My mother and me
(possible triggers — talk of disordered eating)
My mother has always been a positive influence on me, in regards to food, eating and body image. She’s always had the philosophy of enjoying your food, taking pleasure in the act of eating and preparing food. I don’t know whether that is because of her unpleasant upbringing, where food was scarce and mostly scavenged, but it has instilled me with mostly good feelings towards food.
Until I hit primary school. Under the influence of a number of pre-teen girls, all smaller than me, both in height and weight, I threw those good feelings out of the window. I started eating, literally, an apple a day. I was good at hiding this. At home, I still ate pretty normally. I ate all the food my mother prepared. But at school, I barely ate.
This disordered eating pattern might have continued for a long time, but my mother helped make it better without even knowing she did. One day she came up to school on my morning tea break (we lived only a couple of streets away from my primary school and she worked night shift), with a homemade coffee milkshake. At first I was embarrassed – “Oh my god, my mother is at my school, go away”, until I saw the reactions of my fellow girls.
Jealousy.
Now, I’m sure I wasn’t the only student whose parent or caregiver brought food too, but I was the only one at that time whose mother had come up to the school, in years of being there. The other girls looked at my milkshake and they wanted it.
That was when I realised that, yes, I enjoyed food way too much to conform to these eating patterns and eating the same one thing, day in and day out was, frankly, boring. My mother, probably inadvertently, had made me realise this. All with a coffee milkshake.
For her, food equals love. Good food, homemade, well prepared food. Because of my asthma as a child (yes, I also had asthma), she was very careful about the type of food she made and bought as well, just in case it brought on an attack.
She not only shaped me into the woman I am today, but she taught me a great appreciation of food. Preparing, cooking and eating. I’m thankful.
