Epiphany

My mother is a slight hoarder. Not like the kind that you would see on the shows on TV, but she does keep WAY more than we need in the house. We have boxes in the basement of things that haven't been unpacked since we moved into the house ten years ago. I used to not understand why we would keep things we haven't used in so long (we won't use them again!), until I understood where this compulsion to keep things came from.

My mother's family grew up pretty well-off. They weren't rich by any means, but they were definitely comfortable. My grandparents are both second-generation Americans, so they were raised to be penny-pinchers and make things last. My grandmother is the thriftiest woman I know: she even sends me coupons in the mail that she won't use. My mother didn't experience poverty until she had my sister at the age of 17. While raising a child at such a young age was a hard enough task on its own, my sister's father left them both shortly after. Being a single, working mother is expensive, and my mother was pretty poor.After meeting my father, getting married, and years of both of them working, we are financially comfortable. I never had to worry about my basic needs being met as a child, and didn't ever feel richer or poorer than the other kids at school.

Knowing all of this makes me worry that I will follow the same cycle. It's a bit different for me as I'm going to college and not having a child, so I don't have those kinds of expenses and stressors that my mother had. But I see the obsessive thriftiness of my mother in little things that I do.

And in food.

"The Elephant and the Ice Cream" really made me come to this realization. I have the same relationship with food as Khazzoom has, and it's because of the hardships that my mother went through. I wouldn't classify it as a food addiction, but I am definitely a member of the clean plate club. I was trained to be. My parents spent money and time buying and preparing meals, so I had better have eaten all of them. Portions are hard for me to control, because I was always given heaping amounts and told to eat them all up. And I was always rewarded when I did this, rewarded by dessert. Maybe that's why I eat when I'm stressed or down, it feels rewarding. I don't have too much of a problem with my body image, I just think it's incredibly interesting that my eating habits come from so much of a deeper origin.