I was attempting to talk about how I have decided to take the journal in a different direction than i had planned. So here we go again................
I have always had a weight problem. Me and my sisters shared this. They went one way, I went the other. Maura was anorexic , and it killed her. Sarah started to follow that path but discovered her own truth and self and stopped it. (PS I will be using their real names because this is real.) Sarah might get mad, but Maura is dead and cannot get mad about it, too late. And our mother, she died 3 years after Maura.
Me, on the other hand, I ate my way through my adolesence. And it started in my late childhood. I have been attempting for a longtime to write about alot of the things that have happened to me. Every first sentence sounds horrible to me. The self-criticism that originally came from an external source rears its anger and starts the beating. I imagine it being read by someone else and it sounds horrid. Juvenile. Immature. And then I qwell it. So today I have published some of it here....................... you be the judge. And don't worry, you can't hurt me more than I have hurt myself.
Paragraph one:
Snow, summer and a horse that ate our apples off of the windowsill. It was always a battle for my mother to get me to eat meat. Something about the chewy emptiness of the gristle that appeared in my mouth after the brown, heavy taste disappeared that made me aware of the hole I felt I was always trying to fill. She would seat us down to a Sunday dinner of Beef Stroganoff and I could smell the dread before I even saw it. It would sit on my plate for so long that it turned to an even more disgusting congealed blob than I had envisioned before. And then the battle began, I had to sit at my plate until I could force this thing down. I ultimately thought of this as a form of stuffing, stuffing down the sobs I could feel just below my throat. They were sitting waiting for any reason to come out. I had no sympathy for my mother at that time. At the moment she only existed to make me eat this painful mess. If I could manage to eat this then I was praised, to me it made no sense and yet I yearned for the love behind the praise. And so I would try my best to choke it all down. The sobs and the globs. When I couldn’t my mother would sit me on the porch where it always felt like rain and wait and wait in hopes that I would end up famished and realize my love for this white and brown dish. Once I figured out how much the dog liked this dish I would sneak it to him, I would poke a hole in the screen on the porch and push as much as I could thru, I would wad the chewy pieces up in a napkin and then excuse myself to the bathroom (flush) until I was caught.
2 comments:
Yeouch, I forget that you can follow the trail backwards to my page. But I gotta just buck up and keep writing. Everytime I try to tell this story I feel like some version of the grim reaper. So thanks for the words, but I swear for the record I am a normal functioning adult. One day a good friend put this in perspective for me. She said "listen, Kate, Everyone has had shit happen in their lives". And then she told me how her aunt was murdered by a stalker. And realized she was right. Everyone has had some shit happen in their lives. It is how well you can make it out the other end. In my case the end is Hawaii. Or maybe more what Hawaii represents to me. At this moment I am as far from where I grew up as one can get without leaving the States. And yet I have just found something that feels like home.
to add to that my little sister said something even more succinct when her some was born. She said "I am not going to make the same mistakes that mom and dad made, I am going to make different ones"
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