Narc Flavored Malnutrition

Jonsi's got a fantastic post up about the role of food as a weapon and control tactic in the Narc Parent's arsenal, specifically relating to her NMIL and how she's used food and body image related to weight to hurt and abuse her children, both as children and now as adults.  It's a good read and I highly recommend it (and Jonsi's always in-depth non-ACoN point of view) to anyone who is an ACoN or a parent.  Hell, I'd recommend Jonsi to anyone just looking for a good read!

I responded to her post that I don't have a lot of of the issues that I hear other ACoN's talking about when it concerns food, and I was referring to some of these more common problems that I've heard about:
Using food as a comfort/replacement for affection.
Overeating as a compensatory indulgence in order to feel full in at least some way.
Undereating or dieting unhealthily in order to gain the approval of others (especially N's.)

(And please, please, please don't infer that by my saying that I don't have these particular issues that I am somehow judging people who do or that I think I'm in some way better than or less than people who do struggle with these very real issues.  It would break my heart if you thought that, cause it's just not true.  I have puh-lenty other issues, trust me.)

In that comment on her post, I went in to some detail about how I have a DH who does feel love most easily through acts of service, and that my cooking for him has been a good part of our loving relationship.  He has food issues from childhood, mostly along the lines that his mother is a terrible, horrible cook.  I'm sorry, but there's just no other way to describe the alleged food that she makes.  Everything starts with a can of generic cream of something soup and ends with mayonnaise; everything.  Here's a good example:  When DH and I had been living together for about six months, he got home from work as I was making dinner.  He's drawn like a magnet to pots and pans on the stove, and he lifted the pot on some potatoes I was boiling to make mashed potatoes.

"What's this?" he said.
"Potatoes," said I, "What's it look like, silly?"
"But these are starting to get mushy," he said.
"Duh," I said, "they're supposed to.  They'd be kind of hard to mash if they didn't!"
"These are for mashed potatoes?" he asked, seriously confused.
At this point, I was starting to get pissed.  He was taking up far too much space and time in my little kitchen with his silly questions.  "How the hell else would you make mashed potatoes?" I asked, tersely, I'm sure.
And this was his answer, "Well, they come in a box and then you add water."
"Have you ever had mashed potatoes made with real potatoes?"  I asked.
"I don't know," he said.

So... the moral of the story is that DH likes him some Vanci home cooking, the kind that starts with real food and includes all the major food groups and ways of preparing dishes and is informed by a knowledge of spices and seasonings and doesn't involve a whole bunch of processed junk thrown into a casserole dish and covered in potato chips.  Or mayonnaise.

I shop and cook and he does laundry and handles maintenance.  It's an act of love for me to put healthy meals on the table and it's an act of love for him to make sure that there's oil in my car or that my pants aren't wrinkled on the hanger.  It's part of a good relationship, not the manipulation tool that Narcs seem to like to make it.
As I said in my comment over in Jonsi-land (which is a rather nice place to hang out, btw,) one of my DD's has a serious disease that involves a food allergy, and most of what she's reactionary to can be avoided by avoiding processed foods.  It's not easy, especially on a budget, to cater to her needs, but it's necessary.  So, every meal that she - and therefore we - eat has to be cooked at home from scratch in order to keep her healthy.  Food in this context takes on a different meaning as an act of love.  I prepare food for her (not separately, we all eat the same things but our meals are designed around what she can have,) as an act of service and love to keep her healthy and to provide something that is not easily gotten anywhere else.

It took me a long time, though, to see food preparation for my family in this light, because one the ways that the Narcs screwed me up with food was to make the kitchen my 'job.'  Indefinitely.
I believe in the value of involving children in the household as a means of teaching both responsibility and self-care, and my DD's have had age appropriate chores from toddler-hood.  When they were three the chores were simple things like picking up their own toys (with help, of course,) and putting them away.  Now that they're older, they do their own laundry and have one household chore a day.  Dishes or vacuum, those are the chores now, and they rotate back and forth on a daily basis.  Then we all pitch in for the weekend deep clean.  No big deal, right?

But I, as a child from about eight on to the best of my memory, I was responsible for dishes and the kitchen. Every single day.  NSis mowed the lawn and worked on her tan in the Summer and her chores switched around in the winter among various things - sweeping or maybe vacuuming.  I can't remember what she did, but I know that it wasn't dishes.  Cause, you know, I was doing those.  GCYB usually had physical chores, being a boy and all.  I, though, I did the dishes.  Eventually it became my job to cook, first for myself and YB, then for the family.  So, obviously after years of being forced to cook for everyone and forced to clean up after everyone, I saw this as a tedious chore.  It took a long time for me to understand that love really can the secret ingredient, and what turned the corner for me on that was DH's absolute JOY in my meals.  He'd get so excited - "Are these real green beans!?!" he'd ask, "they're not mushy!" having never really tasted anything but green beans from a freezer bag or a can before.  My personal favorite: "Wow, I didn't even know there was a spice called marg-oh-ram!"

And the gratitude that he displayed and modeled for the DD's, man, that was my first experience with being appreciated for my giving of my time, talent and food.  It was a change from the, "Maybe you should try cooking it longer" comments and the, "I guess I just don't like chicken anymore."  So ingrained was my 'job' of feeding my family that for the last five years prior to NC that on both Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, I packed up my entire kitchen and hauled all the food (that I'd paid for) to my NParent's house and prepared all of the dishes apart from one or two for the entire family and anyone they'd seen fit to invite.  They live fifteen miles out of town in the middle of nowhere, and we have serious winter and bad roads here, but it was my job to bring the feast to them.  And my kids were 9 and 11 when I got away.   I usually ended up helping with the dishes, too.  Who does that?  More importantly, who expects that?

I'm so glad that I didn't let them permanently ruin cooking for others for me, because I am a good cook and I've found that cooking for others is something that I really enjoy doing.  It's always an act of love for me.  In fact, if I could, I'd invite you all over right now to a dinner party and I'd go all out to make you a nice, healthy, loving meal which we'd all enjoy together.  Doesn't that sound like fun?

I thought about Jonsi's post throughout the day, though, and I came across something else that it brought up for me, and this is a bit uncomfortable as I'm going to talk a little about sexual abuse, so I can understand if you need to check out now.

I have a lot of blank spots and shady memories from my childhood, and some of them have cleared up in the last five years of LC/NC.  A lot have had to do with the sexual abuse I endured from my father and the fact that my mother had knowledge of it and allowed (encouraged?) it to happen or at the very least refused to compromise her lifestyle to protect me from it.

At around nine or ten years old, in the fourth grade, I started gaining weight.  Some of this I think can be attributed to the onset of puberty, which was pretty early for me.  Some of it though, I can now see was a defense mechanism.  My four years older NSis was shaped like a woman at that point and I remember talk in the NFOO about how our bodies were changing.  Not nice talk.  Weird, weird comments about how shapely my legs were becoming or how full her chest was.  Weird, weird, gross, nasty stuff.  I remember becoming distinctly aware of attractiveness in a new (to me) way.  Attractiveness would make me more of a target.

I also remember gaining weight and thinking, "Good.  Now I'm not attractive."  What I couldn't really voice and haven't really acknowledged until now is that the unspoken next part of that conversation went something like, "Maybe now he'll stop touching me."  I distinctly remember discovering my curves over the next few years and hiding them to the best of my ability - not out of fear of being made fun of at school, but so that ENF wouldn't see them.
Ugh.  That's fucked up.  Sooooooo fucked up.

I also remember that when I did become uncomfortable with my weight - around 12 - I expressed a desire to lose weight to NM.  And she put me on Slim Fast, quite possibly one of the worst nutritionally deficient starvation diets that anybody could be on, especially a 12 year old.  My gawd, I can't even imagine.

I'm sure it was a punishment of some sort, a manipulation of my fragile psyche and body.  I don't know what she got out of it, but I sure didn't lose any weight.  (That happened when I got out of their house at 17.)  I do remember, though, that we suddenly started going out to dinner at restaurants a lot, something that we'd previously not done, and that when the waitress came to take our orders, ENF took great pleasure in informing the server when it came to my turn to order that, "She won't have anything, she's on Slim Fast."  What a horrible thing to do, what a horrible embarrassment to feel (for me and the server.)

I look at this now and I wonder how I have ever had a healthy relationship with food or my body.  But a big part of my healing journey has been to accept that I am lovable and I am good.  My body is only the vessel, and I take care of the vessel as best I can.  What's really helped on the body health side of things has been taking care of the internal beauty.  Once I started getting that dialed in, the physical part seemed to follow and I fit my own standards for what I want to be physically.  All in all, I wouldn't change a thing.

And that's a bona-fide miracle.
Thanks again to Jonsi for bringing it up.

Love,
Vanci