When I was a child, having eight grandparents meant little more than extra presents on Christmas. Now, I look back and see what I missed — the terse conversations, stiff hugs, and apologetic, early departures. In hindsight, I find clues of divorce and hear the calamity of ongoing wars between siblings. But back then, grandpa, aunt, uncle — these were my favorite people, and they fully packed my life.
Grandma Shishler, my favorite grandmother, lived in Ohio, her cabin a wooden dot surrounded by green and yellow corn. The inside of the cabin posed a perfect opposite to the sparse landscape; the Shishler cabin was filled to the brim.
Farm tools and flags hung from every space on the walls. There were no gaps. As family members walked upstairs, they would pause every step or two to stare at the framed pictures hung along the ascent. Piano sheet music, photos, and newspapers covered every table and countertop.
“Your mother is so cluttered,” my Dad once said, sighing through a laugh.
“She’s a collector,” Mom corrected.
During the winter, my grandma — apron-clad, making biscuits from scratch — would welcome us into her blazing home. Oven on and fire raging, her house brimmed with heat, and we baked like happy gingerbread children.
“Take some candy and circle what you want for Christmas in the magazine,” Grandma would say, her cheeks flushed with matriarchal joy.
“They have enough toys!” My parents complained.
“Oh, hush.”
I had no trouble picking from my grandma’s organized candy collection. Her biggest jar held the wafer cookies, my favorite. Grandma lined the crispy rectangles by category: vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. Even today, I believe she was a magician. I would take two or three cookies, and the next time I checked, the jar stood full. No gaps.
Grandma’s house taught me that life was full and abundant. Happiness squeezed out of every corner, and wafer cookies never ran out. Surely, I thought, this fullness would continue.
*
My grandmother died a few years later when I was twelve. We had moved across the country to El Paso by that time, and my Mom flew back to Ohio for the funeral. She returned to our stucco home — which I called a “mud house” — visibly upset behind her motherly guise. She had brought back an Ohio chill to the desert.
I heard my parents later that night, in the kitchen.
“Vultures,” Mom spat.
“Oh, Beth.”
“It’s like they didn’t care about her at all. All they wanted was the stuff. And I’m her daughter!” She punched out every word.
“Did they empty the cabin?” Dad asked, trepidatious.
“Yes. But I’m getting the piano.”
My young mind swirled with confusion as I tried to imagine those happy people, those aunts and uncles and present-givers, swarming my second home like birds of prey licking a bone clean. Was it possible my filled-to-the-brim family could really be this angry, selfish mob that now marched through my imagination? Had I missed something about us? And had my parents always known?
Over the years, the cabin decayed to a skeleton, the logs stacked like bones from a previous life.
*
In the years after my grandma died, fullness lost its appeal and became my enemy. Shame took root in middle school. At the endless El Paso pool parties, I felt my thighs brush each other and glared at the flab under my arms. Squinting at my body from any possible reflection, I looked like an overstuffed ravioli squeezing out of a one piece. Later, I’d struggled to button my pants — each happening, to my mind, a piece of evidence that I wasn’t like my friends. I’d stared at each mirror like I used to stare into my grandmother’s wafer jar. But instead of finding ever-replenishing comfort, I found shame that burrowed deeper and deeper.
You’re cherished, the wafers had said. You’re unlovable, my reflection countered.
As I traveled to Florida for college, the reflection sharpened, becoming even harder to accept. I constantly measured myself against the bronzed freshman girls who always seemed to be on their way to the beach. I envied their endless giggling from their open-topped cars. My full dinner plates seemed crowded compared to those goddesses’ plates of grass and radishes. Soon, I pledged to myself that I wouldn’t let different food items touch on my plate. I needed gaps and space.
My roommates tried to warn me that I was “skin and bones.” A “Q-tip.” My limbs, once sturdy and warm like the logs of Grandma’s cabin, reduced to bones. The vultures had fallen again.
*
My freshman year passed with no menstrual cycle. My body cried for help, for food. Mom, on high maternal alert, took my pile of bones to a woman’s doctor.
So there I sat, a near-skeletal eighteen-year-old atop a cushioned examination table.
“I would first suggest birth control,” the doctor said. “It should help, you know, regulate your feminine cycle. Will put some healthy weight back on too.”
I nodded. I was finally tired of being hungry.
“It’s all in the balance,” Mom said. “When you have a salad, have a slice of cake next.”
It was still a hard verdict. Only two options seemed possible to me: swear off food for good or sink into food, my childhood crutch, until I was at the bottom of an ice cream carton or cookie jar — gluttonously happy but guilty. I wasn’t saintly like the Apostle Paul. I couldn’t simply let go, whether abased or abounding.
The next years held both deluges and droughts. I met my husband. Friends betrayed me. I felt victim to each hill and valley, each season of fullness and hunger. And the vultures would circle one last time.
As divorce ravaged my extended family, my immediate family drew closer. We sisters had a special bond, and I wore the role of eldest sibling as my proudest badge. But I also wore all the other hallmarks of the oldest child: too naive and trusting, yet fiercely over-protective. As my siblings started forming their own lives, shooting away like branches with their own opinions, boyfriends, and interests, I desperately grabbed for fullness.
When I inserted myself into their lives, they resoundingly said, “Stay out of it.”
I cried to God, but I realized I had no words for him other than cliches, Sunday school verses, and memorized prayers starting “Dear Heavenly Father . . .”. How could I turn to a being I barely knew? Like Emily Dickinson, I felt the funeral of my mind, and the floorboards of reason threatened to collapse.
Fullness is the bubble in a lava lamp — it can’t be in two places. It’s either up, or down. Like a firm smack, I then knew that fullness of family had meant absence with God. My only comfort was knowing that the Holy Spirit could convert groanings to prayers.
*
It’s funny what that realization does. God soon showed me that “controlling life,” through food or anything else, had been an allusion from the start. The wafer cookies, the cozy cabins, even the preying vultures would come and go outside of me, like the poet in Ecclesiastes lamenting that there is “a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away.” The only difference was whether I would struggle against these elements that would surely come.
There is a time to every purpose under the heaven. As years passed, I stopped grabbing and gorging, starving and withholding. I found balance — a new garden tucked between the cabins and the boneyards — a place that invited me to rest and trust that I would be filled by one greater.
“So, I hear you have a boyfriend,” I asked my sister slowly, a couple months ago, hiding my hurt that she hadn’t told me herself. A year had passed since our fracture.
“Yeah, his name is Joe. You really wanna hear how we met?” she asked.
“Of course.”
Normally, I would have fought with her — what do you mean do I really want to hear? You shut me out! From a place of hurt, I may have withdrawn, hoping my siblings would miss me and chase me down. Maybe I would have lashed out, grasping for fullness with a raised fist or a fiery word.
Instead, I let the conversation and all of its sensations roll over me — first the shame and longing, then love and grace.
And the bone-licking vultures circled away.