Stress Eating My Emotional Abuse

Joy of joys. I love winter. I do not love winter weight—the inevitable extra cushioning I seem to accumulate around my middle as my body prepares for the never to happen hibernation. However, this season I was doing better…until my mother came into town.

I tend to eat my feelings, and I eat when I am stressed out.

I was doing much better this time around because I was winning the war of the bulge and had managed to lose a little weight. Then came finals, the bullshit at work, and before I knew it my mother’s arrival was only weeks away.

As the number of days before her arrival decreased, the amount of comfort food that entered me increased.

I managed to get a grip on it, and had stabilized. Only to lose it a mere three days before her arrival as the stress of cleaning my house and preparing myself for the emotional onslaught, otherwise known as my mother, to arrive.

I have noted that since she got here, I have been eating non-stop and today I think I have reached a new low. I feel physically ill from all of the binge eating that I have done and it is mentally upsetting me.

My whole life, the portion that matters anyway (from teenager and beyond) my mother has been haranguing me about my weight. Even when I was a skinny little thing in high school, she called me fat, and told me to stop eating. I can’t recall a time when I wasn’t fighting with her over something I was or wasn’t consuming.

My size has long been a source of contention for me. As I recover from the marriage I am discovering that I used my size as a shield from mr horrible. He never made it a secret that he hated that I had gained weight with my pregnancies.

He was very open (not that he will ever admit or claim to recollect) about his disgust about my looks. I will never forget the name calling, the things he said to me and the verbal and emotional abuse in those first three years of our marriage.

I had to be fit in order to remain in the military back then, so I did eventually lose the weight, but I never forgave him for the things he said and the way he made me feel, nor for how he treated me in front of his friends and coworkers. This acknowledgement I suppressed and when I left the service to become a stay at home mom, I didn’t knowingly gain back the weight to keep him away, but I realize now that is what I did.

It didn’t work, but that is neither here nor there. The point is, I have struggled. He threw it back in my face and used it as cannon fodder to attack me during the divorce. Whatever. I knew that was coming. Expecting it allowed me to move past it.

So—back to the present—I am seriously contemplating forcing myself to throw up because I feel so sick after all the food I consumed earlier. And why? Because none of it was eaten because I was hungry, all of it was eaten because my mother stresses me out.

She pushes all of my buttons, and it’s almost like she is making up for lost time, taking pot-shots for past transgressions that maybe she was too sick to harp on a year ago? It is mentally exhausting to be around her and apparently it is also making me ill to my stomach, literally.

I mentioned on the second day she got here that a new gym had gone up right by my house, and one of the girls who goes to my school and happens to live in my complex was telling me she had joined.

Why did I even bring this up? She grabbed onto that nugget like it was her platform for change. She is determined that she will not be satisfied until she sees me enrolled with a membership at that gym.

I am terrified that she is going to follow through with that threat because it is going to ruin my plans. I was going to sign up for that gym because YES, I am dissatisfied with my level of fitness and the membership to my other gym expired and I didn’t renew because it was too far away as it turns out.

But I want to do it by my choice. Not because my busy body mother wants me to do it. If I let her get involved, I am afraid it will sabotage any attempt at actual progress because of the illogical need I have within to spite her, when in fact I will only be hurting myself.

So headachy, and stomach-achy, I riding out the length of her stay, hoping to distract her from this current obsession of hers, as she relives the nightmares of my youth, haranguing me once again about my size like it’s really going to help.

May the odds be ever in my favor…