Dear Blog Readers,
Some stories arrive already knowing what they need to say. Adaeze’s is one of them. She writes about food as language, about love as obligation, about the particular silence that lives inside a family where certain things have no name. She does not ask for your sympathy. She asks, quietly and with great precision, that you recognize her. I do. I think you will too.
Be kind to yourself and remember to nourish your body, mind, and that place inside you that makes you who you are.
Your blog moderator, Kira
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The Pot on the Stove by Adaeze
My mother cooked every Sunday. Not because she enjoyed it, though sometimes I think she did, in the quiet early hours before the rest of us woke up. She cooked because that was the shape of love in our house. A pot of egusi on the stove meant she was thinking of us. Jollof rice meant she was happy. Pepper soup meant someone was sick or sad or needed pulling back from the edge of something. I learned to read her moods through what was simmering before I learned to ask her how she was doing.
I am thirty-four years old and I have not told her what happened to me.
I have thought about how to begin that conversation more times than I can count. I have rehearsed it in the car, in the shower, in the break room at work when everyone else has gone home. I have started sentences in my head that I have never finished out loud. The closest I came was two Christmases ago, when she handed me a plate and said you are getting thin, and I said I know, and we looked at each other for just a moment too long, and then my aunt called from the other room and the moment closed like a door.
I don’t blame her. I want to say that clearly, because I spent a long time thinking I did, and I have done enough work now to know that blame was just grief wearing a disguise.
What I know is this: in our house, food refusal was incomprehensible. It was not a thing that happened. You ate what was made. You finished your plate. You accepted seconds because to refuse was to say something was wrong with the food, and something being wrong with the food meant something was wrong with the woman who made it, and that was not a thing you said. Not out loud. Not in our family. Not in a Nigerian household in Scarborough where my mother had worked twelve-hour shifts to keep the lights on and still somehow had egusi ready by Sunday afternoon.
I understood all of this. I understood it in my body before I understood it in my mind. And still, something happened to me that I did not have words for, in a language that had no words for it anyway.
I was twenty-eight when it started. I had been promoted into a role I was not sure I deserved, managing a team of people most of whom were older than me, most of whom were white, most of whom had not said anything unkind but whose silences I had learned to translate. I was also, at that time, quietly and terrifyingly in love with my colleague Priya, which was not something I had a framework for, which was not something I had a name for yet, which was sitting in the centre of my chest like a stone I was pretending wasn’t there.
Control is the word people use. I have heard it in groups, I have read it in pamphlets, I have nodded along because yes, that is part of it. But control is too clean a word for what I was doing. What I was doing felt more like disappearing. Like if I could make myself smaller, take up less space, need less, want less, then maybe everything that was too large and too frightening would also somehow shrink. Maybe the stone would dissolve. Maybe I would become manageable. Maybe I would stop being so much.
It did not work. I want to tell you that because someone should.
What happened instead was that I got very good at performing fine. I got very good at the Sunday dinners, at the full plate, at the thank you Ma this is delicious, at the second helping accepted with a smile. I got very good at saving and hiding and calculating in ways I will not detail here because that is not what this is about. What this is about is the inside of it. The interior weather of those years. The way I moved through the world like a person in a film about a person, watching myself from slightly outside and above, thinking: she is doing well. Look at her. Nobody would ever know.
Priya figured it out before I did. Not the eating, not at first. The other thing. She said it plainly, in the parking garage after a work event, standing next to her car in the fluorescent light. She said I think you might be going through something and I don’t know what it is but I want you to know I see you. And I started crying in a parking garage at eleven o’clock on a Thursday night, which was not my finest moment, and she stood there and let me, and that was the beginning of my life changing.
I want to be careful here because this is not a love story, or not only that. Priya is important to this story because she was the first person who saw me when I had worked so hard not to be seen. But the work of recovery was mine. The groups I sat in, the facilitators who did not flinch, the women and men and people who said things I recognized even when the details were completely different from mine. That was mine. That happened inside me and it changed the furniture of who I am.
What I have now, six years later, is not a resolution. I do not have a tidy ending. My mother still cooks on Sundays. I still go. I still eat, really eat, and I still notice when I don’t want to and I breathe through it and I eat anyway, because that is what my recovery looks like on an ordinary day. Priya and I have been together for four years. My mother knows, though we have not had the conversation, because my mother is not a woman who needs a conversation to know a thing. She set a place for Priya at Christmas dinner without being asked. That is the language she has. I am learning to accept it as enough.
I have not told her what happened to me. I might, someday. I am practicing the sentences.
What I want to say to anyone reading this who also grew up in a house where food was love, where your body was a communal thing, where there was no map for what you were experiencing because the map hadn’t been made for people who looked like you or came from where you came from:
You are not the first. You are not alone. The fact that there was no word for it does not mean it wasn’t real.
It was real. You were not making it up. And you do not have to have it all figured out before you walk through a door and sit down in a room with other people who are also figuring it out.
That room exists. I sat in it. It changed my life.