I never had a good relationship with my body. Growing up in Lithuania in the 90s and weighing 58kg in my teenage years, I was considered FAT by my peers. Girly magazines were overflowing with tips about dieting, staying beautiful and feminine and impressing the boys, and ideas about diversity, individuality and authenticity were not as widely discussed. Therefore I have always tried to be thinner, dieted and deprived myself since I was 13 and, of course, never felt good enough or beautiful; my environment was simply not designed for it..
The topic of weight is, of course, very closely tied with the themes of food and eating. Thinking back to my childhood and teenage years, certain foods and ways of eating come to mind. It wasn’t an affluent time so one of the most important concerns my parents must have faced was the cost of everything. However, I remember my mother cooking soup, rice and meat dishes, fish, salads, as well as buying some processed foods, such as frankfurters, fish fingers and dumplings. Another category that comes to mind was my grandmother’s and older aunts’ food. They each had signature mash, meatballs, buns, biscuits or other delicacies that were always abundantly present during family gatherings. My summers were often spent at our relatives’ home in a village where they used to make (and still do to this very day, even though they are in their 80s!) almost all of their food themselves, starting with fruit and veg, preserves, dairy, all the way to raising and slaughtering their own chickens, geese, cattle and pigs. My grandparents’ generation grew up during the time of war and its aftermath where everything, including food, was scarce, therefore their coping mechanism later in life was often to over-do, their subconscious forever preparing for survival. The associations that come to me while thinking about the foods of my childhood are “fatty”, “abundant” or even “overload”.
One thing I find unusual is that in all this abundance and process of making, I have learned very little about cooking or preserving. Sure, I was taught how to make pancakes and cottage cheese balls but that was about it.. I never questioned this, it never really entered my mind but now, while on my healing journey and thinking back to my family relationships, I find this fact rather odd. As a bigger picture, it feels like life skills haven’t been transferred into the next generation. This, in turn, poses a question what else hasn’t been transferred. And an answer to that comes to me as Stories. I have so few stories from my parents’, grandparents’ and other relatives’ lives. Why?
While pondering these questions, my mother comes to mind most readily. She was adopted as a baby and has never known her real family. Furthermore, her relationship with the adoptive family has crumbled at some point in life, so much so that the ties were severed and she wasn’t informed of her adoptive mother’s death, invited to her funeral or considered for the inheritance. Coming from this background, my mother must have felt like she doesn’t belong. Food and belonging, it seems to me, are somehow tied; “soul food”, “food for thought” are some phrases that convey that connection.
From my perspective, there are two ways a person can deal with the feeling and trauma of not belonging; by shutting down and controlling, enclosing, pushing the pain down, trapping it OR by expanding into the outer world, making new connections, creating. The latter option, even though clearly healthier, is much more difficult, especially for someone who has already been discouraged in life.
As for the family from my father’s side, their lives couldn’t have been easy either. War, poverty, a society where women have completely depended on their men who often were troubled by alcohol dependence and emotional issues. These are all my estimates and guesses; I don’t feel healed enough to have open conversations with my parents, this proves to be the very hardest task.
Having looked into the concepts that haven’t been transferred, I can name one that has; Trauma. I find it very difficult to communicate, be open and vulnerable with my parents (especially my mother), and looking them in the eye is mission impossible, and for most of my adult life – until I started reading up on trauma and how it impacts relationships – I couldn’t understand why that is.
When I started my healing journey more than 5 years ago, one of the first significant changes I made was going vegan. After being in an emotionally abusive relationship for about a decade and seeing no way out, I needed to start my self-love journey somewhere. I wanted to do something good for myself. And lead by various documentaries, social media posts and articles, I decided that going vegan was something that would make me feel healthier in my body as well as help me lead a more authentic life by actively reducing the cruelty and pain in the world. So I went from omnivore to a complete vegan overnight. This month I am celebrating my 5th Veganversary and am so grateful to be much healthier in body and soul. I also – almost accidentally – proved to myself that I can be consistent in a positive action that relates to my body; up to that point I normally used my stubbornness to reach academic or other goals.
When I started my vegan lifestyle, I didn’t realise or consider how it will set me apart from my birth family. We live in different countries and see each other once or twice a year. My wellness journey has never been forced, I played and experimented with things, over the years stopping eating wheat, then sugar, coffee and black tea, getting rid of excess possessions and leaning towards minimalism, curating my social media feed towards spirituality and body positivity, equipping myself with tons of knowledge about trauma and healing, this year implementing regular breathwork and somatic exercise practices… Those tiny little changes have unexpectedly amounted to a whole new lifestyle and mindset and each time I go back home to see my family, the contrast startles me more and more. I sometimes feel that they pity me for “depriving” myself of a nice fragrant piece of barbeque or some ice cream, while I am piling lentils into my bowl or that they judge me for other life choices. While my relationships with my family members certainly became more surface level over the years, my feeling of becoming more authentic grew. I made peace with being a black sheep but also reduced my urge to please as well as influence and control people and force on them the changes that make my life more positive as I now know that people can only change when they are ready and not a moment earlier, and also that what works for one person may not work for another. I have to mention my father as an exception here: while I feel he wasn’t strong enough to fight for his true happiness and sacrificed it for a surface level peace – or maybe it’s because of it – he always supports me in my choices. It was him who made it financially possible for me to train as a breathwork facilitator and I feel that reaching for my true authentic life and following my purpose is also honouring him. We may not often succeed in having deep conversations but I somehow know that we are on the same page nevertheless.
The controversy and perhaps even trauma related to food is present in my and my son’s relationship too. He was 4 when I became vegan. From then on, I stopped cooking meat for him. He would still eat meat with his father, at school, with his childminder and in other social environments so that wasn’t an extreme change in his diet. However, perhaps being a boy and wanting to be “like his dad”, who was eating excessive amounts of meat, my son started refusing most of the foods that I prepared for us. Any soups, stews, curries were left untouched even without tasting. That angered and scared me but perhaps more significantly than that, I felt rejected and “faulty” as a mother. There is a lingering feeling that if you reject someone’s food, you reject the person themselves, and that was how I felt. Useless. For a while, I fumed, demanded that he eats some of my food but over time I relaxed, served him fruit, veg, simple sandwiches, oat or buckwheat porridge at the times we spent together and allowed him to peacefully enjoy his father’s (he is a professional chef of more than 20 years), childminder’s amazing cooking, school meals and occasional outing at a cafe or a restaurant. Food has ceased to be a battlefield and my son now even occasionally eats my cooking and declares that “It is not so bad..”. I also make sure that we spend time in the kitchen together sometimes and cook. Now, at 9 years old, he is able to make some simple foods and his knife skills are excellent as over the years he has cut up tonnes of veg for my stews! He is also food-adventurous and enjoys eating both Lithuanian and Sri Lankan cuisines when visiting relatives in both of the countries.
I want to believe that by journeying on my own healing path as well as learning how to be a good-enough parent, I am also healing the generational trauma. I hope that we are not only being nourished by the food itself but also being pervaded by tolerance, compassion, acceptance, surrender, joy of discovery, unearthing of our own powers and abilities and the miracle of our bodies. Speaking of my own body, is is older now than it ever has been but for the first time in my life I feel genuine love for it. It is no longer a costume or a suit whose only purpose is to impress others (it never lived up to it..); it is a home, a faithful companion that carries me wherever I want to go and a dutiful servant that completes countless daily tasks for me. It makes me able to see the beauty of the world, to read, to learn, to speak my mind and express my love and – when needed – my boundaries. It literally made my son! I no longer – well, almost never, I am still learning – demean my body for being of a wrong shape or size, for having any features that don’t comply with the “social standard” and for the first time in my life I thank it daily and marvel at the perfection of its intricacy. And I feed it the best I can, with whole vegan foods as well as with love, care, compassion, consideration, boundaries, movement, breath and hundreds of other ingredients that make this life worth living.
Our beautiful author has asked to remain anonymous, but this is someone’s real story, so please do not reproduce as you cannot attribute the story to them. If you would like to leave a comment below they will see it. If you’d like to contact them, please use the contact form here on the website and I will pass your details on, leaving the choice of contact up to them.
Thank you for your understanding, it is important to me that Beyond the Breath Magazine is an inclusive space, and that includes supporting our authors as they explore their voice and their vulnerabilities. Sometimes that means publishing anonymously.
