Something Else

I used to call myself a carnivore and say I had a food disorder: things I didn’t eat, most fruits and vegetables, I couldn’t swallow. It was mostly a texture thing, the wrong one eliciting a gag reflex. I think it was a way of claiming my own identity. My childhood was shame based, nothing I did being the right thing. Somewhere back there I figured out my parents would not actually shove things down my throat, and if I gagged I had an excuse for me not eating them. It became the one thing I could control.

Mind you, I didn’t figure this out until I was in my forties and by then the gag reflex was pretty well cemented into the way I lived my life. I didn’t like it, refusing peoples hospitality ad nausea. And then, when I became a Christian there is that command about eating what people put before you.

I started working on my food problem about ten years ago, making little progress, then I got married and I made a little more progress. My wife is a great cook and she has been very helpful and patient with me, but the going was a slow slog.

Then I had the stroke. At first, they wouldn’t let me eat at all. It seems people who have strokes sometime have trouble swallowing and if you do it wrong the stuff will go down to their lungs. After a couple or three days the swallow expert, a friendly, blonde, hottie, said I could eat.

So I got my tray of hospital food. I remember sticking my fork in some vegetable, caulifloweir maybe. I looked at it, looked up at God, and stuck it in my mouth. That’s about how long it took, the time it took you to read it, but I sad a lot. I told God all about my childhood traumas surrounding my food issues. I gave him my fear about what was going on with me and what would happen to me if I didn’t change the way I eat, if I stuck that fork full of what ever it was in my mouth and gagged on it.

God did something and I didn’t gag on it. In fact the gag reflex is gone. I ate whatever hospital food they brought me and since I’ve been home I’ve been eating what ever my wife puts in front of me.

She keeps asking me if I like it. It drives her crazy because sometimes I don’t know; it’s all so new. She gave me some vegetarian thing the other day and I recognized a half dozen things, each one by themselves would have made me gag before. Sometimes there’s too much going on inside my mouth to figure out yet if I like things or not.

All my life people have been telling me I didn’t know what I was missing. They were right. I don’t know what God did or how many things inside me He fixed, but I know now one of the things I have been missing is blue-berries. You got to have them with Cheerios. They’re something else.