Picking Up the Pieces: Stories
A Family Inheritance
Jun 21, 2010
by Patty West
My story of food issues has to do with my maternal family's extreme dysfunction. There is a long history of child prostitution and pornography. I didn't have to gradually develop food issues; my mother gave me food issues in her efforts to train me for my role in the family business. From a young age she withheld food and drink in order to force me to say my lines and be more compliant. For me my life was about feast or famine.
I eventually reached a point where I would only eat for my grandmother or my aunt. Then my mother managed to drug me at my aunt's house leaving only my grandmother as a safe source of food. When my grandmother became ill when I was in the 5th grade, I passed out at school and had to be force fed. I am uncomfortable eating leftovers even from my own fridge. I sometimes only feel safe eating out. Right now I only feel safe extremely fat because my family doesn't put you on film if you are out of shape. I actually prefer vegetables and fruit, but am eating fast food because part of me feels as though I might end up stuck in the family nightmare if I got skinny. I don't live anywhere near them, but planes, trains and automobiles mean that America is not too vast to make me feel insecure. I am certain my older brother is abusing his daughters, but since I don't live nearby nobody is interested. He is probably not making the same mistakes my mother made with me as far as dislocating joints or the time she nearly beat me to death at age 7, but I am certain that he is sexually abusing them. I can't prove anything and no one is even interested in investigating him. That is how our family gets by though. My extended family lied for each other. Since they were in on the abuse, they had alibis. Since the boys were used to molest the girls, if the girls told one story and the boys a different story, it became a he said, she said if there was any investigation. Basically I am waiting for society to catch up to reality. I am waiting for it to realize that entire families can be corrupt. I quit "hooking" for my family when my grandmother died my freshman year of high school. She had been the one they threatened to keep me in line. I chose the whole "death before dishonor" thing and they were raping my mother to try to bring me back into the fold. I am considered a monster because that didn't work and they had to force my older brother to join the Air Force to keep him from ending up in prison. I lacked a close attachment to the woman that broke nearly every bone in my body except my spine, go figure. She left me with my grandmother at every opportunity when I was a young child. I wasn't close to the woman that hated me. Once she was raped into handing me over to them, I was no longer "pure" enough for her to love. She couldn't understand me not sacrificing myself to save her. She never did understand that adults are supposed to protect the children by going outside the abusive families. My story is much longer than this, but basically for the eating portion of the disorder, I am prone to binge eating because of the "feast or famine" method I grew up with regarding food. I was either presented with food that was unsafe to eat or else safe food at infrequent intervals. I needed to eat as much safe food as I could when it was presented to me to get through the intervals when there wasn't any. Even as a baby I suspect my mother underfed me because I don't have the delicate build, as a medium boned girl I don't fall on the lower end of the weight chart. It doesn't help that I suffer from depressions where I lose my appetite completely and have awful flashbacks to the mistreatment by my family. They never went to prison. I am trying right now through therapy to escape the prison of my mind while staying under their radar enough never to get a visit from the gun toting maniacs I am related to by blood. Thankfully I have never had children to interest them.