Estrangement, Food, and Bodies

A recipe for disaster?

I come from a food family. My Sicilian immigrant grandmother was a stocky woman who made everything delicious, and my WASPy American grandmother was a teeny woman who made everything perfect. I grew up with homemade ravioli, tomato and zucchini omelettes, and magical chicken soup on one side and for summers visited the other side in the Pacific Northwest for clam digging and feasts, salmon, and what my grandpa called “Republican Burgers”-filet mignon on an english muffin with dijon mustard and fresh sliced tomato.

The mixed messages that encouraged gorging, idolized thinness, placed importance in being a good cook, and held food up as a magical, nutritional cure collided in my brain, peaking at pre-puberty. Everything about me was awkward in fifth grade, and my bum grew faster than everything else, gaining me a lot of rude comments from boys and passive-aggressive ones from girls.

My brother warned me that my fat cells would “close” once I hit thirteen and then if I didn’t lose my “baby fat” before then, I would always have a weight problem. My nicer brother snapped at me “stop eating! You’re going to get fat!”

My stocky grandmother offered us food constantly, and everything she made was amazing. It made her happy to see people eating her food. Those factors made her family stuff themselves around her.

Mervin and Tiffany, my mom’s kids, remained slim under these odds, perhaps cementing their outsider status in that family. There was this one summer, when Tiff was a teen and I was an awkward middle schooler, we went on a cruise with my parents and grandparents, and my mom and my tiny grandmother couldn’t stop talking about how cute and petite Tiffany was in her bikini, sneaking up on her to take pictures of her in a lounge chair. They didn’t say anything about me. After the trip, I jealously flipped through photo after photo of my sister, finding very few of me.

My tiny grandmother bid me goodbye after one summer visit by walking behind me on the beach, putting her hands on my shoulders and saying, sort of into my ear but loud enough for my mom to hear, “We’re going to work on our weight when we get home, aren’t we?”

I went home and joined Weight Watchers. My mom let me go, and my aunt took me. I got really skinny in sixth grade, and my friends got tired of me talking about it. I lost some friends and gained some of the weight back.

I didn’t know I was fat until everyone told me. The boy at theater camp who called my thighs “tree trunks.” The ex-lovers and ex-friends who told me how pretty and hot I’d be if I changed this, that, or the other thing: all of them solved by eating less, according to them.

The person who pays the price the most for all of that bad programing now isn’t me: it’s Husband, who actually does think I’m beautiful in all my weights he’s seen me at, and has always desired me. It’s another symptom of the Great Disconnect.

When I look at photos of myself as a child, teen, and young woman, I have no idea what the fuck those people were talking about. I was well within the range of average, even if I was a few pounds more with a slightly bigger ass. So what? If nobody had said a fucking thing, it would have worked itself out. Instead, I just looked for what was wrong with my body, even when I was at my lightest, because the feeling that I was flawed and imperfect physically teamed up with my internal perception of not being good enough.

If I was already good enough, I reasoned, I could afford to carry a few extra pounds. But me, I was already on thin ice, and any strike against me could render me unlovable.

Ironically, once I got to the point, after both parents were dead, after Mervin and Tiff tried to sue me, after the harrowing, slow and conflict-ridden settling of both parents’ estates, after my career burnout, and after the COVID lockdowns started, in the safety of my own home…I did get fat.

Are you happy now, Tiffany? I actually got fat, my hair is grey, and I almost had a breakdown. Are we now squared up in what I owe you on account of being born?

A surprising benefit of estrangement is that I can eliminate all of the stress from eating and existing in a body that my family feels entitled to judge.

Those of you who have toxic, tricky, or somewhat old-fashioned or insensitive families have to do a lot more work than I do in this regard. You’ve got to set boundaries, and sometimes verbally remind people of them repeatedly.

“No, thank you.”

“I’m not comfortable talking about diets or bodies. Can we please change the subject?”

“I don’t eat blankety blank. I will bring something I can eat.”

“I don’t feel comfortable discussing my body with people who aren’t my doctor.”

For me, it was incredibly stressful to attempt to set these types of boundaries, mostly because I was in a family that thought boundaries were for pansies, unless it was theirs.

There has been a marked decrease in fat shaming, diet talk, and food shaming in my life since my estrangements.

I’m hoping those of you who are setting these food boundaries experience some success. Its ok to disappoint someone else, they will get over it, the worst they will do is squawk and gossip and they’d probably do that anyway.

One thing that has been difficult, is that food is a powerful way for me to connect to my ancestors and my cultural background, especially with my Italian grandparents who were both immigrants. Most of the family stories involve food in some way. Eating the dishes makes me feel most connected to Italian and Sicilian culture, but the estrangement from (most of) that side of the family can make me feel like an imposter when engaging with my own culture, especially as I’ve changed my last name.

My relationship with food and my body is a bit cleaner now, and the space away from distressing relationships and interactions has allowed me to unpack a lot of deep seated beliefs about food, habits around emotional eating, and a better understanding of my physical cues around hunger and satiety.

I gained a lot of weight during the sourdough and baked ziti days of the pandemic, and because of a genetic predisposition to high cholesterol and heart disease, my doctor has given me the dread “you need to lose weight” speech. And that still happened, and it still sucked, without family around. And like a million other people, it probably would have also happened had I had family around. So not having them around to monitor and advise me was a bonus, as was not having any of them around to weigh in on mask use.

Like so many issues after the estrangement, I feel uneasy that it’s been so easy to unpack food and body stuff away from family, because I would hate to think that people who have more nourishing connections with their family of origin would be stopped from making healthy changes and improving their relationship to food and their body acceptance (even when there’s a desire for change) because of those heart connections.

Healthy changes do spread through systems, so its important for those of us who are role models in our family of choice to get right with ourselves in this regard lest we pass on toxic belief and behaviors around food.

To Be Continued…..