How To Eat as An Adoptee

1.     Be born.

2.     Realize you don’t know where your next meal is coming from.

3.     Settle for the bottle given to you by someone who doesn’t sound, smell, or feel familiar.

4.     Want something else but have no words to express desire.

5.     Have above feeling for the rest of your life and eat twice as much as you need in the effort of eating yourself around the corner of loss to home.

6.     Believe each meal you have may disappear before you finish eating. Eat faster.

7.     Feel sick after eating because your system is in perma-shock and so you don’t digest food all that well. You fart. You are constipated or you have diarrhea. You may have I.B.S. It may be hard to sit still.

8.     If you are larger boned than the parents who adopted you, feel out of control and wrong at each meal.

9.  Worry there isn’t enough food in the world to feed you. If your birth mother couldn’t feed you, how can anyone else?

10.  Be anorexic so that you can feel in control of your body and your life.

11.  Hoard food because that might keep you safe.

14.  Have bulimia because it feels good to be both full and empty and to hurt yourself in-between.

15.  Eat a lot of sugar because the high distracts you from the confusion of not knowing who you are and the low feels like home.

16.  Live in fear of getting so fat that no one will love you. Living with this stress is familiar and oddly comforting.

17.  Keep eating past full because the weight in your belly anchors you to the world.

18.  Eat because you are afraid of disappearing.

19.  Go to France and eat butter and walk and feel good and lose 10 pounds.

20.  Decide all American adoptees should move to France. 

20. Start talking to everyone you love about how your hunger scares you.

21. Listen to them tell you they have some of the same feelings even though they aren't adopted.

22. Listen to them tell you they love you.

23.  Turn 50 and have pancakes for breakfast. Pancakes with syrup and butter.

24. Pat the rolls of your stomach. It's almost like you are carrying a baby. You love your baby.

25. Life gets 2000% easier.

26. You love your baby so much you feed her.