When Your Adopted Child Eats Like the Food Is About to Disappear

In response to this meme, an adoptive parent asked if I had any ideas how to get her young child to eat more slowly.

I thought about how I have eaten all my life—like an empty vacuum cleaner—and I thought about what it would have been like if my parents had insisted I chew my food, say, thirty times before I swallowed.  

Or nine time. Or five.   

I think my head would have exploded. I think I would have been so full of rage and panic that I would not have had language to express why I was so against this new rule. I may have tried to run away so I could try to eat my shoes in the privacy of my own cave.  

I am trying to think of an example I can give you so you can understand the feeling, and nothing extreme enough comes to mind. 

So…this may be offensive, but sorry. This is what comes to mind: the movie Sophie’s Choice, and the scene where Sophie has to choose between her children. What I am trying to tell you is that my brain would think I was not going to survive the insistence that I chew, and if I look like a whackamole when I compare that experience to something as unthinkable as what the Nazis did to other human beings, again, I’m sorry. 

I’m a writer. Not a righter. 

What I am trying to tell you is that I would be so out of my mind if it was commanded that I had to chew my food, I would not be able to think like a reasonable person. I would be in the dark muck of loss and too rageful and terrified to stay present.  

What I am telling you is that I eat fast because I am trying to eat my way to the other side. The side of full. The side of okay. The side of safe.  

The thing is, part of my brain knows this is ridiculous. Part of my brain can see the entire loaf of bread and the loaf behind it and the three jars of peanut butter you have given me to prove there is more than enough food, to show me I am free to eat until I am full, but what neither of us understands is that it is not full I am after: it is escape from the feeling that I am wrong, that my life is wrong, that I am in trouble and that I just need to change my state so that, maybe, I can feel okay. 

So what can a mom do for a 6 year old who eats as if the food is about to get ripped out of her hand?

 I don’t know.