Eat, Eat, Eat! But Don't Get Fat
The insanity of an 80s upbringing.
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver.
The older I get the more I understand that our varying cultures have endless qualities in common, but if we never share our cultures with each other we’ll never know it. I was raised in the 80s and 90s by a Jewish family, and there will always be certain cultural skews as a result, but something tells me that my experience isn’t a unique one. My great-grandparents immigrated here from Poland and raised my grandmother, my grandfather immigrated here from Germany when he was 10. They all raised my mother, and the whole family raised yours truly. Everybody lived in a shadow of the past, everybody yelled unnecessarily urgent, fear-centric instructions all the time, and everybody had a lack mindset. They passed it all on to me.
“My grandmother showed love through food” is cliché at this point. No shit, everyone’s did. My family showed their limiting beliefs through food, too. I was instructed to eat, offered food at every opportunity, and shown that me eating food made my family happy. “Eat, eat!” I can hear it in my sleep. The protective commands of people who see safety in being well-fed, because we came from a long line of people familiar with the opposite. Nothing made my family happier than feeding its children, and simultaneously nothing was more embarrassing to my family than being fat. I was raised by a vehemently fatphobic family that constantly wanted to feed me, and that’s just one of the ways they cemented me inside an impossible riddle that would last my entire life.