On Feeding Yourself While Adopted
I didn’t realize how many rules or habits that follow some kind of rule I had around food until I gave up caffeine. Holy cow.
Drink coffee in the morning so you won’t be hungry.
Drink matcha in the mid-morning so you still won’t be hungry.
Drink Diet Coke with lunch so you won’t eat so much.
Have an iced tea in the afternoon so you won’t have the munchies.
Wake up and repeat.
Here is the rule: don’t weigh more than 144. Who made this rule and why? Well, obviously I made the rule since it’s my body, but it also feels like it wasn’t a rule that was set for a good reason except for the fact that I weighed 144 as a senior in high school, I think. Of course, at that time, I would have loved to have weighed less, but I was a girl who loved to eat. Maybe 144 felt like a safe number. That’s how much you weighed when you were young, so that’s how much you should weigh when you’re older and forever after. It’s safe.
When I wrote to the adoption agency in my twenties and got some identifying information about my first mother, I learned she weighed 160. That felt like someone put my oxygen into my tank. 160? Really? My mom was thinner than that, thinner than I was. My goal was to fit into my mom’s jeans. Never mind that she was 5’7” and I was 5’10”. Never mind that she was narrow where I was strong. She weighed 137 when she was feeling good about herself, and so that number felt magic to me. Like a supposed-to number.
I got to 134 for a while when I was in college in Los Angeles, but that took a lot of work and hunger, but that was temporary. Mostly I’m not good at starving myself. Partly it’s because I ran, and running made me hungry, and partly it’s because I have the genetics of hearty German stock who are calorie burners and good eaters.
I have considered myself as someone with no eating issues for at least a decade. I never put on a list of goals “lose weight”. I thought I let myself eat whatever I wanted. I thought I let myself eat a lot. But when I gave up caffeine and was faced with the hunger I’d been muting all these years with adrenaline and cortisol, I realized I was a walking eating disorder. My body had been telling me it was hungry, and I filled it with caffeine, putting it on high alert so I wouldn’t think about food.
This feels like a coping mechanism many adopted people might develop. It seems to me, when your system is fed in ways that are not predictable or maternal or whatever, that the first weeks or months or years of your life could set you up to be conditioned to look for ways to ignore or quiet your hunger or to panic and to eat and eat and eat because who knows when the next meal is coming and who will be feeding it to you.
I remember once as a teenager driving by a man who was raking his lawn and wondering if he was thinking about food. I wondered if he was like me, a bottomless pit that could eat the world if we let ourselves.
My sense is that this is my opportunity to start over and mother myself as far as food goes. Hello, little one, are you making those noises because you are hungry? Let me make you something special, something you will like, something that will nourish both your body and soul. Let’s find out what keeps your system running smoothly. Let’s find out what your tummy and your brain like. Let’s try all the proteins and fruits and vegetables and grains and see what makes you feel safe and loved.
I’m not going to weigh myself anymore because I’m eating and eating and eating, and I want to encourage that behavior. I want to eat until my digestive system finally feels seen and supported. I want to eat until my brain feels clear and steady. I want to find the right foods, the ones that make me feel like me. I don’t care how much I weigh. I want to know what size my body likes to be. I want to know how it feels to be real.
Eating a big bag of Skinny Pop and drinking a Diet Coke used to be a go-to meal for me. It filled me up without making any kind of commitment to treating myself like a real person with real needs. When I thought about what I was doing to my stomach or my brain by feeding them those things, they felt far from me. I wasn’t hurting me, I was hurting them. Maybe you have to be adopted to understand this. A distance can exist between you and your body when your body was given up by its mother, don’t you see? You’re a baby with people who have to feed you they best they can, but they didn’t create you, they don’t know you, and so you’re already in a place of confusion when it comes to being fed, and there you are as an adult, still having to feed this unwanted thing yourself. Here are two bean burritos with trans fat and a large Diet Pepsi. Be quiet. I don’t know how to take care of you, and I’m not sure I even care about you. Are you happy? Look! We get to go to the drive thru again! Why do you have diarrhea all the time? Why can’t you think straight? Why all the headaches? What’s wrong?
It’s like caffeine hijacked my sense of being my body as the coffee catapulted me into the stratosphere and made it easier not to deal with the whole what-to-do-with-this thing problem.
I don’t know. I’m still in the thick of it. It has been 15 days with no caffeine, and in some ways I feel like I’m living a different life. It’s like when you step off a skating rink and take off your skates and as you walk to the car on sneakered feet, everything feels different. Weird. Good. Grounded.
Full.
Joyce Maguire Pavao told me the fact that I like to have two of things that are important to me is an adoptee thing—we like to have a backup in case we lose one. Somehow I have two blogs. The other is the Adoptee Dispatch on Substack. Mostly I post different things on the two sites, but this one’s on both because I wanted to give it room to breathe.
The photo is my inside my fist mother (she’s on the left). This was before I knew about Taco Bell.
