I have this really potent, wild memory that has crept back into my thoughts lately.
I was around five. Dad was out, Mom in the living room, Ariel was a snoozing baby. I snuck up onto the kitchen counter. It was crooked, a standalone construction that, like the rest of the kitchen, was tilted about 10 degrees horizontally. You could put a ball in the entry door and it would roll on its own down to the stove.
Anyway, I had not yet climbed a counter in my life due to my mother's repeated warnings about breaking a collarbone, which happened to her at three years old from climbing on a counter. And hers I think was perfectly level. I don't remember much else about the counter other than that it had some weird laminate on the top of it that peeled off over the years. Not sure if that was original or another hideous redesign. I crawled up, grabbed the sugar from a higher shelf, and sat down on the counter.
The sugar was in a rectangular tin that had a strawberry print on it. (Etsy tells me that it's made of brass.)
I opened the tin and started spooning the sugar into my mouth. I'd never done this before, either. My exposure to this sugar tin was limited to the smattering of sugar Mom would put on my oatmeal, rice (yes, instant rice with butter and sugar) and in my already sugared breakfast cereal. It wasn't something to be eaten on its own. However, lucky little jerk of a sister got her pacifier dipped in sugar whenever she cried. Are you appalled yet? Horrified? Yeah, me too I guess. But that was just life, I'm sure plenty of Appalachians relate.
I didn't know what motivated me to sit there and eat it. I remember how utterly gritty it felt, and that it was sour and burned going down. I felt thirstier than I ever had in my life. There was nothing pleasant about it. And yet I got some weird euphoria out of sitting there. I was smugly eating the forbidden food, dangling my legs above the floor like a wild person, focusing on choking down the grainy solid while I stared at that ugly linoleum on the counter.
I heard Mother move and I kicked off the counter. I hid the sugar, which she found later and didn't even question its removal from the high shelf. I still felt as though I had "won" something, but I have not eaten plain sugar out of a container since then. Peanut butter? Yeah. Biscoff cookie spread? A whole fucking jar in one sitting, and I'll do it again. Cookie dough? To the point of stomach ache. But not sugar.
After however long--who knows-- of my time in foster care, I met my caseworker for some unnecessary reason (they all were, at the time). She was almost buzzing, like an overloaded wire. I couldn't read her emotion then, but in hindsight I am convinced she was foaming at the mouth angry and just hid that part from me. She didn't need to, but I think that's what adults do.
I forget how she turned the topic, other than she blurted plainly this was not my first time in the state's custody. I remember my reply being a typical 15 year old, "uhhhh...." to which she responded by telling me the whole story. In hindsight I really appreciate her, correctly assuming I could handle and should have access to this information, because it never came up again. From anyone. When I got my case file from the state it was mentioned in those files, but I guess didn't make it into my main folder. So this one time was the only story I ever got. It was later confirmed, with varying details, from my Dad and my neighbor. My Dad was annoyed and blamed a babysitter, and my neighbor broke down in tears and said she didn't understand how anyone could treat their child that way.
Per the state records though, the FACTS: I was taken into custody after being abandoned, alone, in the home with the crooked floor. I was screaming (why police were called) standing in a playpen and hadn't been tended to for days. Caseworker notes I was unable to produce tears and had a diaper rash. By the time police arrived I needed hospital treatment (I don't know what extent...that hospital also doesn't exist anymore. At this point it feels that I'm barely a person and nothing I grew up around was ever real.)
The police broke down the door, found me, and transferred me to CPS care. Not sure if CPS was present but I'd bet on it. My parents regained custody after being found and notified, and the one part that my Dad and the report both agree on is that they had left me to go to a party. I hope it was a good party.
As I've done a lot of therapy over the years, this feeling sometimes comes up in me that I can't explain. It's a yawning void, a scream. It's like something out of Pink Floyd album art, it's barely human. Awareness so limited and yet so painful I wouldn't dare call it consciousness. I actually started calling it the Tasmanian Devil, because it feels like a tornado that screeches around with no concept of communication. Only understanding hunger and the pain that accompanies it.
It eventually ends up that I have binge eating disorder. This kind of surprises me, because I always thought binge eating was just purely gorging with no end in sight, forever. Like most people I don't understand nuance until I look past my own fucking nose. I started flipping through these memories and it was like peering into a rotting, fetid grave where the corpse of a toddler gaped back at me, lost in eternal hunger.
I watched a lot of my foster siblings succumb to drugs, alcohol. Sex. Any combination of those. I don't know what single, lucky card I drew to escape those particular addictions, but I've also learned that the trauma of food insecurity and being starved as a toddler (at least once that I know of, ha?) has imprinted on me in ways that mirror addiction. I'm not minimizing what anyone goes through and I think that these different paths deserve their own respect and understanding. I've lost plenty of people to all of the above. My heart hurts for them far more than it does for myself.
It never clicked to me until I went through all of this therapy why I'd sit on the counter and choke down pure sugar. But it's clear as day to me now.
First of all, I was getting something forbidden. It was treated as a prize in our house, something that you only got if you were worthy. By God I was worthy and I was not waiting on my Mother to tell me I was, I was GOING FOR IT.
Secondly, sugar was the root of all that is good. Why stomach the leftovers like rice or cereal when you can get the REAL THING, BABY? It was absolutely a dopamine rush, I remember feeling the satisfaction and the satiety even while my teeth were screeching in pain. Sugar doesn't sound like much unless you're starving, and I mean, I had been. Not at that moment, but we'll get to that.
And the wildest part, the third reason I did it... is that it made me feel secure. I felt like I was nurturing myself, sitting there with a spoon and the thing--the only thing--that the brain runs on. I didn't know what glucose was or did at five, but I know now. I was absolutely intuitively going for the thing my poor abused brain craved. At five, I was already self-soothing the screaming dying starving toddler who had to be hospitalized. I didn't know that's what I was doing. I intuited it all. Just wild.
I still feel secure when I eat. Eating has some mysterious power over me that I imagine others feel when they hold a gun. To me, holding a gun just feels like a weight, a responsibility, because in no situation where it's needed would I ever be stupid enough to feel secure. Eating, though? It's free security, baby. Gas station run at 2am for a handful of beef jerky and some candy? I instantly feel empowered, adult. In charge. Safe. Taken care of.
The other strange part of these hidden memories is that while I don't remember the actual physical moment, I do feel the imprint of that starvation. When it comes out, in therapy or otherwise, it's crushingly painful. It's the worst thing I've ever felt. I'd eat a goddamn tree root if one's close by just to get it to stop. I'd eat glass if it helped. Stone. I'd put my head on a train track if it were an option to make that hunger stop. Feeling it without dissociation it nightmarish. It's every nerve on fire at the same time. I have, over the years, come to remember that. To be in touch with my body enough to feel it.
What I don't remember, or have any concept of, is the after.
I assume that the police were gentle with me. I assume that the CPS workers and hospital workers had compassion. I assume that even my parents were nice to me when we were reunited. I know at some point I got food and a diaper change. At some point my diaper rash blisters healed and my stomach stopped wrenching in pain. At some point I started producing tears again. Clearly. Because I'm alive, and I didn't even get starved to the point of abandonment after that (by caretakers--I starved myself, another fun part of the disorder that nobody talks about, but eh another day.)
But I don't remember those parts. I have no concept or memory--created, or truly sensed, of safety after that moment. That part of me broke off and died before help came, and it died deep inside of me, to protect the whole or whatever. Healing my body, I can now hear it screaming. No matter what I do now, no matter how many times I point out that I'm safe, and have access to food, that we're here and people care and I am not going to starve myself let alone let anyone ELSE starve me, the message doesn't compute. A tasmanian devil can't understand it. The fear still exists.
People try to be helpful when they say things like "have the donut! you only live once!" or "don't ever feel bad for enjoying cake!" but I don't think that I can communicate to them how blasé those comments are, how they miss the point entirely. If I eat for comfort, if it becomes my crutch, I destroy my body in a different way. Along the same way my ignorant five year old self did that day with the sugar. Bad things happen. I have to navigate this with the trauma of food insecurity that has imprinted and stuck with me for years. My hunger signals are broken. Sometimes I think that I am just overall broken.
Broken, but alive, carrying around dying and dead parts. Just like everybody else.