6 Ideas on How to Feed an Adopted Person
Never: never, never, never, never, never, never put locks on your cupboards or refrigerator. If you are afraid your child or (god help us, your partner or lover) is going to hoard food or get too big for their jeans, let them hoard until they decide to stop. Keep buying new jeans without making a big deal about it if the old clothes get tight. NEVER suggest a diet. Eat your own tongue first.
Have PLENTY of food on hand, all sorts of stuff. If there is some food you hear your adopted person talk about having no control around, maybe skip that thing unless you want to only hear about how bad they feel after they eat it all, again. Don’t keep track of what they do eat. Never say something along the lines of, “Boy, I never met anyone who could eat two pizzas before!” How much or how little another person eats is not your business. But having food available is.
Do you know the definition of orthorexia? It’s an unhealthy focus on eating in a healthy way. Being adopted can be exhausting in and of itself—all that why did she leave me free-floating anxiety in the secret recesses of the mind and body—and feeding an exhausted body can be like frosting a hot cake, a seemingly impossible task. Just know we, your adopted person and I, are perhaps trying to be perfect or to at the very least just trying stay alive. You don’t have to do anything about this, but awareness is a powerful tool because then empathy has a seat at the table.
Go dig a hole in your backyard. Work on digging this hole for a year. Hire a team of diggers if your arms or shovel are too short. Just keep digging. After a year, throw a hamburger into the hole. Can you hear the burger hit bottom? This is what it can feel like when you are adopted and you are hungry and have a burger.
Know that sometimes when an adopted person looks like they are eating too much or too little, chances are good it’s not really about food for them. It’s about hunger. Imagine if when the Little Dutch Boy tried to plug the dike with his finger he discovered the hole was much, much bigger than he had imagined. Oh, the panic! Maybe if he had a triple scoop of ice cream it would take his mind of the fact his world was flooding!
Maybe your adopted person reads this list with you and are like, “What the hell? I have zero issues with food.” Check to see if they are holding a wineglass or a joint or are pulling out their eyebrows. If they are doing none of these things, that’s so cool. It’s also so cool if they are. At the end of the day, we’re just people who are eating to survive, and, if we’re lucky, we’re also eating for the sheer joy of it. Oh, the baddassery of walking down the streets of New York with an understanding friend and a slice in hand, watching the world go by as we chew.
