For years, my mom and her immediate family have been stuck in deeply ingrained patterns of dysfunction that are hard not to notice, though if they are openly observed and remarked upon, they freak out to prevent revelation, which is part of the abusive cycle they remain trapped in. It's heart-breaking to watch sometimes, because like children who want candy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I know that their bad choices will only make them sicker through my continued neglect. And just like I know that all those pop-culture movies contributing to deliberately false ideas about real American life that we know aren't true (just like I know that people in India do not break out into Bollywood-type skits every time someone gets engaged, funny as that might in the entertainment world), I know that they argue with me because they fear committal to a state mental institution, like old horror movies filmed in black-and-white.
They don't realize that those abusive types of hospitals are a thing of the past, because they fear healthcare, too, just like my mother's youngest sister hides her irrational phobias over rain and storms, because she knows it's another symptom of her psychoses. It was in this manner that my mother and her family hid the worst of their sicknesses behind socially acceptable hobbies like cleaning and eating and shopping, because they provide easier cover than drinking and smoking, which they mistakenly believe are more open manifestations of mental illness and the stress that produces.
Of course, their weirder addictions simply made our households much more stressful to reveal to anyone outside of our family group (which was part of the point), forcing me and my Gen-X friends into old patterns of drinking and smoking to relieve the inner tension cause by their abusive patterns, which put us right back to where our Depression-Era grandparents lived: at hip, flapper-type bistros full of smoky jazz and fun, which was not at all what my mom and her sisters wanted. They can't smoke, or drink, or have fun easily, because their nervous tensions make them feel nauseous all the time, especially when they don't take their medications.
My youngest aunt is so "pukesy-poo" (they make up cutesy names to hide the root cause of their anxieties), that as kids, we knew she'd get sick from sitting in a rocking chair that moved slightly (so we'd sneak up behind her to tilt the chair back-and-forth, making her squeal), or from hearing about someone vomiting (so we'd imitate puking sounds with our grandpa), or it might be that she simply she wasn't sipping from a straw the stomach-calming sodas that she's addicted to.
In was in this way that my mom's middle sister became a hardcore food addict, with an addiction so severe that she has to attend weekly group meetings and pay out big bucks to some unhealthy food company that "has to" feed her controlled portion-sizes of chemically-laden food that will surely kill her off someday soon, like my mom's Aspartame-addicted youngest sister. They haven't actually conquered anything in this world. If anything, their silent generation of "Do-Nothings" have created even worse patterns with harder addictions, like hoarding and binge eating, or simulating a "shopper's high" through a covertly athletic "runner's high", making it extremely difficult to diagnose and treat, which is also part of the point.
One year, my infamously large "Moose Dog" accompanied me to my mom's eating-disordered sisters' house in upstate Westchester with me, staying overnight in her basement on Christmas Day Eve, with the understanding that he and I would leave early the next morning for my mom's place in Rockland after staying the night, because I wanted access to her immediate back yard for bathroom runs that are easier when no else is around, like we did whilst in the country. She was fine with that, and so throughout the day, as other family stopped by, I went up-and-down the basement stairs to the rest of the house, periodically checking in on my still-young Malamaute.
At some point during the day, Ted had figured out how to open up sealed plastic containers to gorge himself sight unseen, because on a food run to the garage, my cousin (her son) was looking in the garage and then the basement room for something, while I held Ted's leash and looking on. He stuttered a bit at first while he looked for something his mom had asked for, because where some such holiday food had been stored were the missing Christmas cookies that my aunt and her "fat friends" (the women who join her in her periodic over-eating that's related to their disorders), trade with each other under the cloud cover of a traditional church cookie swap.
You see, Ted masterfully uncapped (without marring them) the tops of each container with Christmas cookies, eating every single one of them, and it was at least three large flat containers that can hold sheet-pan sized cakes. Hilarity ensued, as first my other cousin (her second son), and then my aunt joined us in the mysterious search for her cookie-swap cookies. We all laughed about it, as Ted reposed regally upon on the cool tile floor near the basement door, in a tellingly calm Zen-like fatness, well-satisfied with his holiday endeavors, unruffled as he was because he successfully masterminded this quest for food done on the sly, because winter is coming!! Feed me fat!! FAT!!!
But that's not why my cousins were laughing. They loved Teds' "taking one for the team", because each and every year my cousin's suffer with this gaggle of crazy females and their weird cookie obsession, because even more than that, they bake poorly on purpose to hurt one another with. Addicts don't eat food because it tastes good like we do. No, the point behind their cooking is to make the drug that they need to get high (taste, flavor, and skill aside), and that's exactly why my cousins will always remember one very special dog who ate all the food that sucked, forever putting him in their memory favorably, because your food addiction is no match for my dogs, ladies.
You're not even as good as one of my animals, woman.
