"i got this close" or "butterfingers"

i got this close to really thinking i was past all of my issues, and then my mom came back from china. and then we went to a play.

after the play, my mom and i were standing around, waiting for my aunt and uncle. all of a sudden, i heard someone say "nancy" and it was sheldon, the father of my childhood friend jenny. we were best friends in elementary school, partially because our parents were dating and more because we dominated the after-school program, SACC. jenny was bossy and i went along with her. and then for reasons i can't remember (maybe when i changed schools) we weren't friends anymore. i hadn't thought about her in years.

her dad looked at me and first commented on how tall i was, then asked what i had been doing, my brother. my mom explained about her time in china. i inquired about jenny and her brother. it had the makings of a slightly-awkward meeting of old friends trying to catch up in a minute or two. i was ready to say goodbye when sheldon looked at me and said, "you really look great. i mean, i'm really impressed. i remember once when jenny told me that you had eaten a pat of butter at a restaurant. it's funny but that has always been the thing i remembered about you."

then he left and my mouth was still hanging open. did he seriously just say that? i turned to my mom and aunt and uncle and said, "so all this time he was thinking i was a butter-eater?" what gives him the right to say that to me in front of other people?" my mom responded by asking me if i really had eaten the butter.

the answer is probably. when i was a kid, particularly around that time, i had some pretty strange eating habits. when i was five and my parents got divorced, i began eating to comfort myself, usually the foods that they wouldn't let me have, and usually foods that had a lot of fat in them. butter, bowls of melted cheese...i even used to suck on the paper towels that absorbed the grease from the bacon we cooked in the microwave. one time before my brother's boys scout box-car derby/potluck, my mom made potato salad with bacon in it and i made myself sick to the point of vomiting from ingesting bacon grease. i remember hiding the paper towels under my bed, right next to my mom's copy of "the joy of sex."

i also remember being reprimanded by a close family friend at one of my father's parties from cutting myself a large chunk of butter for a biscuit. "oh let her eat it," his brother said. "but she's gonna give herself a heart attack at age 7," he responded. this is crystal clear in my mind.

obviously there is a lot of shame about this in my mind. this does not seem like something a normal child would have done. i have spent many years of my life thinking that i could never, ever, ever tell anyone these deep, dark secrets. it's only recently that i have begun to look back into my life to see how hard that must have been for 5 year-old me, trying to navigate how life was going to work now that her angry father and alcoholic mother were not going to live in the same house.

i ate to comfort myself at this time. i ate because it was how i knew how to get attention, and how to shield myself from dealing with a lot of pain when i did not have anything or anyone to guide me through it. i still can't quite explain my choice of foods. this would be easier to write if i had just hoarded candy bars or potato chips (although i did binge on those things as well at different points) i might have eaten butter to rebel against my mother's food restrictions or maybe my growing body just craved fat. even today, after almost four years of a having a healthy relationship with food (thank you god), i still need to eat a lot of fat to feel full. of course, today this means avocados and peanut butter and bread drizzled with olive oil (again, thank god).

i have the fear that if someone were to hear all of this, they would be disgusted and not love me anymore. while i was traveling in bolivia, i had a very nice romance with a terribly, terribly sexy french-swiss man who told me over and over how absolutely beautiful i am and mentioned how much he wanted to see pictures of me as a child, to see how beautiful i was then. this made me feel anxious. like if he saw how i used to be, then he wouldn't love me in the present. i know this is in my head, and that it's mainly because of my own perceptions of what is acceptable to do and talk about. after a week of not feeling guilty (or rather noticing how often my impulse is to feel guilty), i'm feeling brave. i'm ready laugh at myself about my crooked childhood. i'm ready to recognize that all of that hardness is what makes me the honest, compassionate individual that i am now. the truth is that being an overweight child with a compulsive eating problem was not fun. now i'm hoping to make it funny. i'm ready to not be ashamed anymore.

haha, i used to eat butter as a child, and it's actually really funny that this man would carry that memory over so many years, just waiting to drop it and bring up shit from my past. later on, i thought i should have responded that the only thing i could remember about him was what a terrible temper he had and how his bald head would get bright red when he would scream at his kids or when he cut the tip of his own finger off while trimming bushes and drove himself to the hospital with jenny and i in the backseat, swearing all the way....

but somethings aren't appropriate for casual conversation. unless, karmically, you are ready to hear them and use them creatively.

one last story about butter. when i was running for student council in high school, my friend lindsey helped me to make campaign posters using ani difranco lyrics and black-and-white photographs. one of my favorites said, "gracy likes butterflies, but she'd love to be your school representative." a few days after i put the posters up, my friend emily ran over to me holding the poster. "you've been vandalized," she said, laughing. someone, a little punk kid who later on got tuberculosis, had put white-out of the "flies" part. "gracy loves butter." it said. i was horrified. i laughed. i hoped no one had seen it.

it's the truth though, i love butter. i cannot tell a lie.