Not being a burden -- food

Is there anything in your life that it is difficult for you to do, even though you know that you don't have any rational for avoiding it? Maybe you can even explain why you hate it so much, but that doesn't make all the resistance go away?

Well, Gary has some complex stuff that all centers around not wanting to be burden to us. Some of it is conscious, but that doesn't make it go away. Some of it is less than conscious.

The less-than stuff includes food. He doesn't seem to be able to be hungry in front of us. I don't think he is feeling hungry and denying it, I think he stops feeling hungry. Now part of this is the result of institutional living when he had to eat on a schedule. Dinner was a six and if you didn't eat then you went hungry until breakfast. He hated that. I think he hears, "It's time for dinner" and he has some level of anxiety and just doesn't feel hungry.

If I tell him that I really want him to sit with us at dinner he will and he will be nice about it. He won't put much on his plate though, because he isn't really hungry and he doesn't really know why. Half an hour after dinner he will be loading up a plate in the kitchen. If I announce that dinner is cooked and available and people should just serve themselves and yes, you can eat wherever you want, then he is hungry, although he generally won't come into the kitchen until I am gone.

Now part of this may be the "being a burden" thing and part of it may be that he is embarrassed about the amount of food he puts away. He's a teenage boy and he works out hard at least four evenings a week. He needs food and lots of it. He doesn't really want people commenting on the piles of food he eats. It isn't just that though. I really believe that he is just not hungry when he has to eat in front of us.

If I am not feeling like cooking and we decide to go out for fast food (something we do less and less) then he really isn't hungry. Sometimes he insists that he would rather stay home.

When he does eat out with us, he orders the least expensive options and claims that is what he really wants. I still remember one of the first times he ate with us. We had Evan along. We went to a bagel shop, got sandwiches and Gary was turning down all the extras, things like chips or cookies. Evan said, "Come on dude! It's FREE FOOD. Eat!" Gary said, "Free? Oh!" and he grabbed as much as Evan did. Gary of course didn't realize that Evan meant that it was free because I was paying.

Anyway, this is on the list of things that I just accept. I've moved to serving buffet style, eat-where-you-want more often than not, and when we do eat as a family I don't comment on Gary's lack of appetite. I also leave the food out for a while so he can come back later for seconds. I think it is getting a little better since I have learned not to say anything about how much he is eating. If I don't seem to notice one way or the other, his appetite slowly returns.

It occurs to me that all this could have been a real problem for me in the past. I like family meals and I like to see people eating and appreciating what I cook. Having someone refuse to eat what I cooked and then sneaking off and eat it behind my back might have felt like a personal insult. Clearly it wasn't the food he disliked, so it must be me, right? I would have felt hurt that Gary couldn't allow me to feed him. I might have experienced his behavior as rejections of my attempts to love him. Just think of all the posts I would have written. "Would it be so hard for him so hard to just eat with the family?"

If I had decided to make a big deal of it, to tell him that in this family we eat together and I expected him to sit with us and eat what we ate, the whole thing could have escalated. Gary has trouble with authority, with being told to do something. So that would have been ugly.

I probably would have decided that this wasn't a battle I should fight. I would have eventually decided that I wasn't going to make a big deal about it, but I still would have struggled with it, felt bad about it. It would have been hard.

Now though, it isn't hard at all. It is a little sad, but that is just the way he is.

I don't experience it as having anything to do with me at all. I'll just make sure the food is there when I am not. He will eat. Slowly I hope he will feel safer and when he actually starts feeling hungry when dinner is served, I will be happy.

But I won't comment on it.