I was an avid TV watcher when I was growing up. Scooby-Doo, Charlie's Angels, CHiPs... anything we could get without cable. As soon as we walked up the hill from the bus, the TV would go on. One show we watched a lot was Happy Days reruns, and I think in shaped me in more ways than one would expect. In one episode, Joanie was upset about something (her crush on Potsie), and Marian told her that whenever she was upset, she used to eat peanut butter straight from the jar. The episode concluded with Marian handing Joanie a jar of peanut butter.
Fast forward a few years to me trying to navigate my emotions after my mother's death. I remember thinking that if peanut butter could work for Joanie, it could maybe work for me. It didn't. Neither did the add-ins: chocolate chips, sweetened flaked coconut, Hershey's syrup. But I tried it again, day after day when I got home from school.
I think in many ways, I still have that same disordered approach to eating--emotions can be stifled with a brownie sundae. Currently, I can always tell myself that I'm making the food for my family, even if I fail to acknowledge that I'll eat most of it when they've gone to bed. I can't even pretend to be upset when my five-year-old warns me off of food that she wants to make sure she has the next day. She, out of all of my family, seems to know how much I try to stuff inside to avoid the stress and messy emotions of my life.
I'm confessing my own peanut butter eating, hoping that naming it will help me move into something approaching a healthy way of using food.
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