She sized me up and then quietly said, “Jane, you’re getting FAT.” Now, my mother doesn’t criticize me very often so this got my attention. Of course, I was irritated. Who wants to be told the truth about something like that! But it was the kind of thing only somebody who loves you would dare to say. Call it a one-sentence intervention. It did the trick. It was precisely what I needed to break through the logjam of my denial. It had been a while since my scale had died. I never replaced the battery. My fear of finding out how much I weighed was so ingrained in my psyche that I went to the store twice to buy a new battery for my scale and got the wrong size each time. What would Freud say? Yes, I—like most Americans—have food issues. I never did while I was drinking. So long as I had my chardonnay security blanket, I could nibble on a salad and be perfectly content. But when that was taken away from me a decade and a half ago, suddenly food entered my life as a serious contender for my attention and my extremely addictive tendencies.
