Apologizing is a semi-colon; and Food as Protection, Comfort, Pleasure

CONTENT NOTE: Not explicit, but I'm discussing hurtful things like eating disorders, "unaliving" oneself, and painful family.
With the intention of untangling some of the snarls...
_____________________

My brother hasn't talked to me in almost twenty-two years, since shortly after our mother's suicide around winter solstice, 2002.

A bunch of recent things––a random conversation; the thought experiment that reincarnation is for me; and stopping eating sugar (!)––led me to write the below postcard apologizing to my brother this morning.
(Also connected maybe to my intention to write 'thank-you' cards (after DT won the US presidential election)--that weighs more than I expected--and now also seems to have expanded into apologies!)

(That's a raku-fired bowl ^ I set upside-down on the address. The photo doesn't show how the pottery bowl is both dusty and shiny. I love it. (From the store, of course.))

I wrote a postcard because I believe my brother wouldn't open an envelope from me. (My grammar is garbled, but I don't want to write it again.)
The front is that Victorian-style funereal Christmas card I'd posted, with the gravestone weeping willows. I thought he'd think it was funny. We share a family sense of humor. (I miss that about him.)

My brother never told me why he cut me off. He just stopped responding. (Not that we were ever close or in touch much before, either.)
He never explained, but it's not hard for me to see that while I'm only nine years older than him, that's a lot older when you're a kid, and I am an elder member of the family that hurt him.

And I never even thought of apologizing before.
 
I. The Random Conversation

One of the things that made me think about my brother (I almost never do) was a short conversation with a newish volunteer at work, Jeff.

"Do you blame your parents for the bad relations with your sister and brother?" Jeff asked me yesterday.

"No," I said.

"You don't?" He was surprised.

We'd been talking about how we'd both left our troubled homes in our mid-teens (Jeff at 15; me, 16) and thereafter had troubled relationships--or none--with our siblings.

"My parents failed in many ways," I told him, "but there were a lot of complicated factors working on them that they couldn't control.
I don't blame them so much as see their failure as a tragedy:
people--my parents––intend well, but fail to meet their responsibilities or live up to their good intentions.

"And I do that too.
So, then what?
I guess I try to pay it forward."
_________________

Here's what I'd say instead of saying, It's not my fault:

I did not intend harm to you.
Other forces that I could not control (or even be aware of) were also at work.
Nonetheless, I did hurt you.
And I am sorry about that.

The past is gone, and there may be nothing I can do in the here and now. (Perhaps, for instance, you are dead.)
But I make amends for my past actions by learning and practicing to do it differently now... and in the future, with other people.

If you and I meet again--perhaps in another life--I hope I can/ I intend to be more aware of my power and use it more wisely.

There's a lot to be said, but in this case, a postcard saying "I'm sorry" will have to do.
I doubt my brother will welcome it. He might hate it, in fact. "Useless, too late, pathetic... Useless."
But I think (hope!) it won't cause harm, anyway. And I felt I should say it.

II. The Spacer of Reincarnation

You see that reincarnation snuck in there.
It's such a helpful story-element to me--a tool, like the semicolon
that some people get as a tattoo to say they wanted to end their lives (to put a period. to it) ; but they put a spacer in, instead.

The idea of reincarnation is a thought experiment, like science-fiction...
Some relationships are over-and-done in this life.
What if we get another chance, a re-do, in other places and times?

Even leaving sci-fi out of it, there's still the rest of our (my) time on Earth. Might I live as if that time is a time to try again with other people, even if not with the original ones?

III. Food Is Time Travel

Another thing that made me think about my brother is the changes I'm making in what I eat: I stopped eating added-sugar a couple months ago, (I may have mentioned--ha, ha), and there's been a slow-motion domino effect. To begin with, big, rippling changes in what's available to eat.
"Not that. Not that either."

Like--I was shopping for hard cider to drink with my friend Kate on Solstice this Saturday. (I'm drinking less but not no alcohol.)  I was shocked how many cider-makers add sugar!
One box said, "no added sugar", but the second ingredient was "apple juice concentrate". Uh-huh. That's sugar. 27 g of sugar in 8 oz. prepared! That's 2 grams more than allowed for a grown woman.)

I got Wild State Cider, made in Duluth. (Hm, yes, in chi-chi West Duluth, which Marz calls Little California.)
Its only ingredient: Apples.

But also, not-eating-sugar has had totally unexpected psychological side-effects, including that it opens a window in a time portal...
In my case, I am especially looking back at my teen years, which I shared with my brother.
He was born seven-weeks shy of my ninth birthday.

Below: Our parents and my baby brother – – this all fell apart in the next coupla years:

I started overeating when my mother left the family when I was thirteen--he was four.

___________________

(The oldest girlette here, Penny Cooper, is eight-and-a-half years old, my own happiest age.
No doubt the girlettes are reincarnated Time Travelers. Penny Cooper admitted it!
Well, it wasn't an admission---she was very blasé about it.
"Oh, sure", she said when I asked.

I'm not sure that that means it's a fact, but it's a workable story. Is there a word for that? An actionable story?

LOL--oh, yeah! Myth.)

The Girlettes take care of a sick one:

IV. Food Is Protection, Comfort, and . . .

Last night I watched an interview with Johann Hari about weight loss drugs (on utube) recommended (the interview) by Linda Sue.
Johann Hari is the author of a book about recent weight-loss drugs (he himself takes Ozempic), Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs (2024).

There's a lot to be said about drugs and our modern food culture, but what caught me was Hari talking about the psychological reasons for overeating.
Including that a lot of women who became fat as girls did so for protection from male sexual predation--because they'd been sexually abused, attacked, raped....

I was not sexually abused, but my father was unpredictably violent, and I was very afraid of males.
I remember sitting on the front steps with my sister when I was fifteen--she was almost seventeen--and saying, tentatively, that maybe I was fat partly so I didn't get hit on, like I saw boys and men always hitting on her.
(And it worked! I was ashamed and unhappy about being fat, but happy about that.)

Roxanne Gay wrote Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body--about overeating after being gang-raped at twelve.
For protection, strength, and also for comfort:

"After I was raped I needed comfort," she wrote. "I felt so weak and I felt so powerless, and I wanted to make myself bigger."

--NPR interview with Gay, "Be Bigger, Fight Harder"

Hari mentions that more boys and men have eating disorders now too. He doesn't say, but I would expect they also arise from being hurt, powerless, shamed (and so forth).

And that's what made me think about my poor little brother. Four years old, left with our rather clueless father and two older sisters, both of whom also left home three years later, when he was seven. (I moved out the same year our sister went to college, when I was sixteen.)

My brother and I never talked about it, but I wouldn't be surprised if he and I shared a disordered eating life, though in different directions:
he was model-thin as a young man, and subsisted on cigarettes and coffee.

Thinking about that, I felt so sad for my role in his life. It wasn't intentional, but at any rate, I sure didn't help.
And I thought--I never said I'm sorry. I'm going to.

(I felt some resistance--"It wasn't my fault." No, but I did it.)

V. ... and Comfort & Pleasure

Hari talks about comfort too.
It's one of the three main reasons people eat, he said: sustenance, comfort, and pleasure.
For his first 6 months on Ozempic, he felt emotionally flat, he said, and he realized that he missed the comfort of overeating.

Yes! I'd recently said pretty much the same thing--that I felt sad without sugar. (He didn't mention this, but there's also this loss of eating as a time-filler. What do you do instead???)
Other people on Ozempic (etc.) miss the sensory pleasure of eating.
Hari said he is maybe unusual because he actually enjoys eating more now, because for the first time he's not eating only for the comfort of being stuffed.

Wow! I had just said something like that to bink.
Now I'm not getting the chemical comfort of sugar, I've felt sad, yes, but I also started to think...
Maybe I could experiment with eating for aesthetic pleasure. 

I've never much cared about the flavors, textures, scent, colors, etc of non-sugar food. I felt I would be completely happy if I could live on ice-cream.

Could I cultivate caring?
Maybe...
Do I want to bother? I would have to cook...
Maybe.

Serendipitously (the book came into the store and I'd noticed that it's on lists of Best 21st-century Nonfiction), I'm reading food-writer Ruth Reichl's second memoir, Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table (2001).

Marz saw the book and said, that's Solomon. The benefit of a Biblical childhood. I did not know!

"As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love."
--Song of Solomon, 2:5, KJV

It's not only about this, but naturally it's a lot about the pleasures of food. Many, many pleasures I would not enjoy, mostly involving dead animal parts. But the pleasure of food...?
Maybe I'll try that.

I've already experience something new like that:
a couple weeks ago, I enjoyed the look of the sliced-open layer cake I'd made for Big Boss's birthday, without tasting any.

One more key thing––I don't need fat for protection anymore:
I am old.
Yay! Age is an even better protection than fat.

Just to note:
I'm way over-simplifying things here. For most of my middle-years, for instance, I was more at peace with food.

I gained my current extra weight at fifty, with menopause. Maybe I don't need to keep carrying it into old age?
As I say, I'm more motivated by physical HEALTH concerns now. I didn't expect these psychological, spiritual, sci-fi concerns to arise. But they're welcome.

Oh, my.
This is all a lot to feel and to think about.
I'm going to sign off now, and walk to the mailbox to mail the postcard before I become afraid to.
It's a good thing to do.

This semi-colon, an investment in our next lifetime(s).