fighting hunger

I hide to eat. I actually eat in hiding. Sound like some bizarre eating disorder? Before you come running over to my house for an intervention, let me explain.

Most people’s appetites are (I assume) set to “eat until you are no longer hungry”. My children’s appetites are set to “eat until there is nothing left.” Regardless of the amount of food available, they will consume with unbelievable frenzy until they’re certain that there’s no possibility of any of them getting a larger portion than any other. It’s never a matter of there not being enough to go around. I just don’t think they came with a hunger-stop mechanism.

So they eat all day, every day. They eat their breakfast, and before I can finish putting the dishes in the dishwasher, they’re begging for a snack. And so on until lunch, and then after that until dinner. Dinner comes and goes, and the vacuum cleaners are still set on Turbo Suck. Then they have to have a couple of snacks before bed, and in the morning they wake up starving like they’ve never eaten before.

And my job, faced with this kind of steam-engine fire, is to stand in the dark and speeding belly of the train and shovel coal endlessly into its insatiable flames. But if the woman shoveling coal dies, the whole train stops, so sometimes I do have to eat. So when the food is finally ready, and the children who have been clinging to my legs unlatch and make a dash for the dining room, I load up plates, throw them on the table, and run. Because by the time I get back to the kitchen to make myself a plate, and return to the dining room with it, there will be four expectant faces over four empty plates wondering who gets what I’ve just brought. If I actually put the plate on the table, it’s as good as giving it to whomever can get across the table and to my plate the fastest.

So I don’t even go back. I load up everyone’s plates, including mine, take all theirs to the dining room, go back and get mine, and slip around the corner to hold my dish in the air and inhale my food. That way I can actually eat, without the reproachful looks of all the starving children who can’t actually be starving at all. That way I can have food that is at least halfway hot before I have to go back and dish out a second round.

And so I wonder, as I throw back my bowl of morning oatmeal, standing alone in a corner just out of sight, if they would ever actually eat everything that’s available and leave me to starve completely to death. Surely not. I’m overreacting. I’ll just go in and sit down and act like a civilized parent. So I do. I take my first helping and gingerly set it down among the remnants of their third, and they look up at me and say, “Are you going to eat that?”