A HUNGRY AND HURTING: EMOTIONAL AND PHYSICAL ABUSE (NICOLE’S STORY)

NICOLE: "Eating was the cave, barrier, boundary, safety, and the buffer."

Nicole is a forty-one-year-old lesbian of African-American, Cherokee, and white heritage who used food to cope with racism and emotional and physical abuse. As a young child, Nicole was physically and emotionally abused by her mother, who confined Nicole to the house for extended periods of time — continuing through her adolescence and late teens —deliberately tried to kill her, beat her frequently, and forced Nicole to keep this abuse a secret. Nicole's father did not intervene in what, as an adult, Nicole has begun to label "torture." Nicole's mother tried to beat out of Nicole anything that suggested that she was separate from her mother. Retrospectively, Nicole believes that when her mother beat her, "she was trying to kill the bad parts of herself." Her mother had internalized many racist assumptions about black women and tried to pass them on to Nicole through her judgments about her hair, skin, and language. Nicole's mother despised anything that wasn't "white" — curly hair, dark skin, "improper" English. Nicole bore the brunt of her mother's self-hatred.

When she was a young child, Nicole binged because it made her "real self disappear," so that no one could find her. Many survivors of sexual abuse describe a similar splitting process. Whenever she was physically or verbally attacked at school or by her mother, she would "disappear":

I hid my real self inside, very deep inside of a cave or a molecule or a cell. That is where I went. Another part of me that was sort of split off at the same time was the part that you would see. . . . Eating was the cave, barrier, boundary, safety, and the buffer. . . . [The cave was] like in science-fiction type stories where there are whole civilizations way under the earth. There was a room way under the cave that was all stone.

She described this safe place inside her body as filled with huge balloons made of giant globules of fat in cellophane. When she ate she felt as if she could hide in this room. Now she understands that she escaped into this cave because, deep down, she knew that her mother was trying to kill her. Nicole embodied a sexual female self that her mother wanted to destroy.

Bingeing also gave Nicole a way to occupy her time when she was alone, even though it meant being scolded for being fat. Beginning when Nicole was three years old, her mother ridiculed her about her weight and tried to shame her into dieting. Nicole was taken to the pediatrician routinely to be weighed and given diet pills; these trips humiliated her. While being told she shouldn't eat, Nicole watched her mother prepare huge meals and learned that eating was an important family ritual. After school, Nicole was alone for many hours; her parents worked and she was never allowed to play with anyone. She felt lost and abandoned and did not know what to do with herself, so she spent the afternoons hunting down and eating the sweets her mother had hidden from her. Even though she risked her mother's anger, the ritual of finding the food was like a game: "It was as fun as an Easter egg hunt to find what new place she had found to hide the food." While it buffered her loneliness and sadness, the food also gave her a connection to her mother. Although Nicole and her mother never talked about this ritual, it was their shared secret since her mother continued to hide food and Nicole continued to search for it and eat it.

Nicole also binged at school to cope with her isolation and emptiness. She was sent to private schools and a church in which she was often the only African-American child, and none of the neighborhood black or white children went to the schools or church she attended. She was transferred to a different school almost every year. Abused at home and racially isolated at school, Nicole had no place to turn. Children of color from troubled families are in double jeopardy, for in addition to suffering the pain inflicted by their families, they have no refuge from racism.

In response to isolation, Nicole binged. Her fifth-grade teacher told her mother that Nicole ate the extra food from all of the other children's lunches; they gave her what they didn't want and she ate it. Nicole explains, "I was not getting what I needed to survive [emotionally]. Being tortured. I was being tortured slowly but surely, methodically. It was all undercover and hidden." Nicole ate whatever was available, including the hidden cookies and the food her classmates gave her, often without really thinking about it. Bingeing was more of an impulse than an action she controlled. She didn't feel guilty about it except that she knew her mother would be angry. When she was very young, she didn't associate bingeing with getting fat: "It is more like the way a dog eats. The way dogs eat out of the garbage. If it is available, they eat it."

Heterosexism

While compulsory heterosexuality influences all women's emerging sense of themselves, women who link heterosexism directly to their eating problems tend to be those who acted on their sexual feelings for other women when they were very young. Their isolation, lack of knowledge of lesbian communities, and economic and emotional dependence on heterosexual adults explains why coming out as a lesbian as a child or a teenager may be much more traumatic than coming out during adulthood. One-third of all suicides of young people are gay-related; young gay men and lesbians typically shoulder feelings of exclusion alone. The experiences related to me by the women I interviewed illuminate how eating problems emerge as a way of coping with the isolation, confusion, and loneliness of growing up in contexts in which their sexual identities are not embraced.

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