“No!”, my mother has always liked to remind me, was my first word and one that I issued at her, with conviction, on the day of my first birthday to get her to stop feeding me and hand over the feeding spoon pronto. What mattered to me was getting the food in that spoon before my birthday, thank you very much, and in a quantity and quality of my choosing. And this deceptively tricky goal for myself, and then later for my daughter, who resisted most of my attempts to guide her eating choices, came to be a defining challenge and source of conflict in my life, to the point that an eating-disorder counsellor for me and a family counsellor for myself and my daughter were resorted to for help over the years, both to little benefit.
So that today, though I have finally sorted out my own eating and weight issues, my daughter (27) and I are partially estranged as she continues to resent and reject my past attempts to help her manage her diet when she was both over and underweight. I brought body baggage with me to my mothering experience from a youth somewhat misspent as a thin-obsessed, diet-mad ballet dancer and rampant bulimic in my young adulthood and then again in my forties. It was a part of what undermined my efforts to guide my daughter towards her weight health and humour.
But I do not accept the fairly extreme resentment she has shown towards my well-intended, indeed loving efforts to help her manage this deceptively tricky battle. We need to consider in the messy mix the.
