Clean Your Plate

What a ridiculous thing to tell a chubby girl.

"Clean your plate." Make sure you finish every bite, or you can't leave the table.

Give mom the benefit of the doubt, and assume she was trying to thwart the desire to snack later on, but...come on.

And my grandmother, on the other hand, I think she was just plain stubborn. Or she thought mom was too lax on making sure I finished every bite.

I didn't like most meats much at all when I was a kid (and when I could, I would run to the powder room across from the kitchen and spit it out), but I absolutely hated any kind of boiled meat, like that in soups, or pot pie. Just the mention of pot pie gives me the shivers and almost turns my stomach.

It kinda sounds good, doesn't it? "Pot pie." If you'd never heard it before, you might envision apples, cinnamon, sugar and sweet dough, bubbling in a deep pot, some sort of delicious concoction to serve on a winter day with warm milk or tea.

Uh-uh. Yeah, we ate it in the winter, and everyone else loved it, and there is dough in it. But it's dough slices cooked in water with boiled chicken and whatever else you can throw in the pot to make it all grey and disgusting and oily...

Ugh. And I'm eating breakfast right now. Ah well, let the memory roll on.

Once, on my birthday, Gran made me sit in front of a bowl of that crap till I ate it. It got cold and even more disgusting. Mom came home; reprieve! I didn't have to eat it, and mom chastised Gran a little bit. What sweet relief.

I've never been one to reflect too much on the past. We are the sum of our days, I suppose, but as adults we make our choices. If we allow our perceptions of the past to cripple us, if we blame circumstance for who we are, we stymie ourselves.

Still, I can't help but wonder if little things like that didn't have their own influence on my psyche.

"Clean your plate." I cleaned a lot of plates. And I've spent the past few years un-learning that.

We live in a world of plenty. There is always food around. I don't have to worry about running out of food. So now, I don't clean my plate. I always leave a couple of bites of whatever I'm eating (unless it's a piece of fruit). It's part of the process of un-learning that I have to finish all the food I'm given. Another one of those things I learned from Paul McKenna's I Can Make You Thin.

And now, my cereal bowl is nearly empty...