Comments on: being hungry: the places that scare you

By: Meep

Meep — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:05:25 +0000

I can never explain this specific type of hunger. I’m glad you at least wrote a good approximation of it down, though. I know it well. For some reason when I was hungry it never occurred to me to dumpster dive or shoplift or beg for food. All I could think about was a weird anger and how much I hated everything in the world. I did my best to make the non-eating intervals into a game.

And now I horde food, heh.

By: bfp

bfp — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:04:15 +0000

aaminah–yes, yes, yes. kids feel that shit, even if they don’t know what is going on. they may not be able to say–mom is scared because she doesn’t know when she’ll be able to eat again–and that makes me scared and so i’m going to horde in the only way I know how–

but they know. and i think that’s why i obsess so much about being hungry and being a mother. what affect does it have on my kids? what does it do to their relationship with food and with fear? like kids don’t have enough shit they have to deal with, you know?

it makes me sad too–because–kids don’t seem to understand, or they simply can’t believe–”I will NEVER let you go hungry. Ever.” i think it may be too guilt provoking for a kid to hear that and they simply physically can’t let that sentence register in their brains. I remember being told by MY parents that they would never let me go hungry–and i STILL stayed up late at night, working out how i could get a job and get on welfare and and and…just working to make sure that *I* had some control…

By: amapola

amapola — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:20:14 +0000

thank you for this, bfp. i want to marinate on it and maybe come back… but i think this is really important, and wanted to say that much, at least.

By: Aaminah

Aaminah — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:27:04 +0000

thank you for sharing the way Buddhism has helped you work thru this and the practice that you are using. i have been hungry, in the past, like you, before being a mom (though there were some stretches when drinking where i wasn’t eating and was a mess but not because i didn’t have access to food). i almost died while starving on the streets and miscarried twins because of it. and now i am a food hoarder. i swore when i found out i was pregnant again a few months after that miscarriage that my baby would never know hunger like that. and i buy more than i need, and i keep cans and cans of beans and such so that no matter what i will have something… when i buy a packaged dinner, i can never just buy one, i buy three or four… when i buy frozen veggies i can’t buy one bag, i buy three or four. and yes, that means that trying to fast as a muslim is so hard for me. it’s not just the literal physical difficulty, but the emotional difficulty… a stark raving fear that doesn’t even make any sense. and yes, being even a little hungry makes me mean. being really hungry means losing my voice and being nearly catatonic. and what is even scarier, the scariest to me, is that my son is an overeater. as a baby he ate way more than “normal” and cried all the time with hunger. as a toddler, he didn’t sleep thru the night until he was just past two years because he woke up hungry, despite the fact that he was well fed. for a while, we were in a situation where i ate very little and gave all my food to him, but he has never gone without. later, after he moved back with my mom, he would eat and eat until he was rolling on the floor in pain and then he’d start throwing up, not intentionally, not bulimia, but just thinking he was so hungry. now he eats two adult meals (and we all know that our servings are ridiculously huge to begin with), i say he eats like he thinks he’ll never see food again. and i say i don’t understand that because he has never starved. he has never gone hungry. we have always made sure he had what he needed. but reading your post… i think i do understand. i think that he got it all from me, even though his own experience has been totally different from mine… i think he somehow imbibed all this fear while inside me, while nursing from me, while witnessing my own hoarding and mind-losing in between meals. and no, i can say from experience, how i feel for part of the day, or when i wake up at 2:30am, it’s nothing like what it really means to be hungry. i know better. but it’s still frightening.