I have been struggling to figure out how to write this post for days. Over a week now. I have been going back and forth with it. How honest do I be? Do I get as brutal as I should knowing it can hurt people? Or do I hold back? But, as the week has gone on, I think the only way I can write this post is with total and brutal honesty.
Bernadette Watkins wrote a Night of a Thousand Thoughts. In it Michael Bassey Johnson states “Food is not everything, they say, but it means the world to a starving person.” In the past few years I have learned how many children are going to bed hungry and are going to school without proper nourishment. I written and won an award for a paper on the plight. But, even still, my love language is food.
I realized this “love language” last Saturday. My husband went to the new Tim Horton’s in town. He knows how much I love Iced Caramel Macchiatos and doughnuts. Well, he bought me a large and also 3 doughnuts. When we got home, I ate everyone of those doughnuts. Why? Because they were there and he bought them. I did not want them to go bad. And he loved me enough to buy them for me. Who am I to pass up three Tim Horton’s doughnuts. (I will put a caveat here. I do like Dunkin’s better. I really like G&S out of Montgomery better but I don’t have one here.)
Anyway, I got to thinking later that morning, why on earth did I down those three doughnuts? What was I thinking? I will be honest, I haven’t looked at the scale since that day. I am waiting until after the 4th to get damage and then resetting. I downed those doughnuts though because my husband bought them for me. He bought them for me because he knew I loved doughnuts. He bought me all of my favorites. He “spoiled” me.
But it is not the first time. He has been spoiling me for the last 25 years. Why? Because he has been trained that is my love language. My grandmother gave him all the tools. Not physically, but by teaching me at a very young age that food is given to me when a person loves me. I would go to her house over the summer and she would fill me with candies, chocolates, and baked goods because she loved me. She knew I liked them, so she gave them to me. She continued this even through college when I stayed with her over the summer. It was biscuits and gravy for breakfast, West Virginia Hot Dogs or Pepperoni Rolls for lunch, and then whatever I ate for dinner at the paper.
Meeting my husband in Pennsylvania for our vacations, I would not eat in front of him because of my anxiety of eating in front of a man. But, he slowly learned how to breakdown that wall. He slowly learned how to show me that his love was real and then the love language of sweets would come. The desserts, the treats, etc. It’s been a never ending cycle.
Finding this cycle, I know it is a cycle that needs to stop. The question is how to stop it. I know it has to otherwise this journey is pointless. And I am not going to allow this journey to be pointless. Hubby and I are going to have to find alternative means of giving and receiving love. Food cannot be the only way.