It Happened To Me: My Mom's Food Issues Became My Eating Disorders And Lasted 30 Years - Now I'm Trying To Save My Son From This Horror

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Hi there, Thursday that feels like it should be Friday, or even Wednesday, but NOT Thursday (agree?),

The introductory note to today's highlighted new AJPT feature comes from the writer, Dana, herself. So take it away Dana and I will see you all in the comments for our related and unrelated conversations, as usual. I love doing that. (It's also the perfect procrastination tool when I have my own writing to do – like right now. So anything and everything you want to talk about there at the moment, I am so into.) And I love Dana for giving you all this story!

-Jane

I wrote an article about having a chin tuck done when I was 46 years old. I want my experiences to help others feel not so broken and alone. Here is another one. -Dana

By Dana Inskeep

I started developing an eating disorder in high school. Easy enough to do when you spend most of your time feeling like a fat loser with no friends… especially since I had undiagnosed ADHD, which didn’t exist in the 1980s. (Ok, it did, but mere mortals like me didn’t know what it was, and the predominant parenting style of the time was “children should be seen and not heard.”)

My tendencies toward being emotionally hypersensitive (I took EVERYTHING personally), impulsive (I often acted before I gave it any thought), constantly needing mental stimulation (I could only focus on my homework with the TV on), hating most fabric blends (that needs no explanation) — all signs of neurodivergence — were dismissed as me being annoying, bratty, negative, and difficult.

Apparently, children with ADHD are 20% more likely to develop an ED because of those things. Nature versus nurture? Research is unclear. But if you factor in the influences of my family and pop culture, I hardly stood a chance.

At first it was secret binge eating, but that made me rapidly gain weight and stoked the fire of self-loathing. Once I got to college and was introduced to self-induced vomiting my sophomore year, bulimia was born. It seemed logical to just get rid of the evidence, so to speak, and, while not eliminating it completely, it definitely slowed down weight gain.

My fucked up relationship with food began when my siblings and I were part of the “clean plate club” — no dessert until after all of our dinner was consumed. And that’s all it took for me to eat every bite of food on my plate, because what was the point of eating if there’s no dessert?

So I’d eat more food than necessary to get the food I actually wanted to eat while still bamed myself for decades for struggling with my weight.

Also, no food was ever to be wasted in the Walker household. (I’m sure many of you can relate to this.) Throwing food away was an absolutely SHAMEFUL practice only employed in the case of 1) it has gone so bad there’s fur on it or 2) there was actually no second reason to throw food out in my childhood home. (The five second rule stood fast…if it hit the floor and you picked up it fast enough, you were still gonna eat it.)

1990, Senior in high school, prime “fat girl” insults still being hurled at me on a semi-regular basis

Anecdotal tangent: My brother, who absolutely despised carrots, would sneak them beneath the table, line his pockets with them, and then excuse himself to the bathroom. *FLUSH* Bye bye, carrots!

He doesn’t recall how long he was able to get away with that…I suspect he only did that once, but since I idolized him when I was a child, in my mind it’s this legendary drawn-out ruse he performed from ages six through 12.

And when I was a little kid, I never questioned anything. Being the youngest of three made me eager to please when I wasn’t busy pissing everyone off just for existing.

I was the third wheel, the “different” one — my brown eyed, dark brown-haired sister and brother passed for twins until they reached elementary school, whereas I had green eyes and reddish-brown hair.

This may sound ridiculous, but oh, how I longed to look like them just so I’d feel a sense of camaraderie. (I got my wish 40 years later — my sister and I look almost identical these days, except for our hair and eye color.)

And since I didn’t find food particularly offensive (other than certain vegetables and colored pasta — my mom insisted that it all tasted the same but I could tell the difference), it didn’t take much cajoling to get me to eat.

I was proud to be the one child that occasionally didn’t give my mom a hard time about the meals she worked so hard to make us. I would even eat the cabbage part of the stuffed cabbage that was a staple for our Polish/Irish family, while my brother and sister would loudly protest about how slimy and gross it was.

Thinking back on it…God, we could be such raging assholes to the woman who was just trying to make sure we were getting some decent nutrition and weren’t eternally constipated from lack of fiber.

Anyway, the reasoning behind the family food rules makes sense to me now that I’m an adult.

My mother grew up in North Philadelphia, the middle daughter of a single mom who worked at a fast food place called Horn & Hardart. As the family lore goes, my grandma was the sole supporter of her three daughters, her two sisters and their “lazy, good-for-nothing” husbands.

My grandmother wasn’t a big fan of men in general — especially after my grandfather abandoned her, my mom, and her sisters when my mom was barely three years old — and she made no secret of it. (My dad has some amusing tales of her insults.)

There’s a lot more to that story, and I’ll tell you all about it sometime, but suffice it to say that my mom grew up in abject poverty …similar to the kind you read about in Dickens novels.

Here’s the clearest story I remember that illustrates just how poor her family was. She would come home from school and sleep through the entire weekend in her effort to avoid hunger pains, because there just wasn’t enough food to last an entire week. Even though my grandma worked in food service, she wasn’t offered the added benefit of bringing any extras home for her three children.

Food insecurity leaves a lasting imprint, and it ruled my mother’s parenting style. But I can’t say that my parents were the ones leading the charge in my awkward and anxious relationship to food — sweets in particular — or my terrible body image.

My father, who also has a sweet tooth, has always thought I’m beautiful no matter what I weigh, and even though my mom grew up underweight, she ended up with some major body image issues of her own…far too many to go into detail here, so I’ll sum it up with a tale she told me.

My mom’s younger sister was TINY. Like, petite as fuck. She probably never weighed more than 100 pounds her entire life, whereas my mother and her older sister both struggled with their weight along with my grandmother (who was able to escape that poverty level once her daughters were old enough to contribute).

The three of them had a tendency to carry extra weight in their later years, like most women do after experiencing things like creating entire other humans with their bodies or reaching menopause (the time in every woman’s life when shit really hits the fan).

But not my skinny little aunt. She could be a real pill and seemed to relish calling out when anyone messed up, particularly in the weight department.

Here’s what I heard many times while my mom was still alive. Shortly after her high school boyfriend, Billy — the man she planned to marry — died of lupus at age 19, she fled to Pasadena, California where her older sister and brother-in-law lived. In her grief she’d decided that she needed to escape the confines of Philadelphia for a few weeks…but ended up staying there for almost a year.

Upon returning to Philadelphia, she stepped off the plane (back then your family could meet you out on the tarmac, this would’ve been around 1963) and the first thing she heard was my aunt shrieking, “IRENE! YOU GOT SO FAT!!”

My mom’s high school graduation photo, 1961 … So, yeah. Add 20 pounds, she’s still not fat.

Everyone within earshot spun heads and craned necks to see who the circus fat lady was while my poor mother stopped dead in her tracks from sheer mortification.

“So fat” was a gain of about 20 pounds. My mom went on that trip the year after she graduated high school, so she was all of 20 years old and still thinner than I’ve ever been even with those extra pounds.

Seriously, my aunt was brutal. She could be fun sometimes, but compassion wasn’t her particular brand. While I can’t speak for my sister, she fat shamed me as much as she could until she died of pancreatic cancer at age 49…the same year I graduated from college, a full-blown bulimic.

Suffice it to say that my mom was working from a damaged manual when it came to parenting our eating habits, and she did the best she could with the information she had.

Fast forward 40 years, and here we are.