Ah, love and food. (I'll leave the sex out for now.)

Let's pan out for a minute, or should I say pan back, and explore the genesis of this complicated marriage.

We always ate supper together. Supper, not dinner. Dinner, in my father's parlance, was actually lunch. He is, at heart, a farm boy, who spent his formative years on a small farm in Mt. Pleasant, Ohio. I have never seen the place, but he has mentioned that it was quite idyllic--fruit trees, a few animals, lovely view. When I asked once where it was and expressed interest in seeing the place, Dad bristled, said it was a dump now. So much for revisiting family history.
What my mother cooked for supper changed over the years. We were raised on classic American cuisine, but each dish had a flair all its own. Spaghetti sauce made with ground beef, seasoned heavily with thyme and oregano, and cooked all day. My Grandmother's mac'n'cheese recipe, which had nothing to do with a roux or cheese sauce, but was constructed from layers of macaroni and shredded colby-jack and then flooded with milk (until you could see it coming up the sides) and topped with bread crumbs. Bake for one hour. Fucking nirvana in a casserole dish. Linguini with white clam sauce, a family staple. Lots and lots of lamb. My family was big on lamb, even moreso than beef. Leftovers were curried, made into sandwiches, or, in the case of my famously frugal-with-food mother, mixed all together (especially with that night's salad) and eaten while cleaning the kitchen, post-dinner.

AH! An epiphany. When I take the dishes into the kitchen post-dinner, I literally have to run out of the room or I'm hiding in the corner, scarfing down whatever is on the counters, on the stove...I'm grabbing a handful of pasta and dragging it through the leftover sauce in the pan, sprinkling that with parm crumbs on the chopping block and shoving it all in my mouth as the tomato juice slides down my stuffing hand and my chin. And then I'm doing it again. And again. I'm wondering if my lover in the next room is thinking about how quiet it is in in the kitchen. I bang a pot or two, run the water for effect and wash off my now sauce-covered mouth. It's official: I am my mother's daughter.

As the years wore on and my parent's love of cooking grew (today they have a collection of cookboooks that numbers in the hundreds), so too did my father's girth. He was always a large man, but by the time I graduated college, he was officially grossly obese. His dress shirts gapped at the buttons. XXXL was (barely) his size. He ate three, four portions at dinner, and, always the bread eater, slathered a quarter stick of butter+ on his bread every night.

But I get ahead of myself. I'm trying to tease out when I started realizing that food=love. I suppose my mother's faithfulness to keeping my father sated had something to do with it. The look on his face when she baked him that rare apple pie. Surely that was love. How my father once blamed my mother for his weight by saying that it was because she didn't get up and make him breakfast every morning. So, of course, she started making him breakfast every morning. And he was still fat. How every birthday, we got to pick a meal: my sister's was usually bbq, mine ran the gamut from my mother's chicken cacciatore to shrimp pasta with lemon cream. (Oh no, no fat in THAT.) My brother? I have no idea. I can only recall what he hated, food wise--eggs were a big one. And brussel sprouts. Surely it was love that made our parents want to celebrate our birthdays by pigging out on whatever our hearts desired. I mean, doesn't everyone do that?

But here was the rub: my father was merciless with his commentary about how we looked, what we ate, what we drank...for kids who didn't know what a hypocrite was but had an inkling of what it looked like (fat, balding, lumbering through life on rotting knees), his brand of hypocrisy was like an oil well percolating underground until, come the teen years, a geyser of resentment erupted in us that stuck to everything, everything. I can still recall isolated incidents from our childhoods that illustrate perfectly this wicked, painful double standard. Being yelled at for drinking too much grape juice and not enough water. Icy stares as I go back for more marshmallows to put in my cocoa. My brother, in the sole conversation that he's had with me about this, recounts a foggy story of eating ice cream--he remembers only that my father hit the bowl out of his hand , saying "you don't need that."

"The only thing I remember, really," said my brother, his voice dropping to an almost child-like tone, "was the sound of the bowl hitting the sink and what the ice cream looked like."

My sister won't talk about it, but I remember my father chiding her, telling her that she needed "that second helping like she needed a hole in the head." To this day, she's the only one who can call my father out when he's eating too much, when he needs that fourth helping like he needs a hole in the head.

"Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back," wrote Richard Hugo in "The Freaks at Spurgin Road Field".

I take great liberties here and amend that line to this: Isn't it wrong, the way the mind moves for fat.