The Birth of a Binger

I've been seriously addicted to a weight-loss blog I've been following for the past couple of years, now. The author goes through such a mental process with her writing that I just can't seem to get enough.  There's a lot more to getting healthy than just losing the weight that's on your body.  You have to work on the fat in your head, too, which she does beautifully.

In going through some old posts of hers this morning from a few years back, discussing the impact her parents' divorce had on her, I ran across this bit that made me do some hard thinking:

The birth of my binge eating problem had nothing to do with my parents as people but everything to do with my own need to find a coping mechanism; as a 12, 13 year old kid, I wasn't thinking about anything other than how to make the hurt go away. No one is more or less guilty.

My binge eating started early, too...about nine or ten, as I recall, in the period of time directly after my mother died.  Both my siblings were a good bit older than me, and had, for different reasons, moved out of the house, either directly preceeding or directly after her death (my sister got married; my brother went off to college).  For the first time in my life, I was coming home to an empty house every day.  And that emptiness rattled in my bones.

Waiting for my father to come home from work every day seemed to take an eternity.  I filled the time watching TV and binging on whatever looked remotely interesting in the pantry.  I can vividly recall finding a jar of Tang instant breakfast drink (think freeze-dried Sunny D), and eating the powder like Lick-em-aid candy.  My poor, newly-widowed father, not having any clue as to what the depths of the pantry contained at that point, never missed it.  And I got by with pretty much cleaning out the pantry unnoticed.

That started two trends for me; eating to fill the void, and eating in secret...and I started packing on the pounds.  "Puberty", they said.  "She'll grow out of it."  But I was a late bloomer, and all my insecurities started adding up.  Puberty did not see me grow out of it.  Instead of growing lean as I grew tall, I just....grew.  My height made me stick out at school, and I became the 'amazon'....the 'linebacker'...the girl who didn't want to dress out for P.E.  And thus started the slide.

I've always contributed my binging to boredom in the past....being a latchkey kid in the 70's.  But I think my blogger friend had the right idea....in the immediate aftermath of my mother's death from a fatal disease at a far-too-young age, I too wasn't thinking about anything other than how to make the hurt go away.

I've blamed myself for my actions during that time period so much over the years; I know that now.  I've kicked that latchkey kid a million times in my head for her 'laziness', her reaction to boredom. I've regretted that start to my downward spiral, blaming my family bitterly for leaving me alone to fend for myself, for not noticing my self-destructive behavior, not thinking about how badly each one of us must have been hurting at that time.  When I wasn't blaming them, I was blaming myself for not getting off my ass and being active, for not keeping my nose out of the TV and out of that damned pantry.  But I've never, not once, thought of my behavior as a way to cope with the profound loss of my mother.  Looking back now with new eyes, I'm thinking that maybe it's time to forgive my family, and especially that little girl whose world had just been turned upside down.  Instead of condemnation, I'm starting to see that what she really needed was assurance that everything was going to be alright....and a really, really big hug.