Ho Ho Horrors

During the course of a long, somewhat excruciating conversation with my mother recently, I found myself thinking differently about her struggle with my father's lifelong battle with weight and food addiction. We were talking about how Dad's addiction (I will frame it only that way, though I am afraid that Mom can't wrap her head around the concept) shaped how all of his children think about/act toward food, and how really, my mom was totally the opposite with her relationship to food--I told her that I could still remember how she would go a whole day without eating.

"I still do," she said quietly.

(Man, that stung.)

"And isn't it interesting, Mom," I said, "how you ended up marrying a person who challenges some of your very deepest fears every single day?"

I heard her let out a little laugh sound, not a full guffaw, but more like an acknowledgment laugh, a sound of comprehension.

"Yes, it is interesting," she said.


~~~

We had a visitor recently (I mentioned him in the last blog, Mr. Skinny Skinny) who brought all manner of terrible tempting food into the house. And I'm not talking a wheel of fine cheese, prosciutto, some first pressed olive oil from the Adriatic--no, he came fully armed with the kind of food that makes people like me hide in the closet in order to eat it.

Caramel HoHo's. Mega cheese mix, meaning a huge bag of cheeto/dorito/pretzel/sun chips all mixed together and sprayed for 10 full seconds with commercial grade day glo orange cheese powder. Orange Milanos. A 12 pack of coke. My cupboards hadn't seen that much partly hydrogenized trans fat hellaciousness since college.

S. feels compelled, whenever Giles (said houseguest) is around, to take care of him, i.e. never allow the mere possibility of one iota of discomfort to enter his psychic space. True, we are protective of him. His health has long been comprised, resulting in a string of what Giles refers to as "bonus years," and he can ill afford to lose weight. But S. also likes to use Giles as an excuse to indulge. When she quit smoking, the only exceptions to the quit rule could occur in one of three situations: if she was in Europe; if she was with Giles; and if someone/something very close to her died. We haven't been back to Europe in three years, she doesn't smoke with Giles because he smokes American Spirits and she doesn't like how strong they are, and, thankfully, no one's died since Mister Pancakes was killed by a raccoon two or so years ago, and that was the last time S. really smoked. I mean, smoked.

Now, instead of cigarettes, S. satisfies her oral fixation with yet another indulgence: brownies.

Seeing the load Giles brought with him strewn over the counter, I could not hold back the comments.

"Holy shit, it's cheese extravaganza!"

I take a hand full.

"What are you trying to do, make me weigh 400 lbs.?"

I slug a liter of water.

"Caramel Ho Ho's? What the hell is that?" I pick up the box, read the ingredients. "Beef fat," I say.

"Beef fat?" parrot S. and Giles, who has just chomped through his second ho ho.

"You won't eat anything that's a bottom feeder but you'll eat beef fat rolls?"

I was exaggerating--beef fat was just "one of four types of fat" and the one that jumped out at me first--but I couldn't resist that additional poke at Giles.

And I wanted a ho ho.

"I'm making brownies, honey, okay?" S. says suddenly, looking directly into my eyes. She knows well the seriousness of this proclamation.

And so I find myself in that moment again, the one where I'm faced with the choice of giving into eating and savoring however many brownies (or what have you) my little mouth desires or shutting down my myriad food sensors immediately, hanging the No sign, taking the whole IDEA of a brownie out of the picture. I can't eat that, and I certainly can't even think about trying to eat just a little bit of that.

I take the low road. "Yea brownies!" I smile back into S.'s eyes. Heading back to the kitchen. S. does a little brownie dance with a kick.

Celebration wins out. Giles hasn't been in town in six weeks, and when he does come down from Newcastle, he usually stays with another friend with a nice(r)? guest room set up. That other friend is out of town, so Giles has been here going on three days, a record. C

Celebrate! I want to eat brownies with these people that I love on this summer evening all buzzy in the sky and head. I tell myself that they're better than ho ho's but I'm still afraid that, in reality, brownies have more fat. (According to the nutritional info on the ho ho box, one serving of ho ho is three ho ho's. 38 g of sugar. That's over 10 teaspoons.)

The brownies emerge from the oven in their square pan and S. leaves them to cool a bit. I am not so patient. I dig in first, and too soon. But the corner is set, and holds an edge, just crisped on top with moist and crumbling hot chocolate goodness beneath. I eat one, then two, then half of three. I smoke a cigarette to stop my steady climb to ten.

The night after Giles leaves, I come home from work and join S. in the kitchen. Within minutes I realize that the brownie pan is gone. "What happened to the brownies?" I ask.

"I sent them with Giles," says S.

"Good call," I say. Then think of why and say "I was kindaof a freak about the whole junk food thing, wasn't I."

S. wrinkles her nose. "Yeah, you kinda were," she says.

"I was afraid of that," I say, exasperated with myself. My own obsessive thinking
around food showed its ass and I was ashamed. I'd been like a dog worrying a bone, except my bone was the presence of trigger foods in my kitchen, and those foods struck numerous fear chords in my orchestral heart.

I trust that there will be a day when "it's just not worth the psychic repercussions" will be enough to hold me back. This trust, in itself, is revolutionary.

Viva Revolution!