Food and Fingers

(Written 5/26/05)

My husband hates to waste food. He loves to eat, and he eats a lot. And he is skinny. His entire family is like that. All these skinny people always eating like it's their last meal -- it’s enough to aggravate the life out of a couple hundred slightly overweight women. 

He eats a lot, but he only eats his fill and stops. He will not eat the last two little bites of roast potatoes left in the dish just to clean it up, but he will not throw it away either. Ever. He carefully wraps up two bites of potatoes and then puts it in the fridge and there it stays. There it has to stay, because he notices everything. If after three months I throw away those potatoes, that very night he will ask where they are.

If it’s June, he may say, “Where is that 1/2 inch cube of Parmesan cheese I put in here February 3?” I have no recollection of a piece of cheese or of throwing away a piece of cheese, although I’ll admit it’s likely I did, so I say, “It had mold on it,” which it certainly would have if it were still in the fridge. But over the years I’ve learned to leave everything in the fridge until it is truly moldy, and then I ask if it’s OK to throw it out. If he can’t tell what it is, he’ll let me toss it.

How did he get this way? He comes from Depression era parents and all that, and he comes from a culture that values good food. But so do I. And I am quite willing to throw food away, having long ago figured that it’s just as wasted if I eat it when I don’t need it as it is when it’s thrown away. I do not see the point of saving food for a long time and THEN throwing it away either, except perhaps for guilt reduction.

So how did I get this way? I’m the only underweight person in my family. We were supposed to clean our plates because of the starving children in China, and we were urged to finish up the leftovers. Servings were huge. I watched one afternoon as my tiny two year old cousin was plopped in his high chair, and the following (I swear this is true) was heaped on his tray: four ears of corn, three pieces of fried chicken, some Jello cubes, two pieces of buttered bread, and two pieces of chocolate cake. You could hardly see his little head behind all of this. His mother and grandmother were worried that he was too skinny, and they said he couldn’t get down until he ate everything. It took him three fussy hours to finish. I now think this was child abuse.

However, I was never forced to eat more than I felt like, and my mother used to tell this story. When I was an infant, she gave me my bottle and I didn’t want to drink it and kept turning away, but (since this was the rule in our family) she made me drink it all anyway. Then I got violently sick, and she found out that the milk was spoiled. She was so upset that she made her little baby sick that she never forced me to eat more than I wanted again. She was still upset and apologetic about it when I was 50. She also apologized once a year for bumping my head on the overhead compartment in the train when I was an infant and we were going to see my father at his base. 

It’s too bad my mother suffered regret over things I can’t even remember. Of course, I still get the creeps about the time I shut my baby’s finger in the front door and mashed it flat. I shouldn’t feel bad, especially considering that one of her boyfriends later ice-skated right over it and sliced off the tip, and she forgave him. In fact, she was apologetic about getting blood all over the Magic Kingdom’s ice rink.

People sometimes ask me how I managed to mash my baby’s finger in the door, implying I’m a bad mother, a label I am all too willing to accept. This incident shows the disadvantages of having advanced children. My daughter’s developmental milestones were all early, and she was walking at nine months. When she was just learning to walk, I left her playing with her toys on the floor while I took a UPS package at the front door. She had very quietly walked all the way across the floor and stuck her finger in that space that’s left between the door and the jamb when a door is open. Not having any idea that she was there or that she even could be there, I shut the door, mashing her poor little finger. She whimpered, and I jumped, saw what I’d done, opened the door, swept her up, and felt weak in the knees when I saw how flat her finger was.

 I actually called 911. I smashed my baby’s finger I sobbed. The dispatcher asked me if there was any blood. No, no blood. Does it look broken? No, just flat. Is it discolored? Noooo. Is the child crying? Well, no, not now, just me. Kelly by now was playing with her toys as if nothing had happened. Her finger seemed fine, but I still think that one looks just a fraction flatter than the others, but that could be an optical illusion due to the lack of a tip.