Estrangement, Food, and Bodies: part two.

How an unhappy father can f- up a daughter's relationship to her body and sex for life, and how she will not let him.

For part one, go here.

Content Alert: eating disorders, body dysmorphia, covert incest

There was this ice cream shop in Downtown Los Gatos called Swenson’s. It had old-fashioned decor, wooden booths, and amazing ice cream. There was a dish there called an Earthquake. Imagine a cake dish, festooned with eight scoops of ice cream (your choice of flavors!), a banana, all the toppings, and several sauces. The prescient, proto-monstrosity of what became a common child’s dessert later, circa 2000-2012 and still rears its feral head atop hot chocolates at Christmas in the Park, was decadence like none of us ‘70s kids had ever seen prior.

The Earthquake was the sort of thing that you got with six other tween girls to split at a birthday party, back in the days when tween girls had birthday parties at ice cream shops (and that was like, it. Not the second stop in a grand birthday tour, but the main event.) Back when kids ate out of the same dish.

It still exists and here’s an image.

The first time I tried an Earthquake, I was with my father. Just him and me. He had this thing he did where he’d wheedle me into getting a dessert to share.

The first step was accepting a dessert menu; unless you’re already in an ice cream shop, and then you just order the damn thing. I’m sure he said something like, this looks good. I would say, oh yeah, it does. And then he’d look at me conspiratorially and say, let’s share it— so I don’t eat too much. My kid brain now felt responsible for both my overeating and his.

Only, I wasn’t so great at controlling my own overeating, because my father was always taking me to fancy restaurants and accepting the dessert menu. He would have me order it so he wouldn’t feel “naughty” or like a pig.

Another long-gone Los Gatos staple was Villa Felice. They had a Monte Cristo sandwich. Have you ever had a Monte Cristo? It’s as if a Croque Monseur and french toast had drunk sex followed by a delicious, artery-clogging baby. It’s a ham and cheese sandwich dipped in egg and fried, and at Villa Felice, they did it in a fryer. It is commonly dusted with just enough powdered sugar. Delicious. But not something I would eat the whole of today, and definitely not with dessert. Why? Not for any moral reason, but because my stomach would hurt. And I would know that because I would be in tune with my body. Now.

Recently Husband and I were at a really good french bistro, on a vacation, our one splurge meal. The special of the day was a Monte Cristo.

I pondered my choices. I could have that sandwich and really tear into it now, free from my father’s admiring judgment. Free from my mother’s pursed-lip worry. Free from my grandmother’s disapproval. I could eat the fuck out of that Monte Cristo and laugh at their deadness.

I passed on the sandwich. I had to catch a plane from Vegas in 105-degree-heat, and didn’t want a dough ball full of cheesy ham wads in my tummy while doing so. I felt my deceased father’s disapproval, his congestive heart failure be damned.

Back in the Earthquake Days, my desire to please my father and get a singular ray of his attention outweighed (har har) my desire to be in tune with my body, which would told me to say, no thank you, Pop, can you hug me instead? But he didn’t really do hugs past me turning 10, the same age he started force feeding me like föe gras.

At the same time, totally coincidentally I’m sure, I became pre-pubescent.

Food is a way to deeply share family, personality and culture; but when it is used to control others, it is a way to share pain and shame.

My father never told me a damn thing about sexuality, never gave any expectations of how I was to behave, and never set any limits. What he did do was take me to nice restaurants and buy me delicious food and use me as an excuse to buy a dessert to soothe his own ills: a troubled marriage, a stressful career, and all of his insecurities—shame about the shape of his own body, shame at being from a poor immigrant family, his attempts to live up to the expectations of that same family, who either dimwittedly rode his coattails through his entire, long life; or worse, surpassed and stopped needing him.

Now I see he was intimidated by my mom, who was smarter, kinder, and more effortlessly charming, as opposed to his own studied charm.

But instead of spending the time to be a partner to his wife when she was less affectionate with him, he took his young daughter on fancy restaurant dates to make her jealous.

What he did was encourage me to eat, talk me out of stopping eating; teaching me to trust and listen to him instead of my body. Because I wanted a father’s love, I did listen to him, betraying my body. This brought up my own insecurities, which led to weak boundaries and a propensity to then later fall in love with and choose boys and men who really didn’t end up treating me all that well despite being handsome and charming. Which kind of guaranteed me not settling down until my mid thirties, because disappointing boys don’t want to marry you.

My failed relationships kept me closer within his sphere, just like they had done earlier with Giacomo, Peggy Sue, and Carla.

Peggy Sue carted around a larger number of “extra” (the BMI is bullshit, live your life) pounds most of her life, but who also eschewed the idea of femininity. Unconsciously she used her fat body to spite him and get his attention in one of the ways she knew how: hit him in his perceived embarrassment over having a fat daughter (second only to the embarrassment of having a gay son.)

He told her once he’d give her money for her performing career if she lost weight. Ouch.

And that’s the thing. He would feed a daughter, pout if she didn’t swallow all that was put before her, but then also hold it against her that she didn’t measure up to his beauty standards. He would never say anything direct, just ooze the slight odor of disappointment (which was probably also halitosis and poor hygeine.) Then he would give “tips,” like telling me that if I started riding a bicycle at 12, I would develop shapelier legs by the time I became a woman. It makes my skin crawl and my guts lurch.

He also messed with Carla, but I think he was less successful because Carla had her own original connection to food. She married a chef and enjoyed the craft of cooking and branched out into cooking dishes beyond what the family had prepared. Plus she worked for Pop as a secretary (which happened around the time my mom forgave him for fucking his previous secretary) and I think he would just be an asshole sometimes and not take Carla out to lunch much.

He had his ways of putting us all in our boxes and making us resent each other, like inviting me to lunch, which would create a situation where Carla would see us leave together while she sat at her desk and worked through lunch with a lonely sandwich.

Then when we got back from lunch, he would engage in jocular and familial banter (Carlaaaaaaaa? Where are my fiiiiiiiiles?) with her while I watched on jealously, wondering why his interactions with me at lunch were so stiff (not really wondering though, the reason was always, somehow, my mother.)

Peggy Sue is single and says she likes it that way. Every once in awhile, she’ll say something judgmental about other people’s sex lives.

Carla has been married three times and swishes around in the manner of a much younger woman.

What I find interesting is that neither of them seemed to really ever commit their hearts to any of their men while simultaneously holding our father in an inappropriately high regard, ever striving for his approval. Even so, they both bitterly complained about what an asshole he was.

We all had our own flavors of illness around this as adults: body dysmorphia, binge eating disorders, exercise bulimia, restricted eating and severe dieting, to name a few. It is still a work in progress for me to regulate around these issues, but vast improvements have been made.

Did my father consciously try to hold me back by feeding me so much but still making me beg for emotional crumbs? Or was he oblivious to the pain he caused?

I used to spend time trying to figure that out. But I don’t know. More importantly, I don’t care.

He’s gone and he may live on in my head but he doesn’t get to be in charge. Especially not of my sex life. Especially when his was terrible (he told me, because of course he did.)

This is where I take a fork in the road from fierce advocacy for your right to not only estrange but also take as long as you need to process the past. This is where I follow the signposts that say yes, and, what can I release right now in order to find my joy in a vital part of me? What can I do now to acquire experience, knowledge and skills to help make this part of my life better? For me? Here? Now?

Food issues, as Geneen Roth writes in Women, Food, and God, are yet another doorway into your deepest self, and wrestling with those angels and demons are how we and our deepest selves find healing and divinity. Sex can be that, too. So can estrangement.

It’s all pretty challenging, this directive to feel your feelings, take your time, honor your grief AND live your life? I would never lie to you and say it’s easy.

But what are we gonna do? Not shift? We are already divinely doing it, right now. We can’t help it.

The Earthquake apparently still exists. When I looked it up, an ad for an eating challenge unlocked another memory: it was free if you could eat the whole thing.

What a perfect metaphor for my relationship to my father: if I could stomach the careless parenting, the misogyny, the mean-spiritedness, and his propensity to deliberate try to embarrass me, I could hold his attention. The price of admission was nausea and self-hatred; the prize: a crumb of affection the size of a grain of a crunchy sundae topping.

Issues with food and sex can be difficult and painful to untangle, especially alone, so don’t be afraid to reach out and find a therapist or trusted community member who has expertise in holding space for these issues.

To Be Continued