September 18, 2011

• Better Birthdays

  As a wee girl, I was conditioned very early to love birthdays, even though I almost always got sick from overindulgence in cake and ice cream.  Eating ’til I puked was a common occurrence in my childhood.  I hated throwing up, and never learned to like it any better, but even so, my memories of early birthdays are mostly happy.

  All that changed when I was raped, rejected and thrown out on my sixteenth birthday.  I’ve been raped three times in my life, two of them on birthdays.  Seven years after the first I lived through a violent gang rape by outlaw bikers on my twenty-third birthday.  After that, all my birthdays have been better.

  The pattern of eating myself sick continued into my fifties, with several attempts to kick the sugar addiction.  I’ve had more success at that since I learned that wheat was also an addiction.  Poly-addictions reinforce each other, y’know?  Kicking wheat gluten and dairy casein has made it easier to abstain from sugar, too, but I can still taste, in memory, that chocolate cake batter I scraped out of the mixing bowl 64 years ago.

   

  • 2:44 pm
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