The Trap of Shoulding All Over Yourself and Your World and the Hunger Ritual

I think people who aren’t adopted are sometimes envious of what they see as freedom of an adopted person’s life: we, the adoptees, get to invent ourselves. We’re not strapped to a narrative we can’t question (these are your parents; this is your heritage). What a luxury to have no idea who your parents are, if that’s the case for you. What freedom! You can be anyone, you lucky duck, non-adoptees sometimes think about adopted people.

For me, the trap of should sounded like this: I should be somewhere else. I should be with other people. I should be a different person.

I didn’t find freedom in not knowing my roots. I found anxiety, a feeling of worthlessness, and the sense of being or having a compass with no arrow.

Part of this had to do with struggling with hunger and satisfaction. It’s difficult to move on with your day when breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks don’t hit or fill some sort of spot/longing/need. I think I learned to distrust nourishment from the start—someone who was not my mother was feeding me liquid that was not made by a human body and was coming out of something that was not my mother’s breast. People with COVID talked about losing their sense of taste and smell while they were ill. What a different experience eating became for them! Is it even eating, really, if you can’t taste or smell the piece of toast? That’s more about doing an action (chewing and swallowing) to stay alive than it is to be part of the human race doing that cool thing called eating that brings so many different levels of pleasure, of satisfaction. I think drinking from a bottle while looking into the eyes of a stranger might be a little like that, like eating while having COVID. I was a fat baby, I’m guessing, because I kept hoping there was something else, something more, at the bottom of each bottle.

The best eating experiences I’ve had were when the food was cooked with love or by an Italian in Italy. That food was an expression of how I wanted to live. When I was eating a chicken dinner make by my daughter, I didn’t have any shoulds in mind because I was busy experiencing her presence and the food she had made. This was an entirely different experience than the one I have when shoving yet another bag of Skinny Pop into my face. My mind thinks about what I should be eating instead. I think I should be eating more slowly. I think I should be a different person, eating in a different way. I should not be me driving down the Mass Pike eating like I’m trying to put out a fire.

Why shouldn’t I be that person? Me? Myself? Anne? Driving down the Mass Pike eating like I’m trying to put out a fire? Because, uh, I am that person, so…

That’s where the work of Byron Katie comes in handy. It’s nice to have someone remind you to love what is.

I had this idea today while I was driving today from Maine to Massachusetts. What if when a baby comes to its new home, the (I want to say mother, but I know not every baby gets a mother) parent starts the Hunger Ritual that looks like this: after each meal (or before), the parent holds the baby and puts the baby’s hand on its own stomach with the parent’s hand on the baby’s hand, keeping it warm, keeping it company, saying, we are in this together. The parent says, This is your hunger. Listen to it. I am here to help you listen to it. I am here to help you feel safe with your hunger. I love you and I love your hunger. The parent rocks the baby, creating space in their own body for the baby’s hunger—the baby who will grow up into a child and then an adult and who might should all over themselves less if they are able to listen to their hunger without fear or without turning a deaf ear to it. If the parent makes space for the hunger of the baby, maybe the baby will learn to listen to their own hunger without feeling depressed or terrified or lost. Hunger is full of clues. How amazing to make space for this language! To listen to it. To give it room to exist.

That is all for now.

Thank you, Laura Foote, for the drawing I so cherish.