Food – Demon or Goddess?

Food – Demon or Goddess?

“Are you hungry?” my mother asked, gathering us four kids, each about a year apart, into her arms. I was eleven then and my youngest brother six, but I don’t remember being scared. More surprised. She already had her jacket on, her purse and stack of books in her arms. She was always busy, our mother, but never this busy. She wanted to be a full-time teacher, not just a sub, and had just started a master’s degree. We stood there, her four little rabbits in our rubber-soled pajamas, nodding hungrily. “Yes,” we said as one.

            “Then you’d better learn to cook.”

And then she was gone. We looked at each other. I do recall that – the moment of stunned looking. I suppose my brothers looked more to me, the only girl, the mother sex, the Wendy to this lost clan of boys. I shrugged knowing not that much more only that we’d probably need a pan to start. I thought of the times I stood by my mother watching her cook, helping her. Wishing I had, like my best friend who lived across the street, a mother who didn’t worked, who wore an apron, who had blond hair and looked like the mother on ‘Father Knows Best.’

            My mother was so dark that they’d written on her college ID that she was Negro. I remember reading that word and wondering if we were also Negroes. I wouldn't have minded. In that way my mom was cool. She gave everybody a fair chance. Even before my parents officially divorced, she started hanging around this wonderful bear of a boyfriend who was definitely Black. She was also really good with gays when that word first came out. She was open-minded, but there was a lot she wanted to do with her life. Okay so she wasn’t around much, but still I'm grateful to her and do in many ways take after her. She didn't pamper us or stop us from our own explorations and she certainly helped her four kids from that day forward to not only learn how but to love to cook. Even if our first tries at grilled cheese sandwiches stuck to the pan, or the scrambled eggs were either too runny or too dry, or the flipped pancakes and Sunnyside eggs ended up on the floor before getting the knack of catching the return flight into the pan, we all learned how.

It's tricky to know if that was why I ended up with an eating disorder, being in a sense abandoned and made responsible so awfully young. But I think most of us girls back then were obsessed with being thin. It had already started with Twiggy and the pictures of models and actresses in our faces and the link between showing our mothers we loved them (plus the starving children in China and Africa) by finishing everything on your plates and the fear the world wouldn’t love us if we got too fat.

I live now in Europe and many of my friends (especially in the rooms) say the best thing that’s ever come out of the US is the 12-step program. I had already started OA (overeaters anonymous) way before leaving for Europe, when I was in my twenties, and was slowly, painfully slowly, learning to eat mindfully. To not think calories were only the enemy; that I needed to eat, not starve myself and to find the more in less. Before OA, I slathered butter and mayonnaise on everything. Just learning to taste a cucumber, a carrot, a tomato with maybe a squeeze of lemon took some getting used to. The actual taste of fruit without being smothered in whip cream and sweet-n-low. To understand the relationship and difference between the good or empty calories; the nourishment of food into energy, into life, the gift of life. And to find things to do between means. (In OA we joked: I only ate one more a day – all day!) To find sustenance, in the spiritual. Not even sure in the beginning if I knew what that meant.

Step 10 of the 12-steps is about prayer and meditation. For me, all jumpy and restless meditation has always been crazy hard. You’ll probably think it’s crazy that I moved into an ashram! Gosh, there's so much I want to tell you. Maybe if you knew everything about me you’d understand why I did what I did. Maybe you’d even like me, and be able to help me learn to like myself, or at least understand myself. The Swami sure tried. He was a great man and every time, still, when I cut vegetables I can’t help but miss him.

This all happened in Ann Arbor, where I moved for the music, and to get away from my family, still believing that I could find a geographical cure. I had rented a room from a woman I met in a writing group. I knew she was gay, but that wasn’t a problem, well not at first. She was gone most of the day which was good for my music and writing, to be alone, but I kept eating her food. Every day before she got home I’d rush out to replenish the shelves so she wouldn't know. But of course she knew: her shelves were constantly supplied with unopened boxes of cereal, crackers, cookies, and trail mix (that was my killer, pretending trail mix was healthy, boy did I binge on that). After a few weeks she started crawling into bed with me, like five in the morning, when she came home drunk from the bars. She thought my secret binge eating was because I secretly loved her, was afraid to come out of the closet. (Which may have been true, but still.) So I moved into the ashram.

I was terrified at first, terrified to binge in an even bigger kitchen. I told the Swami about my eating thing. “Don't worry,” he said in a way I could believe him. And I said: “Just don't ever leave me alone in the kitchen. Ever. I can vacuum and dust, I can answer phones, but if you leave me in the kitchen, I’ll eat until I puke” “Don't worry,” he said again. He really did back up those words.

            Seva is the selfless work you’re meant to do some four hours a day at an ashram. Meditation and Seva, and no sex. Those were the requirements. The swami was clever, he knew my vital statistics, Knew I was a struggling musician who wrote songs and was trying to write stories and had two jobs to pay the rent, waitressing and teaching music. So my Seva he decided, would be to sit 2 to 3 hours every afternoon writing. After dinner I was to play the guitar for the group evening chants. Nothing I had to do would be alone except the writing; and there was never any food in our rooms. And before dinner, I was to chop vegetables with the team preparing the meal. I cried with happiness at this lucky break. Part of a friendly team in a kitchen (of other lost and confused souls like me), meditative music coming from the tape deck. We’d chant and slice and cut and simmer, all hands moving in symmetry like some mystical octopus or like the pictures hung all over the ashram, of the gods and goddesses, of their hands and arms rising gloriously into the air, all connecting to love.

I was able to stop bingeing, as there really was no food around, except at the meals. (I guess I wasn’t the only one who might steal food as the cupboards and all storage places were locked in between.) I was still going to OA meetings, still trying as we say: to walk the lion around the cage three times a day, not more. No eating between meals, no grazing, no sitting with a book and zoning out, and no picking the food off the plates before placing them in the bus-tray at the diner I worked at.

I was finally learning – and really have been able to retain that learning, especially in the later years when I recovered from the eating disorder – to let eating be a more mindful, meditative activity. One that brought nourishment and sustenance, not the race against time, or the vacuuming in of food before the next activity as in my childhood. Or the sense that it wouldn’t be enough. When I ate slowly – the lentil dahl, and spinach saag, the Basmati rice and yoghurt – it was more about feeling and tasting the food, slowly, each morsel slowly, and I slowly learned the weird sensation of being full. As if we were eating love and just like those gods and goddesses with their multiple arms, there was plenty of love.

(This theme is further developed in the (published book, available on Amazon), Pandora Learns To Sing.)