A Bowl of Potato Chips

When I was seven, I met my first best friend, Carla McCoy. With her blonde hair and blue eyes, Carla was everyone’s idea of the girl next door. We first met because her grandmother lived across the street from my favorite great aunt, Micki, in Wisconsin. Life and her father’s job later moved them from Wisconsin to Nebraska, so there really was no choice except for us to be best friends.

There was something about the McCoy’s that fascinated me. Mrs. McCoy, Dorothy, was a stay-at-home mom with salt and pepper hair and a slight hooked nose who cooked lunch and dinner for Carla and her father. They had a golden retriever and Mr. McCoy, Fred, trim and neat and careful right down to his manicured fingernails, carefully mowed and clipped the lawn every weekend. They composted too, although that wasn’t yet fashionable in 1969 in Nebraska.

There were sleep-overs during the winter and sun burns and playing Mother May I in the velvet of their perfectly coiffed front lawn in the summer. I was regularly invited to the beach; where we ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and potato chips and drank grape Kool-Aid while perfecting our tan and bettering our front crawl. On Friday nights, the McCoy’s took me with them to the Dairy Queen, and we all sat on the curb licking our ice cream cones while the Nebraska heat attempted to melt the ice cream faster than our tongues could lap it up.

While I have many memories of the McCoys, the memory of a bowl of potato chips lingers. It was after school on what must have been a winter night. We had finished our homework and playing Barbie’s, and I was waiting for my mother to pick me up. As it got later and later, the McCoy’s were getting ready for dinner. Mr. McCoy, Mrs. McCoy, and Carla. Mrs. McCoy gave me a bowl of potato chips and kept the television on so that I could watch cartoons as I waited for the ride while they said grace and began their meal.

From the carefully measured serving of potato chips, I took tiny nibbly bites and licked each finger to get the last bit of salt and crumbled chip. But they didn’t last long enough to comfort me as both the hour and my mother grew later. From the corner of my eye, I watched the McCoy’s cutting manageable bite-sized pieces of steak and chewing noiselessly. In laughter and whispers, they shared details about their day. In an odd way, I was transfixed by what I observed. I saw what I thought looked like the perfect family. What was it that made them a unit? What was it that made them more than just people who shared the same address and phone number? What was it that made them…well…actually like each other? Maybe it was because Carla was an only child and her arrival had been long and sweetly anticipated. Maybe it was because Mr. McCoy had a regular 9 to 5 job and watered the lawn and picked weeds. Maybe it was the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and the trips to the beach. Whatever the reason, they were a family.

But I was not a McCoy, and I was waiting for someone to feed me. My parents owned an A&W Drive In and the demands of feeding the public meant that as a child, family dinners and vacations were few and far between. My parents had an obligation to make sure that whoever wanted a Papa Burger, Mama Burger, French fries or a root beer float got their desire fulfilled. I knew from an early age that other people’s needs came first.
When my mother finally arrived, I was starving and she was furious. She couldn’t believe that the McCoy’s were so selfish and heartless as to not feed me while they were eating. I sat in silence in the car. My eight year old mind didn’t know how to say that it was her job to feed me, and she wasn’t doing her job.

Not too long ago, my friend Jan told me that children are excellent observers, but not very good decision makers. Looking back, I can see that I made a lot of decisions that for better or worse have shaped the course of my life. I decided I was not loved or wanted. I decided to stop crying and emotions were to be avoided. I decided to stop asking for what I needed. I decided other people came first. I decided I could only rely on me. I decided that my only value came from being a good girl, following the rules, getting good grades, and never causing trouble.

I made all of these decisions because my mother was late and I was starving.
As a child, I was not able to reconcile my longing for the warmth and protection of my mother with her absence, both physical and emotional and my overeating. Years later, I remember my mother talking about how hearing her parents arguing made her decide that she would never allow her children to hear their parents yelling at each other. And that hearing my grandfather saying there was $5 to last for two weeks and there wasn’t enough food to feed everyone would cause my mother to choose to work day and night so that her children would never starve.

Because of the pain of her childhood, she made decisions about what love looked like that affected me and not always for the best. I did not learn how to be angry and still be someone’s friend. I didn’t learn that a good fight is healthy and necessary to loving. I did not learn that emotional sustenance was the real food I craved. I did not learn to be emotionally honest. I learned that love hurt. But I did learn the value of work and commitment. I learned that I can accomplish anything if I put enough muscle behind it.

While my parents were working and feeding the public, I made food into my parent. Food soothed and calmed me so I did not have to hear the questions that I didn’t yet understand and when I did understand them, they were too frightening to ask. The questions that sounded like: Why doesn’t Mommy tuck me in at night? Why don’t we eat together or go on vacations? Why doesn’t my daddy mow the lawn? Why doesn’t anyone ask me what I think or feel or want or hope? Why don’t they spend time with me? Does this mean they don’t love me? And many years later, why can’t I stop eating?

I can’t stop eating because I haven’t allowed myself to stand still long enough to feel the pain of sitting on the couch with a bowl of potato chips waiting for someone who wasn’t really there. Instead, I spent years being angry at my mother for her decisions. I sought to punish and get revenge for all of the ways in which I was hard done by. I avoided responsibility for my own life and blamed her for my own choices, my heart hardened by disappointment and loneliness because of decisions I made at the age of eight.

It was a seemingly random conversation with my sister about one month ago that began to melt my heart and release tears that had been frozen in gallons of ice cream, unable to be melted even with rivers of molten hot fudge. My sister told me how my mother sat with shoulders hunched and back bent at the kitchen table as she began to remember the events that shaped her life story.

As my mother was growing up, her parents lived on a farm. Each Friday night, their five children begged to be allowed to go to town, to buy some candy or perhaps see their friends. Grudgingly, my grandfather would allow them to accompany him. As they arrived in town and in spite of their pleading cries to please park on the street so they could see what was happening, my grandfather insisted on parking the car in the back of a grocery store parking lot. The children and my grandmother eagerly leaped out to do their errands and to walk up and down the Main Street while my grandfather nearly ran to the bar to play pool.

Once finished with their little jobs, my grandmother and the rest of the family crawled back into the car and waited for my grandfather to return. They waited until they could not hold the heavy lids of their eyes open any longer and drifted to sleep. At 1 a.m. or later, my grandfather would drunkenly return to find his pregnant wife and five children huddled together for warmth and shelter in the pitch black of the parking lot.

My mother, now crying, asked my sister those familiar questions: Why couldn’t he park on the street? Why didn’t he spend time with us? Why, no matter how good we tried to be or how much we did for him, couldn’t he love us? Why couldn’t he love me?

My heart ached as I listened to my sister’s voice explaining without knowing what she was saying that my mother and I were not very different. Two little girls looking for someone to love us.

I woke up the next morning sobbing. Sobbing for my mother who was filled with bitterness and loss. Sobbing for myself, filled with sadness for both of us. Since that day, I have noticed that the voice of Sacred Hunger has grown louder within me and will not leave me alone at times. The voice is calling for forgiveness, understanding, and compassion. I’m not always sure how to go about this other than to write about the stories of my life. In the writing, there is grace and mercy. And when I don’t write, the food calls louder and louder to remind me it is time to stop being a victim chained to the past and start being a hero of my own story in the here and now.

I haven’t seen Carla McCoy since we made one last visit to Nebraska when I was 13, after my family moved to Wisconsin when I was ten. I don’t remember much about our visit except that Carla had recently lost 19 pounds, which gave me yet another reason to be jealous. But from where I stand today, wherever you are, Carla, I hope and pray that life has treated your kindly. And when it hasn’t, I hope and pray you can remember the velvet green grass of your front lawn, summer days filled with laughter and sun, and that first best friends are forever.

Blessed Be.