Neurotics

Now there’s a girl who’s comfortable in her own skin,” my father-in-law said about my daughter, his granddaughter. She was about one year old and we were watching her bounce happily in her high chair, egg smeared across both cheeks as she shoved pieces of fritter into her mouth. I realised with pride it was true: she was comfortable. My pride was followed quickly by unease. How long had it been since I could say I was comfortable with myself?

Well, you’re writing in the ‘Guardian’ so probably ‘never’!

My daughter is almost four now and I’ve thought of my father-in-law’s words many times since that day. She’s at a precious age, no longer a toddler and still just on the precipice of childhood proper. She interacts with the world without self-consciousness and has not yet learned that society may expect something different from her. When she expresses hunger and when she eats, she does so with joyful abandon. When she takes a mouthful of something delicious we can see a whole-body response: she closes her eyes, tilts her head back and dances her shoulders up and down.

Because she’s a child and so lacks inhibition - part of growing up is of course learning social inhibition, which so many adults these days appear to lack. 

Many girls will learn, if not explicitly taught then by cultural osmosis, the notion they shouldn’t be outwardly hungry. Whether a girl’s hunger is literally for food or it’s yearning for something greater in her life – a high-powered career, an unabashed artistic practice, a passionate affair – she is often taught to not be so honest in her expression of it.

*sighd* 

Watching my daughter’s strong sense of self has forced me to reflect on my own adolescence through the early 2000s, when our wildly misogynistic pop culture filtered down to the schoolyard. I once overheard a high-school boyfriend say I looked ugly when I ate. Instead of dumping him, I simply stopped eating when we were together.

Teenagers do stupid things pt 732489... 

Later, in my 20s, when Instagram brought with it the first wave of diet culture masquerading as “wellness”, I was primed to try it all: juice cleanses, appetite-suppressing teas, “quitting” sugar. I once lied to a colleague that I was eating soup for lunch when I had, in fact, poured green juice into a bowl.

 Women trying to make it in work do stupid things pt 732489... 

These memories are horrifying to me now and thank God for that. Thank God that in my daughter’s world there is no morality ascribed to food, there is no good or bad, or that most disgusting of office kitchen diet-speak, naughty. There is just desire and pleasure and satiety.

It might be a little trite to say that adults can learn from watching children interact with the world...

It certainly is.