If You’re Truly Listening

Back in June, my body told me that I don’t trust it, and that did something to me: stopped me in my tracks and made me realize that I’ve never trusted my body. Then again, why would I? It’s not like I ever got the message that I should. Where would it have come from? My mother, who tried to control her life by controlling (among other things) the numbers on the scale? And not just for herself. She tried to do it for me, who—as a child—never weighed quite enough, and for my sister, who always weighed too much.

Would I have gotten this message from a teacher or a college professor? We got little more than the government food pyramid and “this is how you deal with your period” in middle school health class. And other than trying to start a conversation about “country matters” and pre-Apple sex in Paradise Lost, the professors at my Catholic liberal arts college wanted nothing to do with something as material and messy as the human body. Besides, they were too busy killing and dissecting poetry, literature, and art so it could be analyzed, labeled, and placed in safe little boxes where it would do no harm.

What about a doctor, a television program, or a woman’s magazine? Well, since there’s no money in telling a woman to trust herself, to not worry about something, to not strive to look like a cover model, that’s pretty unlikely, isn’t it?

Then, of course, there’s Christianity, but we won’t even bother to go there.

What does this not trusting my body look like? Well, it’s different now than it was, say, four months ago, and that did not look the same as it did in January of 2022, when I finally faced the fact that I had an emotional eating disorder that manifested as fear of food. At that point, I was eating about six foods and scanning, scanning, scanning for something wrong (a hive? digestive discomfort? maybe a little anxiety?) whenever food passed my lips. What I was actually doing, though, was trying to control, well, something. It’s sort of funny that we can so easily see what is going on with someone else, but have a hard time finding clarity about ourselves. Decades ago, I was theorizing to my husband that a woman in a similar stage of parenting worked hard to control her kids because she was married to a demanding man and had little control in her marriage. Of course, back then, I was convinced that I had no control issues. As my husband would say, “Oh, Henry.”

So, I learned to listen to my body, and she told me that I don’t trust her. What now? I’m still working on things, but I apologized for trying to sabotage her efforts to take care of me. I said I was sorry for betraying her by complaining about my ample breasts and hips, and I thanked her for trusting me enough to clue me in.