Burnt Toast

I have an eating disorder.

It's called motherhood.

Many a day, I have sat down to dinner with my family, so ravenously hungry that I am ready to eat the table. It is then that I remember that I simply forgot to eat today.

It's shockingly easy to forget to eat when you are a mom.

You get your kids breakfast, and, while they are all contained, use the precious moments to empty and refill the dishwasher. By the time you're done, the toddler is finished eating, dragging you into the livingroom to play. One activity follows another, every free moment fills with a bit of cleaning here, a bit of teaching there, and, suddenly, lunchtime rolls around. Get Julia her food, make the boys theirs while she eats, feed Jade, Julia done, boys done, clean up, change Jade, "Mommy, come on, come on!", off I go again. Gee, what did I forget?

And then there are those times I actually do try to sit down and eat something, only to find the vultures swooping in to grab "a bite" of whatever I'm attempting to enjoy. I can either come off as terribly selfish or give in, forking over most of my snack, usually to Julia AKA "the incredible bottomless pit." Frankly, it's usually just not worth the effort.

Many days, I don't even notice. I just drink a lot of coffee, thus fooling my body into believing it is full enough to keep going.

Sometimes, though, I get shakier and shakier until I really don't feel like I can handle anything anymore. Today, for example, I found myself so hungry that I simply could not take whiny, fussy, needy children. I was making their lunches, responding over and over again to "mom, is there anything else I can eat?" as they munched their way through my cupboards, and all I kept thinking was that bit in the prodigal son where "he longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating." Not that my children are pigs or anything (on second thought...).

Finally I just had to put both the girls down for a nap and make myself a peanut butter sandwich. I hate peanut butter sandwiches, but it was quick and easy, and I felt much better once I had choked it down.

Why are we like this? Why is it such a defining characteristic of motherhood to take care of everyone else first, fulfilling our own needs last, if at all? Sacrifice is great and all, but it seems like we kind of take things to the extreme. Every season I spend hundreds of dollars on my children's shoes and clothes. For myself? Nada. I feel guilty for buying a ten dollar pair of shoes to replace my worn-out flip-flops, for goodness sake.

I once heard this referred to as the "burnt toast syndrome." Like, if there's a pile of lovely perfect toast and one piece that is burnt, the mom will say "Oh, I'll take that one." Always! My mom did it! Your mom did it too, I'll bet. And now I do it. Do all mom's do it? Why? Men certainly don't!

Anyway, I know that it's great that we're all such wonderful committed caring mothers that we never never think of ourselves first and always put our children's needs above our own. In fact, I believe that God programmed a switch, located just below our cervix, to flick over from "completely selfish" to "completely selfless" as the baby passes through. And that's good.

I just don't know if it's all that healthy.