There is a song at the climax of Stephen Sondeim’s musical, Into the Woods, called Children Will Listen. It talks about how you protect your child from the world and still prepare them for it. How do you warn them, without scaring them too much? I have spent much time over the past month mulling over my early years. It started with that pivotal story that I described in my last blog entry of when I was five and my Dad pulled me over to show how I wasn’t fat to my uncles. You already know from reading my last blog entry that I wasn’t fat, but my Dad was already acting as if I was.
By the time I was seven years old, issues of overeating had already entered my psyche. I wrote a poem for my mother during the fall of that year. It was entitled “Thanksgiving Day.” The paper, which I still have, is appropriately decorated and colored with pilgrims and turkeys, but the end subject is shocking. See if you agree:
“Thanksgiving is a special day
A day of fun and such
The only trouble we may have
Is it we eat too much”
There it was in black and white. The attitudes toward food had officially entered my brain by the age of 7. Yet, I was still not fat. It then became like a self-fulfilling prophesy. The messages of “don’t eat that,” “you’ll be fat,” and the likes continued on and on. I was an average size until right before puberty, then I started the deadly combination of hormonal changes and teenage defiance. I became fat. But I don’t want to dwell on this because it is not important. The important part is coming.
Have you ever had an epiphany moment? A moment where, as you go about the course of your day, all of a sudden, things become crystal clear. I recently had one of those moments. It came about as I processed something that I had discussed with Jenny. This food obsession was not originally mine. It was thrust upon me by other people’s obsession with thinness. I was surrounded by messages regarding food from a very young age and it became mine, but I did not initiate it. Furthermore, after embracing it from that influence, the course of the next 42 years of my life was influenced by someone else’s issues. Pardon the language here, but what the hell? As I thought more about this, I quickly realized that my dad’s and his family’s obsession with thinness and food were their obsession, NOT MINE. My issue came when I started to use it as my friend and I certainly need to work on that, but FOOD IS NOT MY ISSUE!
I cannot tell you how freeing that moment was! All of a sudden, I didn’t feel crazy. I understood and then I got mad. Not a bad angry, but mad at the idea that someone else’s agenda had influenced the way that I was judged by others and myself in such a profound way for so many years. Forty two years is a long time! At that moment, I decided that it was a good run, but now it was time for me to deal with turning this thing around. Who knew? Take a look at the lyric of Stephen Sondheim’s Children Will Listen with me
Careful the things you say
Children will listen
Careful the things you do
Children will see and learn
Children may not obey, but children will listen
Children will look to you for which way to turn
Go learn what to be
Careful before you say "Listen to me"
Children will listen . . .
It’s true, isn’t it? What I did was listen and see and learn. I never thought that it could be wrong because I thought that there was something wrong with me. You know, I feel better. Now I need to find a way to be my own influencer and reverse the affects on my poor and patient body. I will be going about things one step, one minute, one hour, one day at a time. Always knowing that my resilience will carry me along the journey. Thanks for joining me.
