I remember the exact moment when I stopped enjoying food.  I was 12, and had had the flu for two weeks. After two weeks with a raging fever—tossing, turning, sweating, and not eating—I woke up 15 pounds thinner.  The five foot three, 125 pound girl who looked back in the mirror was someone I had never seen. (I had been in the 90^th weight percentile for my age since I was 5, and when I went to bed with the flu I weighed 140.) Now this was not the moment when I first noticed my weight.  That had happened five years earlier when I was about 7. I was probably not as fat as I thought I was; I was simply not ectomorphic. Yes, I weighed 20 pounds more than most of my female classmates, but I was also quite a lot taller.  The reason I knew I was fat was that people commented on it, not just as an aesthetic handicap, but as a moral failing.  Like when our second grade teacher passed around a box of chocolates to a group of (maybe 15) of us, saying “take one”.  There were several layers of chocolates in the box, probably 40 in all.  So I took two.  Who ever heard of anyone taking one chocolate the size of your thumbnail? Even tv commercials tell you that. (“Betcha can’t eat just one.”) Anyhow, I was roundly excoriated by the teacher for being greedy, and my size was mentioned in the process.  Then there was the time I was eating a sandwich in the lunchroom next to a skinny athletic boy (we were about 9) and I said “I love mustard” only to be smarmily chastised by this boy who said “You’re not supposed to love food [insert critical parent type sneer]; you’re only supposed to love people.” I wanted to say that you could love both, that it really wasn’t the same kind of love, but could not get myself to speak up.  Even then, I knew that children didn’t appreciate nuance. But despite all this, and despite my sometimes going for weeks at a time without eating dessert or any type of sugary snack (I was able to discipline myself to do this by telling myself that eating sweets was “childish”), I never got any thinner and I couldn’t stop enjoying food.

          Until I saw what I looked like waking up from the flu. So the challenge became: if I could be that thin sick, could I be that thin well?  I mean “thin” is relative.  My idol, Beth the Ballerina, was the same height I was and weighed 90 pounds.  Even if I was no longer overweight (no longer overweight for an adult if I had been one, anyhow), I still had chunky thighs, and was still bursting out of a bra size 34B. I did not look like a ballerina or like the sort of “classic” 12-year-old who might be the heroine of a children’s novel. So I set out not just to maintain the weight that I had become, but to achieve “Beth-hood”.  My mother found me a private ballet teacher. I made her take me to a fancy brassiere shop to buy a minimizer bra.  I let my hair grow.  I tried to live on 500 calories a day.  I grew another inch and lost another 10 pounds. I had a nervous breakdown and ended up sitting in a psychiatrist’s office.

          About six months later I gained back all the weight but—thanks to the ballet lessons, the fact that I was now five foot six, and the redistribution of weight that happens when you grow up—I had permanently lost my chubby awkwardness.  I now looked like Kim Novak.  I dyed my hair blonde. I looked like Jayne Mansfield. I was popular with boys.  But I still longed for sveltitude (it was the era of Twiggy and Mia Farrow). I was no longer reprimanded for being greedy, but was told that I looked trashy.  Girls from my social class didn’t have big boobs when they were 13 or 14. So I made friends with blue collar girls instead. Once my father died I was no longer an upper middle class girl anyhow.

          I lost and re-gained 25 pounds again. I started smoking to spoil my appetite.  A music teacher friend of my mother’s told me that I had an exceptional singing voice (I had spent my young childhood imitating Julie Andrews) but it was more important to me to smoke and be thin(ner).

          Whatever I weighed that week, during those years I certainly never enjoyed food. I often ate nothing all day so that I could eat one of the nightly four course dinners my mother was famous for. Or I made my own meals (meat and veggies, no starch or sugar) and sulked over dinner (I was not allowed to go to my room.) Then, after a few weeks, not being able to stand it anymore, I went to the local candy shop and bought a pound of fudge. Or I went to a coffee shop and treated myself to a club sandwich with bacon and turkey.  Did I enjoy it? Not particularly.

          When I was 19 I discovered diet pills, which I washed down with copious amounts of alcohol.

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          At 25 I got sober. I was down to 125 pounds again. As was the case post-flu so many years earlier, I decided that if I could be that thin drunk, I could be that thin sober. This time I actually managed it for a few years.  I was away from my mother and her cooking, I had rooms full of peers in recovery to emote to when I felt hunger pangs (I learned that drama was as successful an appetite suppressant as amphetamines), and I had just met Betty and we were madly in love.

          Gradually my weight crept up.  I stopped smoking (penalty: 15 pounds).  So I was no longer at my thinnest, but not as heavy as I had been as a teenager.  Also, the benchmarks had changed.  As a 12-year-old I had been conspicuously heavy.  As a 30-year-old (the age at which I had my last cigarette) I was about average. But I still didn’t enjoy food.  Betty and I fought about what foods were “allowed” in the house.  We fought about what time meals could be eaten. She had been extremely thin all her life.  She didn’t get it.

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          I don’t remember when I began to enjoy food again.  I was probably in my mid-forties. I was now in a senior management position and could no longer afford to spend large swaths of the day too hungry to think clearly.  I still ate mindfully and ate sweets sparingly, but I noticed that I felt better if I ate six times a day and not three.  I gained about five more pounds but not more.  Now that I was no longer hungry all the time I was no longer obsessed with food, and the fear that I would keep eating and not be able to stop gradually dissipated.  I had been away from my mother’s enormous dinners for several decades.  Betty and I usually ate dinner in bed in front of the tv.  We served ourselves a modest amount (she often left half of hers) and didn’t go back for “seconds”. 

I discovered that in social settings as an adult, it was ok to talk about enjoying food. People said things like “I love mustard”. No one called them greedy or piggy. People talked about restaurants they liked.  I joined in the conversation.

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          I am now almost 70 and Betty is 84.  She is bedridden and has dementia.  I believe that the progression of her medical conditions was hastened by her picky eating habits.  The last time she was in the hospital one of her diagnoses was “severe malnutrition.”  She weighs 90 pounds.  She fights constantly with the home attendants (and me) about not wanting to eat this, that, or the other. I see that extreme thinness resulting from picky eating habits does not age well. My mother was four foot ten and weighed 180 pounds and she was fit and active until she was about 93. I still weigh 145 but am now only five foot two. So I am now overweight again.  Tough tomatoes. I suppose I enjoy food, although I enjoy many other things more.  I am still mindful of what I eat. I don’t eat sandwiches very often, certainly not at home because I don’t keep bread in the house.  But there is a little French grocery store near where Betty lives that makes wonderful sandwiches on pumpernickel ciabattas.  My favorite is Swiss cheese with lettuce and tomato – and mustard.  And yes, when I have one I enjoy it very much!

Despite my parents’ being militant atheists and my mother being ethnically Jewish, the “Christian assumption” ran through everything I was exposed to as a child, from literature (mostly British Victorian or Edwardian) to idioms (“christen” was a common synonym for “name” [as a verb], “Christian name” was a common term for “first name,” and “un-Christian” was a synonym for “uncharitable”) to the mother of all holidays, Christmas.

So I grew up amidst this “Christian assumption,” but my life as it was lived was not part of it. When I say “Christian” I am not speaking of deeply held faith, but of a culture. And it wasn’t my mother’s Jewishness that made me “not of” the culture I am referring to. What was at issue was that my mother was modern. From the time she was a teenager, her chief self-identifier had been that she was a “New Woman”. New Women did not attend houses of worship, believe in a deity, ascribe to a code of conduct that originated in the Old Testament, or use sentimental religious language to explain suffering or cushion the loss of a loved one. They did not believe in Heaven and Hell. They made sure that their children’s minds were “stayed” on the here and now, in other words, on science, progress, and, most of all, frank clinical talk about disease, death, and sex. My father, a midWesterner of Scots Irish descent, was a scientist who loathed religion as being at best superstition and at worst hypocrisy. He mentioned having been dragged as a child by relatives to a “hard shell Baptist” church where Jesus was often quoted, but “colored people” were not allowed. But what it all boiled down to for both of my parents was that to them, religion belonged to the past, and they belonged to the future.

For whatever reason, however, this did not stop my mother from immersing me in fiction where the Christian assumption ruled: Little Women, for example. The chapter in which Beth dies, many girls’ first exposure to reading while crying, takes its name “The Valley of the Shadow”, from the Twenty-Third Psalm. When Jo, the quintessential New Woman, cries to her mother that she misses her father, Marmee gives Jo a gentle sermon in which she refers to how she herself always derives comfort from God the Father. (And later in the book Jo says “If God spares Beth I will love Him and serve Him always.”)

Was Jo less of a “New Woman” because throughout the book she equated religion with goodness? There are few times now when I miss my mother, but as I write this, I wonder how she would have answered this question. Most likely, she would have said that Jo’s thoughts and feelings needed to be put in historical perspective. Her talking about God and religion were like her wearing a long dress. A New Woman in 1959 would not have worn such a dress, nor would she have talked about God or used religion as a framework for ethics and character.

For me, the dis-union between what I was encouraged to read and how I was encouraged to think and be was made more painful by the fact that most of my classmates (and their parents) seemed to have at least one foot planted in the nineteenth century. (Gertrude Himmelfarb, whose writings on Victorianism had a profound effect on me, said that the Victorian Era didn’t really end until 1962.) Not all of these families went to church, but somehow their children had absorbed a lot of religiously themed vocabulary. People who died went to Heaven. “Taking the Lord’s name in vain” was wicked. Prayer was mentioned if someone was ill. Probably most of these children had been baptized. Then of course there were the Jewish families but I was not “of” them either. They had Jewish last names (mine was Scots Irish) and the children stayed out of school (schools were open then) on Jewish holidays. Some belonged to synagogues. Many did not, but none had a Christmas tree the way my family did.

Along with a rejection of religion and its (mostly sentimental or punitive) vocabulary was a disapproval of anything “old fashioned”. This catch-all included everything from pink clothing and long loose hair for girl children (I was only allowed long hair if it was braided, and I was constantly nagged to agree to having it cut), to antique furniture (everything in the house was teak and chrome, and the color scheme favored sour greens, oranges, and turquoises).

So I escaped into stories set in bygone eras, about girls from large families, who lived in big houses, had long hair with big bows, and wore long dresses with pinafores and high topped shoes – and then opened my eyes in my ultra-modern bedroom, which I hated with its orange bedspread, metal framed butterfly chairs with removable canvas tops, and formica desk. In addition to my hating its lack of aesthetic appeal, it had no literary associations. At least in the late 1950s, there were no magical stories about apartment-dwelling only children raised as atheists and groomed to be “modern”.

[That was sixty years ago. Since that time I have been a serious student of the literature and culture of Victorian and Edwardian England, and in my 50s, I became a choir member and soloist in a progressive Lutheran church. I am not baptized, and don’t consider myself Christian, but I have somehow managed to find a home there.]