Toast Points and Losing Three Pounds This Past Week
Photo by hlkljgk
Out of the warm oven came the delicacy that I have never forgotten – a delicacy that I became aware of at age five and took me from being a rather thin, stringy child, to a pudgy one. Sitting at the kitchen table with my best friend, her mother placed two flowered cake plates in front of us. Onto each of these she slid a toast point, but not just any toast point, a toast point that included melted cheese. Though it is hard for me to get past the memory, the cheese was actually a processed cheese slice that had been wrapped in plastic moments before it was laid to rest on a slice of bread and entered the stove.
It had been a terrible day. My friend had slammed my fingers in the door. She had made me feel clumsy because, as she said at the time, my fingers should not have been lounging on the door jam. My tears of pain had become tears of frustration. All the other children who lived on our street and were present had laughed.
So, her kindly mother had come to the rescue and in trying to sooth me had fed me those amazing toast points and processed cheese. I could not get enough of them, though they did begin to fill the void. Tasty bites encompassed my senses and I forgot the humiliation
During those early years, I grew apart from my best friend. I was too non-intellectual for her and her school crowd. I would come home feeling very stupid for this or that, and my Nan would feed me (never toast points and processed cheese – I never had them again, though there are times thirty years later that I still crave them). We would work through my homework with a bowl of comfort food.
This toast point memory came to me recently during a self-hypnosis session. I was struggling with a desire to eat cheese curls while I worked on a scholarly paper. Whenever I work on scholarly papers, I tend to want to eat cheese products (gorge on them is the reality). In trying to stop myself, I decided to investigate the craving using self-hypnosis and this long forgotten memory came to the surface.
Since doing this, it seems the void is gone. No longer do I feel the urge to stuff myself to fulfill what my self-esteem had lost.