Smithwick’s and Chips
I am a Lenten failure. Let me just get that out of the way. Unless Smithwick’s Ale and Lay’s Wavy chips are on my Lenten meal plan and count as lunch, then I am way off track.
Which I know I am. Because, God help me, if I am not right in church kneeling with a priest nearby or worshiping at my laptop altar, I cannot seem to hold onto anything but my compulsion for food that hurts me and makes me feel sick and hateful- to myself and others.
I am in a bad way. I am hoping it’s that menopausemonster rearing it’s monthly head and that this will pass and I will be able to hold onto hope again before I think too many more crazy thoughts. But in the meantime I would not want anyone listening in on my internal dialague. I can’t tell which comes first- the crazy thoughts or the crazy eating, but they sure as hell go together.
Why can’t I just say no like Nancy Reagan drilled into us for eight ineffective years? Say no to drugs. Say no to Smithwick’s at noon and yes to tea. I have found a favorite- cranberry apple zinger. Nice and sweet with a little bite to it. But when I drink it now I feel all depressed and miss my blogging back in November when I truly believed that tea and blogging would help me save myself. Now I don’t know what would be more compelling to me than my bad eating- maybe it’s the self-hate I’m addicted to- not the food. Maybe it’s not the donuts but the painful indigestion and self-loathing, the punishing it provides, the familiar feeling of failure and powerlessness and if only…. The hope of waiting- knowing that someday, when—something or other finally happens- my life will change and I will be the healthy whole person I have always secretly known I could be. I’ve been waiting like this for as long as I’ve had the ability to think such thoughts. Most definitely since first grade when I realized my whole life would be wonderfully different if Mrs. Rye my first grade teacher, the Baptist minister’s wife, would just adopt me- take me home and be her gentle, quiet, steady self for me. I followed her around like a puppy- around the classroom, stood next to her instead of playing when she had playground duty, ate my lunch in my classroom, brought my paper to her desk first, finsished first, worked the hardest, volunteered to go get the milk, empty the trash, erase the boards, walked the long way everywhere I needed to go, huffing and puffing my chubby little self up the hill past her husband’s church hoping to catch a glimpse of her, have her see me out there not looking like I was looking for her.
I was so manipulative already in first grade. Already perfecting my good girl persona, my “let me help you” self. Knowing, without knowing I knew, that looking needy would turn people away, but that being smart and good and kind and helpful and never saying what I really wanted was the route to maybe getting a little bit of what I needed.
What is it that I need now? I am not in first grade, there’s no Mrs. Rye out there to make my life better, to model something I knew I was missing. Whatever that was I was looking for then I am not going to find now. And yet I know, in my heart of hearts, I am still waiting for it in some way. I don’t know what I think I’m doing when I eat. What hole I’m trying to fill, what sin I am trying to punish, what flag I am trying to wave, but it is not getting me anything that I want. Quite the opposite. Or do I not really know myself. Am I so unconscious that some part of me is getting exactly what I want? Am I that badly damaged? How do I make myelf whole??
I know this beer is not the way, though I love the taste of it in my mouth. It’s bitterness. I feel very masculine when I drink it. I’ve loved beer since I was a little girl. It was a huge honor whenever my father would let me sip some Budweiser from his can. I remember when I was very little and my dad was sitting around drinking with some of his friends who I found so scary. I was loitering, trying to take in their conversation, enjoying the smell of the outdoors on them, loving the way they laughed their huge loud laughs and told and retold their funny work stories. I remember my dad once gently putting his arm around me and pulling me into their circle and asking if I wanted some of his beer and I knew it was a great privilege and the men were all watching and I sucked down a big gulp and I hated the taste on my tongue- it wasn’t at all what I’d expected but I knew to moan and lip my lips and make a happy sound and ask for more and get a big laugh out of all the big men and for years to come I was proud that I learned young to drink beer like a man. I learned to drink like a man, eat like a man, burp like a man, fart like a man. My 3 older brothers had nothing on me. It would make me glow with pleasure when one of my parents would say oh, she can keep right up with the boys. As if eating, drinking, burping and farting big, are goals to aspire to!!
And here I am in my family of new boys. Once again feeling so alien and yet knowing exactly how to make myself fit in the place I find myself.
Maybe I haven’t always been looking for a mother as much as I’ve been looking for womanhood. For some idea of how I could be a woman in the world. Not how to mold myself to fit where I find myself, but how to be myself in a world I so often feel I do not fit, where I feel foreign.
How do you find these really basic things when you’re almost 50? Therapy was great for the first 20 years, but you know, at some point I got the picture that what I was missing wasn’t something I was going to find talking to someone. What does that leave??
Time to eat some food to soak up the Smithwick’s.
I will keep looking for today’s miracle. I have a sneaking suspicion it would have been easier to recognize if I weren’t slightly foggy with beer…
1:08:53 PM 
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