THE VERY LONG ROAD TO REDEMPTION

AND A HEALTHY LIFESTYLE

By the time I escaped my family’s endless descent into more toxicity, by being the first Wright ever to attend college, I knew what a reward was. A reward was a pair of bacon double cheeseburgers.

I also knew what comfort and love were. Those came in the form of downing whole pizzas with 6 toppings, or wolfing down enough giant burritos to feed four starving men.

When I realized my dad was perfectly content to ignore most of my mom’s obsessive compulsive and other damaging behavior, I salved my pain – and 40 work, 40 hours of study weeks – with newly-discovered sub shops and fatty food drive throughs open late night in downtown Akron.

It took me damn near a half century to figure out that I could confront pain and reward achievement – with something other than triple slices of cheesecake with a caloric content exceeding the recommended intake for all five work days.

I’m not all the way there. When even a hint of anxiety or depression enters my life, visions of iced brownies, XL orders of fried catfish and mountains of double buttered whipped potatoes dance in my head.

I’m an orphan now. Have been for nearly a year. Dad died of cancer a few years back and mom died in a nursing home April last year when COVID was ravaging her dementia care ward. They are at rest, maybe, freed from the demons that robbed them of much joy and burdened their two sons with shame, obesity, insecurity and mountains of unresolved issues.

I’m about as imperfect as they come. But I have a dynamite soulmate of a wife. I have a loving, if strained relationship with my only sibling.

And for the first time since I was a tiny boy, I’m eating right and exercising routinely.

 

OVEREATING -- ROOTED IN SADNESS

I WAS TAUGHT TO MAKE FOOD MY DRUG OF CHOICE

I understand the factors that made me overweight from a young age.

My late mother was severely mentally ill and dad unspeakable things to me. A chaotic and terrifying day was a good one.

A day of having everything you loved dearly -- including trinkets your beloved late grandfather gave you on his deathbed when you were nine – torn from your arms, broken then burned in a ceremony of anger and draconian punishment, those were the hard ones. And they sometimes outnumbered the “simply” torturous days of chaos and agony.

When my mom would come out of her fit of fear, anger and rage – she’d run to get her little boy a big pizza.

When she snapped out of it -- and realized she should not have told me I would be an orphan because she was either fated to die within a year or would take her life in front of me – she would bake a pie and feed me half of it.

After a round where my mom, nearly psychotic, would attack me, pummel me – then lie and tell my dad that I raised my hand to her, so he would beat me black and blue when he got home from work – she would order a 4-piece fried chicken dinner with huge breaded jo jo potatoes to some how make up for it.

When I went years without seeing a museum, park, zoo, or play on a school field trip – because her messed up mind felt I would be exposed to imagined death-causing germs for leaving the classroom – she compensated my weeping (because of being left out) with half bags of chips, pretzels and sugary sodas.

When I became isolated from all friends – I was the only kid who never was allowed to host sleep overs, or have visitors, or join a sports team – and considered a leper to be made fun of, mom would feed me a half dozen big donuts from the in-store bakery at the new super market.

From about second grade on, you can see it in my school pictures. As my tummy outgrew its little body, my eyes looked vacant, sad, mournful, hopeless.

Part 4, the final chapter, published in this blog on Sunday March 14