eat your feelings
I wanted to redact. I’m not sure when redact. Just as I find myself stumbling through nearly every therapy session, despite my efforts to write about anything or anyone else, I can’t obscure this truth: my mother is sick, and I have to come to terms with it. Only in conversations with her do my redactions occur in real time. I edit my words, my face, as we go along. She’s FaceTiming me these days without warning—a pastime she thoroughly enjoys—not to ask me about my day, though she does, and not to make plans for the weekend, though she does that still. My mother is calling to share with me the details of her consumption. Barely even breadcrumbs. She calls in the evening to boast about her discipline, to divulge the microscopic list of everything that passed her lips that day. Only 350 calories, Can you believe it! She doesn’t even ask, it’s an exclamation, she can’t believe it. Her hard work pays off.
We all live with ghosts. Protective, vengeful, misguided ghosts. Unrecognizable ghosts passed down to us. These are generational ghosts. Mine are many, and often translucent. My body too carries opaque, envious, insatiable ghosts. I inherited some of the insatiable ghosts from my mother, in the form of lessons about my frame. These are her ghosts, too, and she hoists them up, waves them high like flags. I, too, have boasted about diets, however fleeting; my tips and tricks; have feigned healthy and happy. But I’ve also hidden some strategies in shame, tucked them deep in dark corners. I’ve prayed for mono, fallen down rabbit holes of dangerous hashtags, painfully thought lucky them. As I work to ward off my inherited ghosts, I’ve learned to silence her as she feeds me hers over FaceTime. I switch her sound off and nod, mmm, and huh, as though I’m listening. My body is on autopilot.
One of my favorite memories from childhood is actually an accumulation of memories, all of which happened between the ages of nine and twelve. My mother had miraculously qualified for too many credit cards though she didn’t make much, was still paying off student debt from her nursing degree, and had no familial support in raising her twin daughters—my sister and me. At this time, my mother discovered that allowances could be made for missing work when you suffered from grief and chronic migraines. The first time it happened, I remember sitting in class. I sat near the window at the front of the room, and we were practicing long division. It’s safe to assume this occurred on a rainy day. It was Washington, and my mother had seasonal depression among other diagnoses. An announcement came through our classroom intercom, summoning me to the main office and instructing me to bring all of my belongings. It was all so unexpected.
When I arrived at the office, my mother was standing at the main desk, my sister behind her. I heard my mother admit to the office attendants that she’d forgotten that we had a dentist appointment. When we got to her car, an ’89 gold Subaru, my mother collected our backpacks, put them in the trunk, and told us that we weren’t really going to the dentist’s office. No, we were beginning a new tradition, where anytime my mother felt sad, or lonely, or bored, she’d pull us from school and drive to one of her favorite tiled shopping havens in Lynnwood, Bellevue, or Seattle, but mostly Bellevue, where we’d tell stories, laugh, play, and spend money we didn’t have in shops that were too luxurious on clothes we didn’t need and eat until our bellies and mouths were too full to think or speak: Caesar salads, sugary sweet tea, and endless bread bowls at Olive Garden or the Nordstrom Cafe. On the car rides back, she’d turn the music up so loud it almost hurt, usually Tori Amos, or Jewel, or The Sundays. And she’d cry the entire way home.
As I look at my muted mother on the phone, I can sense her emotions, feeling them as though they are my own. I know exactly when to react, when to feign engagement. No longer is she crying on the long rides home from the mall. No longer does she listen to music that considers the woes of white womanhood, the torment of patriarchy. She’s convinced herself that fifteen pounds down, three inches here, an inch there, is happiness. No longer gorging on Red Vines, stir fry noodles, and fish & chips to numb the pain, my mother gained control by going out of control. Her daughters left the house, too plump to play dress up anyway, and formerly bustling malls are now apocalyptically desolate. So she feeds her ghost through modes of starvation, her newest hobby.
These mall trips were fun, for a while, because we didn’t know then what I know now, that my mother was in pain. More important than my mother’s confusing and erratic behavior was that during these days we felt so special. We shared a fabulous secret. Of course, when we were small, dressing us up was fun for her, too—vicarious retail therapy. But for a woman with an eating disorder and severe body dysmorphia, dress up can be triggering when the body being dressed reflects all of your darkest insecurities. The day my body began to change was the day that retail therapy no longer worked for me. For the first time, my body was unlike my twin sister’s, and with a year’s head start into puberty, it would never be the same again. I grew in my belly, my breasts, my bottom. My hips expanded inches beyond hers. I got bigger, while she remained small.
My weight continued to be a problem throughout my teens and twenties. This is when I realized that I was no longer fun to dress up. Shopping with me was burden. Shopping with my sister? Delight. My mother’s voice echoes now, as I watch her, still muted. Phrases she’s said in faraway fitting rooms, with five pounds down, she snaps her fingers, it’ll look just fine. A faint image of places she’s picked and pulled creep into my head. Her neck, the rolls under her bra strap, the underside of her arms, the inside of her thighs, the dips in her hips, her ankles, her cheeks, her eyelids. She points them out on herself as she gapes at me in the mirror, letting me know what we need to work on. These remarks became worse—intensified—the older we got. Now, and for the past decade, when we go on shopping trips my mother makes a teammate out of me. When we try on our haul she’ll say, Ugh, don’t you wish you had her body?—pointing to my sister, or, Let’s get skinny like your sister! No longer alone, she has me with her in her misery. I have to fight her sharp words, her judgmental looks, her sage advice. Don’t eat your feelings! she’s warned, and spawned within me a new ghost.
But there are her own ghosts, still haunting. I’m disgusting, she says to me often, as she pinches her belly. Hand into claw, making red the skin beneath it. I especially hate this, she’ll confess, raking her neck, her thighs, the flesh of her back—pulling at her skin while she sits in front of a mirror or her television. She watches the underside of her arm whenever she whips up a bowl of something tasty, it doesn’t matter what it is, she’ll say, This is the last time I’m eating carbs, or sugar, or grains, etc.
In femme social mediascapes, my mother clings to the corners where terms like body positivity or fatphobia do not exist. She prefers disordered eating propaganda guised as wellness or health consciousness. She prefers the lie. My mother loves an extreme diet. She tries them cyclically despite the fact that her body protests. Last fall, she added heart attack to hypertension and gallstones, a result of adopting the newest trend she found on Facebook. I try to ignore the memory of my mother crying in forgotten fitting rooms, puffing on her inhaler—which she’s only needed since chain-smoking proved most effective—or lying in a hospital bed, with diet induced halitosis, yellowing teeth, and leather skin. These recollections aren’t much help to me now anyways. I need to emancipate myself from these inherited ghosts. She needs to want the help—the words of my therapist, Courtney—ring loudly in my head.
Only I would be able to sense the pause in her monologue. I unmute. I’m stressed right now, I respond, after turning up the volume to her question of if I want to start her diet too. Well, don’t eat your feelings! She offers, again. She’s perpetually sad, and I love her, so I smile and tell her, Thank you, I know, before ending the call. My fights with her no longer exist outside of myself. So I pad toward my walk-in pantry, pull down on the chain that illuminates it. Yes, I am sad too. But I have to love my body. I grab some crackers, make a cheese board. Quiet the ghost.
Grace Dunbar-Miller (she/they) is a poet and non-fiction writer and educator. Their work often incorporates threads of her own experience with kinship, Blackness, intimacy, the body, and haunting. Grace is a PhD dropout and received her BA and MA in English Literature from Western Washington University.