Her handle is AsianBBW and she brings to the board a breath of fresh air and irreverence that organizations such as ours need desperately all the time. She injects humour, understanding and good sense with her posts, and it’s obvious that all of these were hard won. She’s a survivor and by her example, helps those around her to survive as well. I had to edit her story for reasons of length, but it was the hardest edit I’ve ever done. I so wanted to leave it all there. I think I’ve captured the essence though.
As for me, I don't have any recipes taught to me by my mother because both my parents told me I was fat since I was 8 or 9 years old (when I was merely a little chubby, not having lost the baby fat yet). They yelled at me not to eat - anything, even if it was healthy food, or a glass of water. I can still hear them yell "Lisa! What are you doing? Get out of the kitchen!!" (even if I was just walking through the kitchen) All the while coaxing, even begging, my brother, who was a picky eater with bowel problems, to eat - anything, junk food was all he would eat, so it was around all the time. Being of Japanese heritage, the boy is always treasured, where the girl is treated like a servant, so I would see him being adored, and given food, and so I equated food with love.
So when I was 16, I got a part time job to make money of my own, and I bought food and hid it in my room, and binged until I gained more than 100 pounds within a year. They sent me to a shrink who made things worse for me and so I starved myself so I could stop seeing the quack. When I moved out on my own after university, I promptly gained all the weight back and more, and my weight has been a roller coaster of weight losses with greater gains afterwards.
It was only after my dad died, that I was able to understand that his yelling at me was all about his hatred for his mother, and as I grew older I looked more like her. She was very heavy, so the more I weighed the more I looked like her, the more he hated me for it, and would yell. In time I also understood that my mother didn’t know any different but to do things the way he wanted them done.
I don't want to come off as a victim, I am not, when I was in my teens, I was, I felt like a victim, and was angry, and only hurt myself with the anger. Now I am trying to learn from my mistakes and the mistakes of others, and hope for a better life where my parent's voices aren't echoing in my head.
This is CanadianBabe. Moms are important in our lives and it’s sad when they’re gone. But we can be glad for the time we had them and the memories we built with them.
This is a sad/happy topic . . . wow.
My mom lost her battle with cancer just over a year ago, and I don't think a day goes by that I don't think of her, nor do I think I've ever missed anyone as much.
Anyhoo . . . mom made the best stuffing at Christmas, with just potatoes, onions, bread crumbs, egg, salt & pepper, and LOADS of summer savoury! I think it's an east coast thing, all that summer savoury. She'd always make loads of it, because we just could not get enough! It was so yummy! You could smell it cooking through the house . . . not the turkey, but the stuffing inside! Her cranberries rocked too! Boil them up with some sugar, set them overnight. Yum!
This past Christmas (our first without her) I tried making these, but it just wasn't the same :( and the cranberries were WAY too tart!
I should have paid more attention when she was making them, or even wrote it down. I'm sure with a few more years of practice I'll get it right!
I could go on and on about moms good cookin', and boy could she cook! What a treat Christmas stuffing was though!
