Hungry

When I was 16 years old, my best friend invited me to visit a friend of hers. He lived in a single wide trailer set beside the driveway to a dairy farm. I don’t remember his name, Skippy maybe? My friend’s name was Sondra.

I drove to the place where Sondra was living and picked her up. She gave me directions to Skippy’s house.

He was cute. Older than we were, probably in his early 20’s. Dark hair, long, and he was bearded. He smiled hello to Sondra and I with deep set, very dark brown eyes. He was making spaghetti.

Now I grew up eating spaghetti and I loved it. I love it still. My kids love it. Even now that they are grown, they ask for my spaghetti. My mom made good spaghetti. It always tastes like home and safety and warmth and, maybe, kindness.

I didn’t have a happy life. There was some kindness, sometimes. Warmth, for sure. Physical and emotional safety were assumed but not provided.

So spaghetti was a big thing, that feeling that taste and smell can carry, those things that trigger something deep and emotional and completely unrelated to the moment you might find yourself in when you experience the smell or taste.

In order to understand the issues around safety you’d have to know my history and how my telephone calls were all recorded and how my room and car were regularly searched and how I was told, regarding having been raped, “He only did it once, why don’t you just get over it?”

Keep in mind, I was 16 at the time this statement was made. The ongoing sexual violence started when I was 3. This was not only rape. It was not only one time.

I was hungry, and Skippy, with his dark, deep set eyes was passionate about his spaghetti.

He had a whole process around creating his sauce. He cooked the sausage and added the onions and garlic, and sautéed those, and added the other ingredients and cooked them down for an hour or some number of hours.

Then he let it sit overnight. The flavors blended as the sauce sat, cooling and cooled, on the stove top. The next day he heated it up, boiled his pasta, and served spaghetti.

We arrived on spaghetti making night.

There were Sondra, Skippy, his friend, and me.

We talked and had a beer, probably, maybe we smoked a joint. And when Sondra and I got ready to leave, Skippy invited us to come back the next night to eat spaghetti.

We said yes.

The next night was basically a replay, only I was half in love with Skippy and his dark eyes and his passion for red sauce. And Skippy was probably more than half in love with Sondra who was beautiful, and pained, and uncomplicated in a way I have never been and never will be.

When Skippy told us the food was ready, we got up off the couch, grabbed plates, and got in line.

We all enjoyed the pasta, garlic bread, a beer or iced tea. But then I went back for another plate. And then another. It was like the child in the fairy tale who cannot ever get full. I ate and ate and ate. I, in fact, ate all of this poor man’s carefully made sauce and didn’t realize until I had finished that my behavior was weird, and rude, and that everyone was kind of staring at me with stunned expressions.

Surely Skippy thinks back on this event, which was 40 years ago now, if he remembers it at all, and he thinks about the night the thin young woman came and ate ALL of his spaghetti. It would make a funny story in a certain light.

But what I wanted was love and safety and I wanted a human to hold me and tell me that everything was going to be okay, that they would keep me safe now, and no one has ever done that from that day until this except me.

I have so much compassion for children, even children who look like they are grown, who need protection and don’t have it. Who crave safe space where their nervous systems can drop in and relax. Who live in constant high alert and fear.

Over the 40 since I ate all of Skippy’s spaghetti, I have sometimes thought back on that night. It was only recently that I wondered why it stood out so clearly in my memory and then came clear about that. Its funny in a way because I’ve always just thought it was me feeling guilty because I ate all of a poor man’s spaghetti sauce…but now I see. My goddess, that poor child. I’m holding her to my heart right now, rubbing her back, and have vowed to protect her forever more.

In the end, I did finally find what I needed, it was within myself. I’m now the powerful, able, fierce mother that the 16 year old me was so hungry for.