crying baby from my dad, thanked him for the childcare, and left. With my shrieking daughter buckled in her rear-facing car seat I blitzed to the nearest Walgreens for a twenty-two-dollar can of formula. I sat in the backseat of the car next to her and mixed a bottle with some water I’d also bought at the drugstore.
My daughter looked at me with imploring blue eyes and sucked down that cold concoction like it was a vanilla milkshake. With tears in both our eyes, we agreed wordlessly in the backseat of my Prius to throw in the towel on breastfeeding.
When it came to feeding her in the toddler years, I did my best to copy moms I trusted. A task that proved surprisingly challenging in the food-moralistic, organic-or-bust, suburbia where we’d settled. It was the kind of neighborhood where kids referred to milk as “cow’s milk.”
For my kids, I bought goldfish crackers by the oversized tub, hit up the McDonald’s drive-thru frequently, and ignored discourse around gluten sensitivity and the inflammatory dangers of dairy. I hid my restriction behind a third cup of coffee, staying busy, and bellied up to sensible dinners with everyone around the table.
I felt guilt about this: subscribing to a cultural value system of thinness-at-all-costs, but the guilt never outweighed my desire for the social currency being in the system afforded me.
My daughter has never heard me complain about my body or express feelings of remorse after eating sugar. My mind chatters endlessly with complaints and my brain involuntary tracks a log of calories consumed, but I have never vocalized these comments to her. I fancy that a feather is in my maternal cap, but the problem with feathers is that they lack weight and substance.
For Mother’s Day a few years ago, she delivered a cup of coffee and a protein bar on a plate with a cute note attached to the wrapper. It was the only breakfast in bed she knew I’d have wanted (wanted? eaten? I cannot find the right verb—language fails me.)
That loving gesture made me feel awful. Moms across the country ate pancakes with undercooked centers, rubbery scrambled eggs, and burnt toast made with love. My daughter knew me well enough to know those efforts would have been wasted on her mom.
American author Robert Fulghum aptly said, “Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.”
I was already seeing an eating disorder specialist at the time of the Mother’s Day protein bar incident. My motives in seeking treatment were unrelated to my recovery which had stagnated two decades before in the valley between disorder and normalcy—a shadowy space where I’d grown comfortable.
But I had this daughter on whom I knew my food stuff was imprinting, and that terrified me.
If she avoids the pitfall of an eating disorder or disordered eating it will be mostly thanks to this therapist who blatantly recommends, that I leave my daughter alone in all things food related.
“But she keeps heading to the pantry after dinner,” I’ll say in a panic. Or, “She ate all her Halloween candy in less than a week.” The trained professional will nod and smile and hold space for what we both know is my fat-phobic anxiety. I’ve never felt this frenetic energy around my son’s food choices; a fact I find academically interesting in an effort to distance myself from the metallic shame of it.
I’ve noticed her ‘off switch’ related to treats seems less attuned than her brother’s; he turns down sweets more than her and he leaves cake on the plate. My inherent defenses want to attribute this to individual differences in the nature of each child’s temperament, but the deeper thinking intellectual knows better. The unflattering truth is, my son is better at intuitive eating because he’s been allowed to be.
My gender bias has shown up covertly and overtly in the kitchen, while dining out at restaurants, and in casual conversation. I’ve subconsciously disguised this bias as a health concern, attempting to steer my daughter toward a side of fruit instead of fries, because—fiber is good for you! I’ve asked her if she felt hungry or just wanted dessert. (Is there a more inane question one can pose in relation to dessert?) I’m working on this. Working on it looks like shutting up.
Though the Mother’s Day protein bars are no longer on Subscribe and Save renewal from Amazon, I don’t see pancakes in my near future. That’s just the reality of what my long-term recovery from an eating disorder has looked like.
She is an adolescent now. Eleven years old and wearing all my clothes; that’s an unsavory remark. At a time when she has no control over the shape and appetite of her body, I cling to my restrictive habits like a life preserver. Watching puberty take hold is triggering. For me being in a woman’s body is fraught with shame, self-loathing, and insatiability. I know it no other way. But I have to believe there is one. To be a parent is, after all, to want better for your offspring.
When she is foraging for a snack or having additional helpings of whatever I am very clear that my job is to say nothing. Don’t make it a thing, don’t make it a thing, don’t make it a thing. That’s the refrain that gets me through.
It’s the only hope I have of liberating her from food thing for the rest of her feminine life.
Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash
Liv Spikes
Liv Spikes writes about her life-- it seems to offer up plenty of material. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Brain, Child Literary Magazine, The Briar Cliff Review, and others.
