Plush

A liturgy of embodiment, communion, and disordered eating. Part Three: Liturgy of the Eucharist.

X. Oblatio Donorum: Offering of Gifts

My phobia wasn’t cured with one stomach virus, despite the zen I experienced through it. Just like we forget the sensation of pain once it’s passed, I promptly forgot the sensations that might have helped me differentiate it from a panic attack. And so my panic attacks stayed with me. I talked myself down with the same frequency I had before, I ate half portions of meals all the same. I’d lost even more weight, and though I would go another decade or more before the next time I threw up, I still contracted every other virus that passed through the daycare that season.

The more my weight diminished, the harder it was to get food into my body. Malnourishment is often a self-compounding problem; at a certain point, the less you eat, the less you experience hunger, as if the body knows that asking for what it wants is a waste of energy. And then it stops wanting at all, and begins to consume itself.

But my mother’s force feeding me through my childhood had taught me how to power through. I filled the blender with chocolate protein powder and as many other ingredients necessary to turn it into something palatable: semi- sweet cocoa powder, honey, fresh raspberries, coconut milk, and maybe a couple of ice cubes. I drank it down alongside a cup of black coffee while I got ready for class. On mornings when I had a little extra time, I drove ten minutes to the nearest Chik-fil-a, ordered a chicken biscuit and a side of hash browns at the drive-thru, and take it home to the safety of my bedroom, my laptop, my homemade coffee, like a mouse bringing a slice of cheese back to her den. Food was so stressful that when I could find a way to make it feel safe, or even comforting, I did so. This was my survival.

Later that same winter/spring, I attended the wedding of a friend. I put on my favorite dress: an ash-gray stretchy cotton blend with a soft ruched bodice and a knee-length skirt that had perfect twirl. The dress was held up by thick shoulder straps, creating a squared neckline that gave the illusion that my bust was bigger than it was. It was modern, a Charlotte Russe sale rack find, but its cut was reminiscent of the 1940s. Wearing it made me feel chic and beautiful, and I was excited to pull it from my closet for the first time that season.

But unlike the last time I’d worn it, I was at my most gaunt and still recovering from pleurisy. I had spent most of the semester going from bed to class and back again. It was nice to have a reason to dress up.

I came downstairs, my red sunflower earrings in, my shoulder-length perm moussed and tousled.

My mother took one look at me in my favorite dress and said, “Is that what you’re wearing? You look like you just stepped out of Auschwitz.”

Her tone was light, breezy, but shocking. I went back upstairs to change. There was nothing I could do about my size, so I did the best I could. I chose the boho printed maxi dress that I wore for my highschool graduation. It had more colors, so it didn’t as starkly highlight how pale I was. I never quite felt the same in my gray dress after that.

Between the ceremony and the reception, I went out for brunch with a group of friends and fellow wedding guests at Lincoln Square Pancake House. A crowded breakfast table was a difficult place for me, the antithesis of my chicken biscuit burrowing, and as I worked my way through the food on my plate, I silently contemplated the mystery of communion. Could this be a holy act, a sacrament, to take eggs and avocado and portobello mushrooms, goat cheese and sourdough and butter and black coffee, surrounded by friends in our wedding best? But the solitary eucharistic rite didn’t provide much of a template for eating in actual communion with others. In fact, that comparison might have been more helpful had I instead been attempting to eat my friends.

As I picked at my omelette, a medical student seated next to me named Mikey remarked on how little I was eating. I carefully told him that I was struggling through eating lately due to anxiety, that sometimes it was worse than at others, and at the moment I wasn’t able to get much in. Mikey apologized immediately, fearing an overstep. But then, he asked if I was willing to let him try a bit of physical therapy he had been learning about, to prompt my parasympathetic nervous system back to the helm.

I would’ve tried anything to get some relief, to be able to eat enough to fill me. He had his massage table folded up in the trunk of his car, just in case.

When we arrived at the Knights of Columbus banquet hall for the wedding reception, Mikey set up his table in the lower level, while our friends gathered in the ballroom above us. I laid on my back while Mikey made adjustments to my body. He placed his palms on my ribcage as I breathed, and then he gently pulled at the base of my skull, releasing the pressure on the nerves around my brainstem. It was temporary, but it helped. I stayed through the reception, and when I went home I was ravenous. I made myself a hamburger, and I ate every bite.

When I graduated college, I worked two jobs, one as a barista at Bee Coffee, and the other as a nanny for a Catholic homeschooling family with nine kids. I was a “mother’s helper,” technically, because their mother stayed at home, but I preferred the term nanny as it sounds a bit less like a job one might give to a thirteen-year-old.

I primarily looked after the babies and toddlers so that their mother could teach the older kids. I went with them to co-op groups and on field trips, but I had an understanding with the family that if anyone threw up, I was out. I’d return when the germs had cleared. On my nanny days I survived on kid food: dinosaur nuggets and tater tots. Sometimes we’d picnic with the co-op, and I would try not to fret over whether Krista had put enough ice packs in the cooler, and hope I’d have the chance to assemble my sandwich before the kids (especially Olivia) stuck their fingers into the prepackaged turkey or the bag of wonder bread. And each Monday and Wednesday, I’d wrap myself in the big navy blue Moby carrier, and fold little Millie into the pocket of it, her head against my chest. She was always eager for that time, toddling up to me as soon as I began to don the mobi, patting at me with an open palm until I scooped her up, as if I could somehow forget her. Once she was settled in and secure around my waist, I’d get my book and her pacifier, and we’d take a little walk to the neighborhood pond. She’d fall asleep with her cheek on my chest, and I’d sit on a bench and read, a quiet reprieve from the rest of the household—kids fighting, mom yelling to be heard over them, messes everywhere, not an unsticky surface to be found. Walls colored on and punched in by prepubescent boy tantrums, clogged toilets and puddles of cat piss in the laundry room. Millie and I were both eager for that time away, the two of us in the fresh air, our heartbeats synchronizing, our nervous systems regulating. It was the calmest I ever got to feel during that time. I was as underweight as ever but still strong enough to carry a toddler at my waist.

Every day was still a struggle to leave my house. I was chronically late on my nannying days because there was no firm start time, no door to unlock and neon sign to click on like there was at the coffee shop. I had less motivation to push through my anxiety and my front door.

Over a year after I graduated, I moved into a house with a friend. I was newly dating Matt long distance, as I was still in Indiana and he was in Michigan. Over the time that we dated across state lines, my health and weight both dropped again. Once school ended I became horribly depressed, made worse by the rigorous process of applying to graduate programs and then watching the rejection letters drop in, one by one. My newfound closeness with Matt, who had long been a friend and confidante, was my only reprieve. But the tendrils of my mother’s concern began to wrap me in a chokehold. She didn’t like that I was seeing him, that we were making weekend trips to visit each other, that he wasn’t Catholic.

That summer, I developed pleurisy for the second time. By mid August I wasn’t going anywhere without a big brown cardigan, no matter how hot it was outside. My mother had long predicted that I would do poorly when I finally lived on my own, which may be partly why I was so late to leaving. I wasn’t adept at food preparation, the care and keeping of my adult self. I relied heavily on her stocking the fridge and making dinner apart from my own little habit foods—the cereals and fruits and ice cream and protein shake fixings, the things of which if I ran out I thought I might die, and maybe I would have. I was dependent on my mother to provide the meat and potatoes.

But what my mother scoffed at as laziness or incompetence was something that ran deeper. Food overwhelmed me. It’s almost always over­whelmed me. I didn’t think about food until I had to, and by then my blood sugar had plummeted and I was lethargic, shaky, irritable, panicked. I couldn’t come up with a plan, gather ingredients, and implement a recipe. And my hunger was too urgent to allow for that kind of time.

When I did have food, whether prepared or purchased, I formed a habit of rationing it. I never finished a meal anyways, but now I ate just a little bit less at a sitting, in order to have half left behind for the next meal: one less meal to have to think about.

And then, my friend Francis died. He rode his bike everywhere. He wore black, sometimes varying his wardrobe with a dark brown or a merlot. He was riding his bike to a friend’s house on a fall evening, and he was hit by a car and killed instantly. I couldn’t stop crying as I served lattes at the Bee, where Francis used to work alongside me, where he helped me practice steaming milk and pouring leaflets and hearts and rosettas. I couldn’t eat from the shock and the sadness, the sudden awareness of danger around every corner. What if Matt died in an accident on his way to see me? Death felt looming and ever-present–though with my starvation and sickness, I was its more likely target.

I became less useful at both of my jobs. My body felt paradoxically weighted down, pulled towards the couch when I was nannying, the counter barstools at the coffee shop. After the morning rush of lattes, I’d go back to my spot at the bar and stamp the Bee logo on cardboard sleeves and pastry bags, just an excuse to put my tired body on a surface, to lean it against things.

Our shop manager Greg, a seven-foot-tall gentle giant with a stooped back and a shuffling gait, would meanwhile be in the back kitchen mixing up recipes. He was part owner of a cocktail mixer brand, so tinkering with flavors is what he did best.

Greg was one of the very few people who could make me want to eat. Whether this was his design or not, I’ll never know. Perhaps he was the more perceptive of the two of us.

He sat down next to me at the bar one late morning and said, as if he were sharing a secret, “Want half of a fig stuffed with goat cheese?” I did. I really did. He brought it to me with no plate, fork, or napkin. I ate it in a few bites, the velvety-sweet fruit with its little seed crunch blending beautifully in my mouth with the creamy tang of the goat cheese.

Greg made a coconut curry butternut squash bisque that I couldn’t get enough of. Making it is almost an all-day affair. You have to roast the squash for at least two hours to pull out the best flavor and get it to the right softness. Then, all of the flesh has to be scooped out of each half, removing any straggling seeds, and that’s not even taking into account the attention the other ingredients require: the onion, garlic, ginger, red thai curry paste, coconut milk, chicken broth. I get an immersion blender or a food processor involved to get the texture to perfect creaminess. It requires a lot of cleanup, a lot of hurry-up-and-waiting, but god is it worth it. I serve it with cilantro and crushed peanuts on top, and wedges of warm naan grilled in butter on the side for dipping. It’s a fall staple to me years later, a filling comfort food that I double-batch.

The parents of the kids I nannied went on the famous keto diet, subsisting on proteins and fats. It worked all right for me, because I kept eating carbs alongside Krista’s high calorie snacks like peanut butter fat bombs and salami slices rolled with Philadelphia cream cheese. Easy protein for when Krista and I sent the kids to play in the basement while we snacked and watched Silence of the Lambs.

Encouragement, coaxing, threats–none made eating any easier, and some just laid on more baggage. Spiritualizing food certainly didn’t help either. Food was most enticing when approached slant, when I could see someone else relishing without the automatic expectation or obligation to partake. No pressure, just a dash of envy, and my appetite was gently whetted.

I moved to Michigan, making a long-distance relationship one less thing contributing to my deep depression. But I had so many more waiting for me. I pieced together an income at several part-time jobs. I had so far no success with monetizing my English degree, but I found plenty of opportunities at Grand Rapids shopping malls. I worked the cafe at Barnes & Noble, the register at the Gap, the fitting rooms at Old Navy. Without Matt to feed me and keep me supplied with leftovers, I might have starved.

Meanwhile, I double- and sometimes triple-dosed church. Matt led worship at a tiny Evangelical church plant that met on Sunday at 5, leaving us just enough time after his services to get downtown for 7 p.m. mass at St. Andrews Cathedral.

Matt played music at another church some Sunday mornings, and I often went with him to that service before attending each of our own. We did our best to uphold both of our faith traditions, keep each of our respective practices. To an untrained eye these might have seemed hardly distinguishable, but to us and to our families, they were worlds apart.

But mostly, we didn’t talk about our faiths. And while I didn’t eat much at any time, I ate even less on Sundays, and sometimes went nearly catatonic with anxiety and low blood sugar before the evening services.

My mother and her chosen church kin had imposed on me the obligation to coax Matt into the Catholic church. Get him to go to mass, to Adoration, to pray the rosary, to read all these books on Catholic apologetics, they pressed. Have him read about eucharistic miracles, the bread turning into actual flesh, the wine into blood. Catholicism became a set of claws lodged in my back.

Within the first twenty-four hours of my relationship with Matt, my mother announced to me, “If you don’t marry in the Catholic Church, you’ll be living outside the Catholic Church.” As if this would be news to me. As if it wasn’t already an anchor around my neck as I realized I was in love with him, and wouldn’t hang there for years to come.

To marry in the Church is to make certain promises to the Church: That we would use no unnatural methods of preventing pregnancy, not even barriers or withdrawal. That all of our children would be raised Catholic. I was sick to my stomach with the fear that I would have to choose between the person I loved and my faith, when to let go of my faith would mean my own damnation. Or, that I would by omission trick him into vowing things he opposed. For almost two years we attended multiple churches together, but we didn’t discuss religion. It was too fraught, too frightening. The stakes were too high, and it was more than I could take. All that time, Matt slowly coaxed me into eating vegetables when I was otherwise surviving on chicken tenders and chocolate cake. He cooked meals from scratch and packed leftovers for me to take to eat on breaks at my minimum-wage jobs.

Around Easter every year, Matt’s family celebrates a version of the Jewish Passover meal from the perspective of Christianity. The Passover holds the origin of the liturgy of the Mass, so as a cradle Catholic it feels rather familiar. It’s the ritual meal Jesus celebrated with his Apostles the night before his crucifixion, a Jewish tradition that even at that time had been passed down for many generations. It’s a religious rite and a sacred meal, and it takes a few hours to get through.

It is, in other words, one of my worst nightmares.

Matt’s family are not Jewish, not even of the Messianic kind. They are evangelical Christians, and Matt’s father is an ordained United Brethren pastor. We sit at the dining room table set with place mats, the family china and the seder plate which holds a lamb shank bone, an egg, parsley, horseradish, salt water, charoset, and a pack of Arby’s horsey sauce–not a traditional inclusion, but a setup for a horseradish joke which Matt’s father repeats every year.

Unlike the traditional Passover, ours is completely dry: our blessing cups are crystal glasses filled with Welch’s sparkling grape juice instead of red wine. Though I am an adult I am the “youngest child” at the table, so I have a role to play in the script.

“Why is this night different from all other nights?”

“Why on this night do we eat bitter herbs?”

“On all other nights we don’t dip even once. Why on this night do we dip twice?”

“On all other nights, we eat either sitting or reclining as we please. Why on this night do we all recline?”

If only we could recline. If only our meal could be taken from the living room couches, kitty corner to each other around the simmering wood stove, maybe even with the promise of a movie afterwards.

But we sit formally, eating and praying, reciting and singing. We pass around roasted chicken, potato kugel casserole, and four-cup salad–a Depression-era abomination of cottage cheese, coconut, marshmallows, and canned fruit which my mother-in-law still believes to be a staple at family gatherings. We start the meal with matzah ball soup–a broth with balls of crushed matzah bound together with egg and vegetable oil. The first time I had it, I had no frame of reference for what I was eating: meatball? Potato? But almost immediately I knew I couldn’t stomach the texture. I’ve since learned to opt out of the first course of the Passover meal.

As we eat, Matt’s father explains the symbolism of each component of the meal. We are all familiar, but the repetition is part of the ritual. We dip parsley in salt water. We eat horseradish and charoset. We break matzah with a familiar crack and my father-in-law again explains how it symbolizes the Body of Christ. My mother-in-law chimes in that she loves how he called it a symbol–her gentle dig at Catholicism, meant for my benefit. Yes, I get it. But we both of us are in our own rites cannibalizing Judaism.

We spend hours at the dinner table. We drink blessing cup after zero proof blessing cup. I want to crawl out of my skin.

XI. Praeparatio donorum: Preparation of Gifts

I started on Zoloft in the summer of 2018. The relief from anxiety was subtle, incomplete, though certainly present. Over the next few years I gradually increased the dosage twenty-five milligrams at a time. Like most antidepressants, Zoloft can come with side effects, including weight gain. But I was on Zoloft for six months without any noticeable metabolic changes.

On the following New Year’s Day, I stopped attending church. It was a Thursday. January first is a Catholic feast day, the Solemnity of Mary the Mother of God–a holy day of obligation, meaning that mass attendance is required.

Over the past several months, attending mass had become a purgatory for me. More than just the dogmatic incompatibilities between me and Matt, that August had brought an extra blow to the Catholic laity: the sexual abuse allegations against Theodore McCarrick became public. McCarrick had reached the status of a cardinal, the highest ranking clerical title beneath the Pope. He was a key fundraiser for Church charity missions, and one of the most outspoken advocates for reformation of the clergy and for justice for church sex abuse victims.

Simultaneously, McCarrick was a prolific sexual predator. For decades, he abused young boys, adult seminarians, and fellow priests. His behaviors were widely known to many high-ranking clergy, as well as to three consecutive popes.

McCarrick’s was the first of the Church sex abuse scandals that I learned of without having my mother in my ear to tamp the grief, rage, and enormity of the Church’s betrayal. She always told me that the Catholic Church doesn’t have any more problems with abuse than any other widespread or public institution. It happens in Protestant denominations and public schools, she said. The media just hypes it up, exaggerates it. It is a form of persecution to our Catholic faith. The Church is the victim here. And if we do have an abuse problem, it’s because the Church is so holy that the devil is threatened by her, and all he can do is attack the poor priests with temptation. Maybe they’d do better if we prayed harder.

She never presented the possibility that the church hierarchy is the perfect place for predators to hide in plain sight, to lean into their most vile inclinations in total safety. They can do no wrong. They operate In Persona Christi– “in the Person of Christ.” They represent God himself. They hold the Body of Christ in their hands.

I held onto my faith in the Church for as long as I could. I attended Matt’s church and my own, as I had been, but I couldn’t sing or pray. I could barely hold my body upright. The eucharist was the final tether keeping me attached to the religion I was born and raised in. It was the one thing that had always kept me coming back. The one thing I couldn’t get anywhere else. And yet my whole body was in pain each time I stepped into a church.

Catholicism has its workarounds. A few misspoken words can render an entire mass invalid; and yet, the priest can commit any number of heinous acts and still turn the bread and wine into Christ’s flesh and blood in those very same hands.

On that New Year’s Day, I had planned to go to evening mass. To not attend mass on a holy day of obligation is a mortal sin. A rule more strictly enforced, it seems, than any prohibiting child rape.

I met a friend for coffee that afternoon, a friend who’d grown up similarly to myself, yet was somehow able to hold onto our shared faith a little more loosely than I was. I told her of my doubts and grievances with the Church. I told her that I wanted to step away for a while, but even as I said it, I knew I had no real intention, no matter my inclination.

As we sipped our lattes, she said simply, “l think taking a break would be really freeing for you.”

It was the permission I hadn’t been able to grant myself. I didn’t go to mass that evening as I’d planned. I went to Matt’s house, and wept with the intensity of a loss, the fear of the sin I was choosing to commit, and the relief of letting go of something that had become untenable to carry.

I decided to give it a month. Just a brief hiatus to clear my head and get some perspective, and then I’d go back. I took a pause from Matt’s church as well; to attend his and not mine felt like a betrayal of my own tradition, a confirmation of my mother’s fears that I would leave Catholicism for Protestantism. And, I needed a break from the rhetoric, the Jesus talk, the prayer and the hymns.

When my month was up, I pushed the end of my hiatus back. Ash Wednesday would be a good day to return, I thought.

And then as the beginning of Lent approached, I still felt I needed more time. I’d let it go until Easter. At Easter, I knew I needed a year.

I didn’t go back.

During that very first month of hiatus, I ate like a child who’s just been given solid food, without the burden of neophobia. Eating had once been my most dreaded task, but now, I discovered in it so much pleasure and possibility.

I sat on Matt’s couch one evening with a plate of pasta on my lap–linguine and homemade tomato sauce thickened with turkey sausage. The linguine noodles were incidental, we’d run out of spaghetti, but they were so much better–after all, noodles are all about mouthfeel. He’d topped it with a generous spread of mozzarella that melted and stretched over the sauce. A buttery slice of warm garlic toast, for the crunch. I’d never cleaned my plate so easily. It was as if something shifted in my nervous system once I loosened my grip on the rigidity of my faith. I had clung so tightly to it, believing it was the answer to everything–even to my anxiety, depression, and chronic dread. I began to discover that instead, maybe it was the primary cause.

When a time of scarcity, restriction, or starvation passes, the body has a biological drive to nourish itself back to homeostasis. Even when a person with anorexia nervosa oscillates toward a binge, it is not some lapse in discipline, but rather, an evolutionary necessity. When it has the opportunity, the body will swing the pendulum in the direction of survival.

By loosening the grip on my faith, I made space for nearly thirty years of hunger. And, inevitably, my body began to change shape.

The first time my mother saw me in jean shorts one size bigger, she took note of the change. I hadn’t told her much about my recent life changes–antidepressants, therapy, church hiatus. When she asked which church I was attending, telling me I should register as an official member of a parish, I told her that I had been attending St. Andrew’s Cathedral. I hadn’t been there in at least six months. She asked me if my weight gain was the result of using marijuana. I told her it was. I’d only tried weed a couple of times, in fact. Though my mother opposed cannabis usage, I still preferred that she believe I was a stoner than that she know I was getting mental health treatment & leaving religion.

But my mother, who force fed me protein shakes and multivitamins throughout childhood, was the first to remind me how slim was my margin of error for her approval, in all things.

“You look good with a little meat on your bones, “she said. “But be careful. People on my side of the family get–”she puffed out her cheeks to show instead of telling me: Fat.

XII. Prex Eucharistica: Eucharistic Prayer

My body leveled out after about a year of being away from the Church and accommodating nearly thirty years of hunger. I felt as though I developed overnight, not only from an emaciated body to a fed one, but from a perpetually pubescent body to a woman’s body.

Where once I spent hours at each meal, I could not clean my plate fast enough, as if it might be taken away from me. My esophagus suffers the consequences. But I can’t help myself. Food is so good it can bring me to tears.

In my years of ARFID and eating for survival, I never cultivated habits of moderation, nutritional balance, or diversity. After all my slow eating, my full stops halfway through each meal, suddenly I was inhaling my food, cleaning my plate, returning for more.

My body filled out in curves and lines and solidity. In soft thickness in my upper arms, my chest and shoulders. My clavicles no longer pull toward each other and hunch my shoulders in. Where once I had the unattainable thigh gap, now my skin chafes in the summertime, the moisture sticking my flesh together with each step. It’s annoying, uncomfortable, but new, and I notice it with a kind of wonder. My breasts have filled out, the soft round pockets of fat sinking down beneath my nipples, which stay upturned like the noses of curious shrews. Underweight and underdeveloped through young adulthood, gravity didn’t get the chance to wreak havoc on my elastic tissue. My breasts still stand on their own. I discovered tiny rivulets running down the insides of my thighs and along the outsides of my hips–sometimes lilac, and sometimes shimmering silvery white, and I didn’t know what they were. Through my growth and puberty years, I had never developed stretch marks, and god are they beautiful. The weight of my body allows me to feel more grounded, whole. A soft breeze can no longer topple me.

And yet, sometimes I don’t recognize myself, as if my body has been entirely replaced by another. I was eleven, sickly and puny, and then I was thirty and curvy. I was once described as “willowy,” with my broad shoulders and slender limbs, but what if my build was always meant to be fuller, softer, more voluptuous? My bones were yearning to be cushioned by plush.

The change is wonderful and terrifying. It cannot go unnoticed by those who have seen me before and after. I am not always the skinniest person in the room. And yet, I always felt self conscious of some parts, didn’t I? I always thought my waist spread too wide, my belly took up too much space, even when it barely did. I don’t know how to dress this body that I used to place in harem pants and maxi skirts, tank tops instead of bras, oversized sweaters because she was always cold. I barely had to try things on in that body. An extra small used to drape on me, and now a medium is a narrow maybe.

When I first got back to a yoga studio, I found that this body doesn’t fold like she used to. My stretches were confined by my flesh, but also by my body’s learned rules, to keep her legs crossed and her shoulders hunched in to make herself even smaller. My toes and hips want to turn inward like shy sisters sharing secrets. My ribs want to compress to make walls instead of cages. Still, I’m surprised as I see my own new thickness in the mirrors, the squish of my belly now as I sit in sukhasana.

As I stretch and strengthen her, I strive to teach her to take up space. As I roll from a jackknife shape in forward fold, all the way up to standing at attention, prayer hands at heart’s center, samastahiti, the instructor prompts me to open slowly. “Take forever to arrive.”

Here she is. This is my body.

XIII. Commemoratio Mortuorum: Commemoration of the Dead

What is it about vomiting that some of us can find so terrifying? Most children will at some point throw up at an inopportune time, so why do some of us develop a crippling phobia while most just bounce right back?

Even aside from my vomit catastrophe at mass, there were other components of my developing years that provided a warm, moist breeding ground for my phobia to thrive.

I was nine when my grandmother Janet had a malignant tumor removed from her back. She functioned as normally as possible for as long as she could, before the cancer ultimately spread to her brain.

Until then, we went to my grandparents’ house for Sunday dinners like we always had. I remember one evening early on in her illness, she prepared dinner and we carried platters from the kitchen to the formal dining room table, sat down, and said grace. And then my grandmother excused herself to the first floor bathroom. The rest of us sat quietly at the dinner table, pretending we couldn’t hear her retching just down the hall, a side effect of radiation treatment.

I wasn’t quite as skilled at pretending. I whispered to my mother, begging for assurance that whatever was making my grand­mother vomit was not something I would catch. She returned to the table a few minutes later, exhausted, but composed. She picked up her fork and resumed eating, more for everyone else’s comfort than to sate her own hunger.

My grandparents always seemed larger than life, immortal. It was strange to me to think of them ever even having a cold. As far as I was concerned, the moment they became grandparents, they ceased all functions of a physical, uncouth nature. They never had sex, used the toilet, or got sick.

At the end of my grandmother’s five-year coexistence with cancer, she informed us one Saturday morning that she had reached her last day. Other signs of the end followed, such as vomiting. A typical reflex of a dying body: ridding itself of anything it has no use for. Her organs were finished with the tasks of digestion; anything still inside them was useless baggage.

These instances of vomit were five years apart, essentially bookending my consciousness of my grandmother’s illness. Neither instance involved contagion, but it hardly mattered. The cancer diagnosis was so out of my frame of reference that what my fear latched onto was the vomit. The idea of vomiting, which I already lived in constant terror of, became a marker for my first experience of mortality, of loss, of life’s impermanence.

XIV. Signum Pacis: Sign of Peace

For our honeymoon, Matt planned a trip to Italy. We began in Florence, and then moved on to Venice for a few days. After that, we traveled up to a remote cabin in the Dolomites. We spent a day in Rome before flying home.

“You have to see Assisi,” my father told me, a few months before we were married. Assisi, the home of Saint Francis.

“Of course,” I said.

But of course, I would not. As Matt planned our trip, he worried over our itinerary. Would we have enough activities? Would I be disappointed with not enough to fill the time? I assured him that all I wanted to do was eat and take walks. I didn’t want to go to the Vatican, visit any churches, shrines, or reliquaries.

We ate pizza, pasta, gelato. Gnocchi, steak, mussels, shrimp. Cheese, melons, grapes, prosciutto. I spooned tiramisu out of jars, drank red wine with dinner and espresso with dessert. When I couldn’t finish a meal, a server teased me, though with a grain of truth, “Il cuoco, he cry.”

We walked along the canals of Venice, which I couldn’t get enough of. We rode in a gondola steered by a man named Matteo, who whistled as he steered, whose boat had been in his family for generations. We went on a ghost tour. We visited Aqua Alta, a bookstore that is known to flood every so often when the canals rise. The books are elevated on tables and in old bathtubs and retired gondolas. The bookstore is inhabited by dozens of cats.
Our first night in Italy, I awoke to hear Matt vomiting in the bathroom of our Florence Airbnb. “Babe? You okay?” I called.

“Yeah, the pork’s coming back up,” he announced cheerfully between heaves. “Cover your ears, sweetie.”

A few years later, my parents planned their own trip to Italy. My father had been there before, but it was my mother’s first time.

“We had the best pizza in Florence,” I told her, on the speaker phone with both of them. “And make sure you eat gelato every day.”

“We’re going to see eucharistic miracles,” my mother said with characteristic brashness.

“Great, do that,” I said. “But also, eat pizza and gelato. It’s Italy, for Christ’s sake.”

XV. Communionem: Communion

Matt’s proneness to kidney stones has compelled us to become frequent flyers at Blodgett Hospital Emergency Room. The pain tends to last around six hours, and the only sufficient pain control has to be accessed in hospital. At one of our visits, in the dead of Michigan winter, we waited for his morphine and Zofran to kick in as an elderly couple settled into the booth next to us, only a thin curtain separating us. The wife prattled a bit about how her husband, the patient, was snow blowing after the big storm, and maybe he’d developed a blood clot. Meanwhile, Matt’s pain was not subsiding, and his nausea returned. He doubled over the edge of the bed, cupping a wrinkled emesis bag as he heaved loudly.

I am a dainty, near-silent puker. But Matt, he pukes with his entire being. He involun­tarily vocalizes as he retches. His throat becomes raw. A morning of vomiting causes him to lose his voice for days.

“Oh babe,” I said as I rubbed his back. I hit the call button on the bed remote to remind the nurse about the pain meds we were still waiting on. I took his bag. He tried to hold onto it.

“I’ll get you a fresh one, “ I said as I dropped it carefully into the bin.

As we began to quiet, I heard a whisper next door, the wife to her husband, “l think they said kidney stones.” I briefly considered addressing her, bridging the gap, apologizing: My husband is a very loud puker, but it’s just pain, not anything communicable.

But I did not, because she already knows, and I’m occupied with his comfort. It’s okay for me to not take on anyone else’s, to keep the curtain closed.

Later I told this story to my parents, who had me on speaker phone. I laughed a bit about the elderly couple and their very audible whispering.

“Well, she was probably worried it was something contagious,” my mother said reasonably.

Of course she was, I thought. And isn’t that completely okay?

People used to tell me, “You are stronger than you think you are.” Mostly, it was other Catholic women. My mother, Krista whom I nannied for, other women invested in my remaining tuned into our religion. They looked at my frail, underfed body, saw me closing in on myself, and encouraged me to stay the course.

But what if my strength manifested differently than they hoped? What if it meant that instead of continuing to white-knuckle my way through life as a devout Catholic woman, I left?

Being hungry was the only way I felt safe, but I didn’t feel safe in my hungers, either. The thing that terrified me most was having the needs of my body announce themselves, make themselves impossible to ignore. Our appetites render us vulnerable, whether we want food, sex, attention, or something else entirely. In hunger we are powerless, at the concave side of the bargain, in no position to do anything but compromise. The have-nots, the beggars who cannot be choosers.

Can we suppress one appetite without impacting another? While I was under eating, my body staying pubescent, I also strove to resist the other changes to my body. The swelling heat deep in my belly, and deeper. Desires that I thought I’d invented, that became intrusive thoughts, like imagining a man’s head between my legs. I wanted to amputate the parts of my body that felt desire.

Disordered eating is often about more than food, even more than body image. At the root of it is the need for control. For our bodies to be in charge terrifies us, especially girls and women. If we indulge our hungers, our bodies have won. And in the spiritual realm, our bodies are to be tamed, mortified. Denied.

What is the worst, most invasive way my body can make her needs known? A way that I can’t hide, a way that requires me to stop everything and see to her, that even implores help? The most inconvenient thing she could possibly do? She could vomit. She could disrupt everything, and bring total humiliation upon me.

What if all the worst parts of me come out?

“If you do throw up,” he said to me, many times, when I panicked in our early days of dating, “I get to take care of you.”

What of letting ourselves be cared for when we’re sick? Of eating and being fed. Sharing secrets over coffee. Admitting when we want or need something. Pouring syrup on the big fluffy pancakes he makes on a Sunday morning and cuddling next to him on the couch. Lying back while he runs his tongue over the violet rivulets of my inner thighs, and takes my flesh into his mouth.

The parasympathetic nervous system takes charge of our rest and digest. Para means “alongside,” as in, these nerves run along the sympathetic nervous system. But also, as in connection. It’s in parasympathetic that we feel hunger, sleepiness, and sexual desire. Our parasympathetic allows us to be alongside, to commune, with another. We can’t separate rest and digest, we cannot have one without the other. And we can’t have either one without safety.

XV. Benedictio: Blessing

There are myriad reasons to eat. Take away the moral values around it, none of them are good or bad. They just are.

I spent a summer working as a gallery guard at the public museum, in which I read every plaque in the building, looked at every artifact, and then began to slowly lose my mind from boredom and isolation. I pushed my half hour break as far into the afternoon as I could. And then, I’d spend a dollar on a cup of coffee from the second-floor cafe, and slip into the security office by the first-floor loading dock where Jenna, my friend and our third-shift security guard, kept a drawer filled with snacks, including fig newtons, just because they’re my favorite.

When I’ve served drinks at both a coffee bar and a wine bar, before I feel hungry, I get sloppy and accident-prone. The moment I break a glass I know I’ve pushed myself too far. So I pay attention, I bring good snacks and a full water bottle. At my first moment of clumsiness I sneak off for a granola bar, a slice of cheese, and a generous drink of water. I now know how to sustain myself through hard work.

These days when I eat ice cream, it’s not because I need the calories, nor do I need it to stick to my ribs. I eat it for no reason at all other than wanting it.

We eat to be nourished. We eat as medicine, as comfort, as culture. We eat for dopamine, entertainment, pleasure. We eat when bored, sad, happy, or stressed. We eat when grieving or celebrating. We eat because we need to be fed. We eat because there is someone who needs to feed us.

On a Saturday one summer, we found reprieve from the heat at Grand Haven beach with friends–Josh, Cody, Sarah, Anna. Matt and I followed Cody to where he stood on a sandbar, the water down below his waist.

But once we got away from shore, I struggled to keep up.

“Can you swim?” Matt asked, the water deep enough that neither of us could touch ground.

“Oh,” I said, “no.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you couldn’t swim?”

It hadn’t occurred to me. I always stayed in shallow water, relied on concrete walls and doggie paddling. I can’t swim, but I can fight to survive.

Matt called out to Cody, who didn’t need to swim. He’s six foot three, the size of two of me.

Cody waded away from the sandbar, lifted me onto his back, and carried me to shore.

We walked the pier, climbed down the iron ladder at its flank, and dipped back into the lake. But this time, they watched me like hawks, Sarah and Matt and Anna taking turns broad-stroking toward me, on high alert, ready to tow me back to the pier at the first sign of trouble. I laughed, comforted and embarrassed by their shared concern.

I’m stronger than I look. Though I do yoga every day, forming plush into muscle, still I am fleshy, curvy, and soft. All I have to do is lie back and stare at the sky, my body spreading herself across the water, taking up space.

I’ve never learned to swim, yet my body has a newfound buoyancy. When I dip into the cool blue water of Lake Michigan, now I float.