My mom is turning seventy in a few months. And increasingly, I find myself worrying about her eating habits as if she were a teenage girl. I don’t really know how to handle this.
She’s a beautiful woman, has been all her life, and in many ways has relied on this fact--once she discovered it--to shore up an ego that was reduced to tatters by a very traumatic childhood. We’re quite close, though we don’t get the chance to see each other as often as we’d like, and over the last fifteen years or so she's talked to me a lot about her changing body and how she’s supposedly come to terms with it. To hear what she says directly about the issue of aging, it might sound like everything’s ok.
However.
The subject of food, and whether she's being "good" or "bad", comes up more and more often in conversations related to her mood. I should mention that my mom's an outstanding, health-conscious cook and I’ve never seen her eat junk food in my life, except under duress when nothing else was available, so being “bad” implies what she considers to be overindulgence in foods that in and of themselves are healthy. Say, nibbling on nuts, or cheese. Or having an extra glass of wine (she doesn’t have an alcohol problem). My mother is thin. Very thin. She has a thicker waist than she used to, but she’s a seventy-year-old woman, for crying out loud. She was fixated on weight even when she was younger, though; I’ve never seen her exhibit behaviour I would associate with a real eating disorder, nor would she even officially go on diets, but she’d make deprecating comments about her body all the time. In one childhood memory that makes me cringe, I remember asking her how you could tell whether you were overweight, and she pinched the one inch of pinchable stuff on her forty-something-year-old belly and said “this is getting to be too fat”.
She’s admitted to me (abashedly) that she’s always had trouble relating to overweight women, ascribing it to the fact that her abusive mother was obese. And I’ve always been very conscious that she values the fact that I'm thin as well, though this was never expressed through negative comments, but rather through pseudo-positive ones like “you’re looking good, you’ve lost weight since the last time I saw you”... which I managed to put a stop to at a certain point by telling her that if anything, I was worried about being underweight. Not entirely true: it’s hard to get past a lifetime of conditioning, and though I rationally know that it would do me good to put on a couple of pounds, when I do it makes me irrationally unhappy. Like mother, like daughter, which is one of the reasons all of this irks me, because I don’t want to be acting like my mom when I reach seventy.
You see, when she’s being “good”--and many aspects of her daily life are a constant battle against entropy and depression--she seems to eat less and less. I started to notice because when I visit my parents these days, I’m hungry all the time. The portions at supper are lovingly prepared, but tiny. My dad fixes himself something for lunch, as do I; she doesn’t. And her breakfast is a half a cup of yogurt with a little granola. Ok, people often eat less as they get older, fine. But I really think she’s often hungry. You can hear it in the almost erotic detail she uses when describing food. You can see it in the way she eats when she’s decided to let herself “indulge” a little, the visible effort at self-control, and worst of all, the look of guilt. At feeding herself.
This all makes me unutterably angry. I only get to see my mother twice a year, and that’s not enough to assess whether my feeling that she’s not eating enough is justified, but I CAN say that her feeling that she eats too much is unjustified; all one has to do is look at her. I’ve tried to confront her about it on various occasions, with varying levels of diplomacy or bluntness. She's responded in different ways, but overall the sense I get is that she’s touched by my concern, agrees she shouldn’t beat up on herself too much, but doesn’t think I really get that staying thin is a big struggle when you’re older, and that she’s just trying to take care of herself. In other words, the idea of ceasing to worry so much about a few extra pounds (which are in no way a detriment to her health) is simply off the table. No pun intended.
I’m not sure what my dad thinks of all this; I'd like to talk to him about it, but our opportunities for private conversation are practically nil. And I'm also afraid that if I keep harping on the issue with her, she’ll a) decide food is a taboo subject with me and b) see it as her daughter saying "you're an old lady, no one’s going to consider you attractive anymore, it’s ridiculous for you to care so much about your appearance". Which of course is NOT what I mean, but it makes me mad that she's been obsessed with body image her whole life and shows no signs of letting up, even now that the laws of nature are making it impossible for her to like what she sees unless she changes the way she looks at herself. It makes me mad that someone who takes so much pride and finds so much creative pleasure in feeding others, as an expression of love, should be dosing that love out to herself in teaspoonfuls. And aside from being mad, I'm worried.
She’s coming to visit soon. Suggestions?
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Both of my grandmothers had issues with eating until their end of life. Watching them, I learned that it is a mixture of worrying about aging and kind of being in denial of it, or certain parts of it and also trying to maintain a sense of femininity. As a woman gets older, it becomes difficult to preserve the things one may have relied on to feel confident, such as conventional beauty or delicacy. Because we are feminists and from a different generation, it can be hard to relate to an older generation with very different, very repressive gender roles, but I feel like the argument can be made that any woman, regardless of when she grew up, can see through the bullshit of patriarchy.
I tried to impress on both of my grandmothers who were in very different situations in the old age that they had earned a right to not have to care so much about certain things. I reminded both of how beautiful they were in youth and how hard they had worked as mothers, the whole time maintaining an image of socially constructed female beauty. Sometimes, this was enough for them to sit back and enjoy food and wine, and sometimes it wasn't, depending on mood.
I, like most women, can relate a lot to this post. My mother also has had issues with eating and takes a lot of pride in her thinness. She also makes a lot of self-deprecating comments. I know that she values thinness, I however, am not thin so I have gotten the brunt of a lot of her fatphobia.
I think that for your mom, there probably isn't much you can say that won't come out as your a and b senarios. All you can do is continue to let her know you love her and find her inner and outer beauty beautiful.
What you CAN do is that if you decide to have kids (or have them already... or have kids that have kids...) or are around children at all, is not self-deprecate and make sure that you are living a healthy lifestyle and telling the boys and girls around you that you feel that they are beautiful and healthy (especially when they exhibit beautiful emotions, ideas, etc).
I am sorry for your frustration and hope you find peace of mind.
Much Peace and Love.
I don't have much advice for you beyond continue your efforts to challenge your mother's beliefs about bodies and eating when the come up. Also, do your best to be an example of healthy eating and body image when you can.
To be honest with you, this post scared me. I have had eating issues for as long as I can remember and they sometimes completely exhaust me. I am always looking forward to some day when they will no longer be a factor in my life. But from reading this post I have been pressed with the seriousness of dealing with things now so that I am not still dealing with them in my 70s....
many aspects of her daily life are a constant battle against entropy and depression . . .
This line stood out for me in your post. Have you considering getting your mother to a doctor and having her evaluated for depression? Clinical depression in the elderly is extremely common, and vastly under treated. Many people see depression as an inevitable part of aging, but it doesn't have to be. There are effective treatments available. Also, many medications can cause depression (such as some drugs used for high blood pressure, antacids, and hormone replacement therapy)
Many older people don't want to acknowledge symptoms of depression for fear that they will seem weak. And your mother's obsession with food could be a symptom of depression. From personal experience I can say that a friend with an eating disorder has more trouble controlling it when he is depressed.
I don't know how receptive your mom would be to this, but maybe if you get her doctor on your side? Or if you could have your dad or someone she trusts (like her minister or maybe someone else of her generation) talk to her?