Dear Maurice

Dear Maurice,                                                                                     1-28-2016

I have a dysfunctional relationship with food. Where some people are able to eat three meals a day and snack normally, I can’t. I find that my relationship with it is filled with guilt and self-recrimination when I eat poorly. I self-soothe with food. And now that I’m battling diabetes I find all of these emotions clamoring to the surface and are playing a game of emotional tug of war.

I strained my upper jaw muscle last night. Yeah. That’s right. Slept on my hand wrong last evening and woke up with a a nagging pain which quickly became the worst kind of pain ever. It was so bad I broke down and had my mother call a man I totally despise and to ask him what he thought might be wrong and to god in heaven please let him have some treatment options.

The sight unseen diagnosis was lockjaw. Truly most hideous pain. Couldn’t bring my teeth together. Couldn’t open my mouth wide. It was horrible.

Today was better and I went in to see him. Not lockjaw but strained upper jaw muscle on the right side of my face. So why is this food related. Because everything I ate today had soft. Which meant mashed potatoes, plain greek yogurt, peanut butter, chicken enchilada soup and sugar free pudding and Italian Wedding Soup from Progresso. I didn’t go over in carbs but to say the least I am very hungry at the moment.

So why do I have such a complicated relationship with food. I have been, since some of my earliest memories, obsessed with food.

When I was five years old I would get up in the morning on the weekends when my parents were still in bed and go into the living room hoping to find those last one or two dead soldiers from White Castle or Taco Bell and eat for breakfast.

My earliest memory with food was when I was two years old and I got up out of bed when everyone was still asleep seeking out the birthday cake with Bugs Bunny on it. When I found I clumsily dug my tiny hand into the buttercream icing and the chocolate cake and pulled off a hunk of it, cramming it into my mouth. My mouth is watering just at the thought of it.

Food=love. So when I would feel down or lonely or scared I would eat copious amounts of food.

My step-mother would fix this elaborate dinners. Chicken Fried or barbecued. Sometimes it was pork chops. She used Crisco to cook it in. Green beans. Corn(usually creamed). And mashed potatoes and rolls.

I’m a food addict. Alcoholics remember their first drink. Well definitely I’m a food addict because a lot of my memoires are awash in food details. And the road to the onset of my Type 2 Diabetes is paved in those memories.

I’m feeling guilty right now because I fear tomorrow my blood sugar will higher than it was this morning. Which it hit its lowest point yet since I started my road to recovery. I’m second guessing everything now.

Should I have eaten the mashed potatoes? What will they do to my sugars? What kind of weight will I gain? Or will everything be okay because I’m working hard to get better and I won’t wake up feeling sick to my stomach and weak all over because my sugars are 150 or higher.

It’s not something I like to admit how weak I am in the face of temptation. That I can run a marathon of 26.2 miles. That I can bring my bipolar disorder to a highly functional level.

But put a plate of Chinese food in front of me and wilt under the strain of resisting temptation.

Every warrior has their Achilles heel. Mine is food addiction. When I ate poorly in the past I was simply fat, overweight, unattractive to the opposite sex. Now my health is on the line. I either face this demon head on and learn to manage it one day at a time or it will literally be the death of me. That is something I most definitely do not want.

Sincerely,

Amy McCorkle