Deny the Instinct, Damn the Child
I’m going through a health phase right now. Since February of this year, my body is loud with its opinions. It’s been so dramatic that we’ve internally termed it my “toddler phase,” creating many family jokes from the outputs.
Food is especially difficult. In addition to forced vegetarianism that seems to have a spiritual source, I am going through what I can only term a “full body rebuild,” which affects my appetite and my food tolerances almost daily.
On one such day, my appetite returned fully and I spent the day imagining the fried egg and bell pepper I was going to add to my wild rice. I could not wait for that meal.
So with contentment and anticipation, I fried my egg and bell pepper, sat down at the table, took one smiling bite of egg and…
…set the fork down, utterly repulsed. Suddenly the egg was so disgusting I couldn’t stand to be in the same room as the smell and I rushed out, leaving my meal behind and not eating again until the next day.
I reflected on this and realized this is probably exactly what actual toddlers feel like. It’s not “being picky” or “bad” when their tastes change so rapidly; a body rebuilding has to scavenge for the correct resources in a fast changing environment.
Having gone through it myself now, I have so much empathy for the impossibility of being a two-year old, unable to articulate why suddenly the thing they wanted so badly is intolerable. Not just intolerable, absolutely impossible.
Imagine the punishments, the forced “sit there until you eat it all,” responses, and how confusing that must be to a body learning to trust its own cues and then compelled to ignore them.
This sparked more “toddler conversations” with my kids, but this time, we talked about how to preserve autonomy in a world that teaches us to deny our own instincts.
In so much of our culture, we are taught to look to the “authority” for answers.
What to eat? Your doctor, who has almost certainly studied nutrition less in his official capacity than you have in scrolling the feed.
What to think? Your school, and each one has its own agenda and focus. Where you land in that spread seems to be determined largely by circumstances you never had control over in the first place.
What to believe? A church whose view almost certainly contradicts in some way the church next door but wants to assure you that its truth is the right one.
And it all starts here, in early childhood, when our pure cues are redirected or completely rejected because an “authority” figure somewhere knew better than our own bodies.
It can take a lifetime to unearth what the body has to say on things, but the more I travel the road of the intuitive, the more I realize the wisest advice I have ever received came from inside the body I inhabit.
Whether you call it that “still, small voice,” a “gut feeling,” “intuition” or simply “a knowing,” it deserves a seat at the decision making table. In my own life, it now sits at the head of the table, and I credit some major recent gains in my life to that promotion.
As I explored my own body’s wise responses to food over these past few months, my heart hurts for the children, like my ex-husband, who were forced to sit at the table until bedtime if they didn’t eat The Food I Worked So Hard To Prepare, who have so many aversions and traumas as a result.
It is my earnest wish that we change the future by trusting the perfect creatures we create, because who they are before we tell them who to be is who they should have remained all along.
And climbing our way back to that purity shouldn't take so much of the precious time we have.
