That From Which We Cannot Escape

Facing Fear In The New Year

I haven’t been able to say Happy New Year with conviction yet.

I had not even fully coped with 2024 and how quick it whizzed by, turning my daughter into someone who reads books to me at her bedtime, and my baby son into a toddler that’s demanding three scrambled eggs at breakfast and chocolate for dessert.

So I let 2024 expire without a bang and went to bed at 10:30pm, not even waking to the sound of midnight fireworks, but the next morning, flipping through the news, I saw that the pre-dawn had contained something much more explosive.

An hour after my sister and her friends had rung in the new year, walked through the French Quarter, and gone home, a terrorist plowed through a busy three block stretch of my origin city, sending crowds of people fleeing, 35 to the hospital, and 14 to wherever we go when our lives are no more.

I have another sister who works at a shop about three blocks from where the coolers containing additional pipe bombs were found, and she was inexplicably required to go in to work despite the massive police presence and cordoned-off area search that was underway.

These things are horrible anywhere, but it was all too close to home.

This terrorist even stayed in (and set on fire) a house on Mandeville St., a street I once lived on, although mine was much further down towards UNO and Lake Ponchartrain, when in college.

I later read with incredulity that as a former member of the military he had once earned a medal for anti-terrorism work. What had happened in life for this man to decide to become the worst thing he himself could think of?

But I didn’t know any of this initially. My only question was “are my sisters ok?!” So I immediately texted them in fear, and then, because they had been up late and were now sleeping in, I stayed in the kitchen and cooked our supposedly lucky traditional New Year’s foods with tears streaming down my cheeks as I watched the news, waiting to hear back from my family, sad for those whose families never will.

Here’s a link to the collection of GoFundMe’s for those families:

https://www.gofundme.com/c/act/how-to-help-attack-in-new-orleans

The cooking soothed me a little. I made a spiral glazed ham (they’ve been on discount at Stop N Shop lately), New Orleans style black eyed peas with smoked ham hocks over rice, and some smothered cabbage with onions, shallots, garlic, a little Cajun seasoning, and some chicken broth.

I like this soup,” my daughter said, “because it isn’t spicy, doesn’t have a lot of Cajun sprinkles.”

“Who am I raising?!” I joked to my husband as I gestured towards her and tried to keep it together, making a Dijon mustard honey orange glaze for the ham, and adding a few precious spoonfuls of local honey grown by a beekeeping childhood friend of mine in Slidell, Louisiana (after trashing that awful little packet of smoke-flavored corn syrup the ham came with).

I’d invited a couple dinner guests to my house for New Year’s Day, as I assumed they’d appreciate it and could use some 2025 luck and money as much as anybody, especially with one of them getting an endometriosis surgery later this year.

I told my sisters, when they reached out, that I wished they could be here with me at the dinner table too. That on a day like this I just wanted to hug and feed them. They agreed and it was a little painful that despite our clear desires in the moment, we remained 1500 miles apart. I hoped they got their cabbage and peas and pork from somewhere.

Because my kids are too little, my husband has already heard it, and my siblings weren’t here, I explained the thought behind the food traditions to my dinner guests. Greens represent cash. Peas or beans represent coins. And pigs root forward, bringing prosperity. Superstition (and Grandma) dictates you must have at least a spoonful of each on New Year’s Day.

But as I hosted and ate the meal (which was overall pretty dang good, if I do say so myself) the white rice seemed a little dry. This was because it was in fact a dry variety of long grain easily-separated rice more typically used for Pakistani dishes like biryani that I was trying to use up before we bought another bag of my husband’s preferred jasmine rice.

But I had a secret. I’d already bought more rice, and it was brown rice. Yet it didn’t seem right to serve the new bag of brown rice for New Years, as I don’t really like it, even though brown rice seems likely to be part of my life in the foreseeable future.

The week prior I’d had some bloodwork done, much of it normal, except for one number. The A1c marker for blood sugar. Mine said 6.6. Anything 6.5 or above is diabetic.

Genetics weren’t ever on my side with this. I believe my Dad, a poster child for how not to handle diabetes if there ever was one, was diagnosed when he was about my age.

I remember my Grammy, his mother, the only girl in a family of 8, saying she had lost two brothers to the disease before good treatments were routinely available.

I’d been through a bit of my own experience with it before, when pregnant with my son, developing gestational diabetes and then preeclampsia. Turns out gestational diabetes is more common in Asian people, something having to do with the placenta, and the placenta is made by the baby, not the mom. So I had concerns but I’d been able to chalk it up to having an Asian husband, an Asian baby, and therefore an Asian placenta, which, once the pregnancy was over, would be no more. Or so I’d hoped.

Some people’s blood sugar gets back to normal after a gestational diabetes pregnancy. Others find they are always a little more inclined towards diabetes. It seems my lot in life is to face the latter.

When I saw the test results pop up in MyChart, I sat in my bed with a lump in my throat. Another cloud forming over the already ominously cloudy 2025.

I fielded a call from a nurse the next day, while at the grocery store, telling me about a prescription for blood sugar testing strips she was calling in and the expectation for me to go on a low carb diet and start doing finger sticks four times a day. I added the brown rice while I was loading up my cart with peas and ham and cabbage.

Clearly I couldn’t take a ton of time for wallowing while other people made plans for me. I knew this intensive testing and restrictive dieting plan wasn’t going to work for me anymore than it did last time, and I needed help to form a better one. I said I would reach back out to the endocrinologist I’d seen before, have an actual expert to discuss all this with, rather than some diabetes education nurse I was about to be referred to, who in prior experience I found to be lower on the scientific information side and higher on the food weirdo side.

I simply can’t abide restrictive food weirdo behavior. In part because I love food in a very cultural and personal way. Cooking it, feeding people, trying new dishes, sitting around and discussing meals we’ve had and meals we’re having and meals we’re gonna have. If there’s any part of me that’s truly Cajun, genuinely in touch with my roots, it’s this part. I will not be eating boneless skinless chicken breasts with a little salt and pepper and a side salad unless it’s a one off like I’m in an airport and nothing else is available. And even then, I’ll be wishing I was carrying hot sauce in my bag.

But, cultural swagger aside, there’s another, sadder reason. My mom has orthorexia. For years and years she was into an extreme whole grain low-fat diet, then abruptly switched to an equally extreme but opposite Sally Fallon/Weston Price Foundation diet. If it’s got significant amounts of quackery plus whole categories of food and food preparation methods that can be demonized as “bad,” she’s in.

Growing up she would take recipes and adjust and adapt them to her diet until they tasted so bad as to be unpalatable. Biscuits that could break a window. Pasta that felt congealed. Pancakes that were so sour they would have babies spitting them out and wiping their tongues with their hands. Once we started refusing to eat her food even when hungry, her job was done. She would get this glitter in her eye as she insisted the recipe was a success but we just didn’t want it because we weren’t healthy. Because in our sinful gluttonous fleshly state, we only wanted bad food.

If this doesn’t sound disturbing enough, as the chubby eldest daughter, mealtime was often especially negative for me. A time to be singled out, portion sizes controlled, belly skin pinched, pig noises made at me while I ate. Extra walks and bike rides forced on me after dinner.

All my endometriosis symptoms got either ignored or blamed on me being out of shape and eating wrong, first by my parents and then in adulthood by a succession of doctors who didn’t run any tests.

Six years ago, after finally getting a real diagnosis followed by an emergency six hour surgery where I was told the abdominal endometriotic scar tissue was so bad that my kidneys and the major veins to my legs had been in danger, I finally learned that in my very severe case, my stomach had been adhered to the sidewall of my abdomen. Nobody could really tell me what that had done to my digestion when I asked, but in the 3 months post-op I could often barely stomach foods besides soup or cereal and I put on 40 pounds.

So my background is complex and my health is complex and I have tried to bear with both struggles as best as I am able, but how I got out of that house or these medical issues without an eating disorder, I don’t know.

Maybe it’s because I came to connect with food as a craft and an art, a safe and generous way to show love.

My gateway drug to becoming someone who loved to cook and eat was this old spiral bound La Leche League cookbook, which I recently found online and reordered a copy of, for nostalgic reasons.

It had a small section of bright orange pages that served as a kids’ cookbook. I remember at age 10, finding this cookbook and feeling empowered to take matters into my own hands. I got out a stepstool, thumbed through the kids’ section to choose a recipe, then turned on the gas stove, and made myself a grilled cheese sandwich. Being new to cooking, I burnt it, but scraped the burnt edge off, and ate it anyway. Then I made two more grilled cheese sandwiches for siblings who asked for them.

“You make an excellent grilled cheese sandwich,” my husband says. “Grilled to perfection.” “Yep,” I tell him, “lots and lots of practice.”

I soon added other dishes to my childhood cooking repertoire. Meatloaf. Pasta. Eggs many different ways. Lots of poor people food. Plenty recipes that could be made with ingredients received under the USDA commodities program.

If I hadn’t gone to school for poverty alleviation policy I’d probably have gone to chef school. But instead I studied among the people I was around, always looking for ways to make my cooking a little better, centering my appreciation for a good meal.

I learned how to make a proper roux (use slightly more fat than flour, never quit stirring it) from Grandma, one of the best cooks I know. How to make barbecued chicken (parboil the thighs first, then slather in your favorite barbecue sauce before finishing on a charcoal grill) from a creole dad in my parents’ fundamentalist church. And some time after that, I was taught how to make homemade New Orleans style king cakes from a college friend (who herself was taught by Popeyes chicken founder Al Copeland’s brother while she worked in an adjacent family-owned restaurant). I also listened and took mental notes while my ex-uncle-in-law (may he rest in peace) told me he added a little liquid crab boil to his crock pot pork shoulder, and slapped fish fillets on the grill still frozen, with a bit of Cajun seasoning, because they defrost fast enough anyway.

After I left New Orleans I met many other people who have added layers to my culinary traditions and my eclectic life. My Pakistani neighbors and the hospitality that goes with biryani and milk tea and parathas. My first post-divorce roommate, who introduced me to Hungarian paprika and the best matzo ball soup I’ve ever had, as well as the double cabbage excellence of adding a jar of sauerkraut to some red sauce before topping trays of cabbage rolls. Then there’s my mother in law, who showed me how to season a proper Vietnamese-style chicken broth with charred onion and ginger, and after three years of practice, told me I had finally made a pretty spring roll.

In time, I developed a reputation for myself.

When I get together with my siblings, even years later, there are often classic beloved menu items requested. Shrimp creole or crawfish étouffée. Pot roast with spaghetti squash. Apple pancakes.

But it is clear that I worked hard to rescue the joy of food from the abyss my mom tried to keep it in, and also that being around a situation where restrictive eating is promoted is NOT a good thing for my psyche. So I never tried to lose weight, despite the pressure I sometimes got, or the difficulty of finding favorite clothes no longer fit, or the weirdness of looking in the mirror or at photos and having my body be different than it was.

It also probably helped that I have Read Aubrey Gordon’s book "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People” (she also hosts the podcast Maintenance Phase) and educated myself on what we really do and don’t know about body fat (not as much as we think) and what it means (not a lot of what we claim it does). I also learned about set point theory and that BMI, like so many other dystopian things, started out as a health insurance company actuarial ploy to charge more for what was a cultural bias disguised as a health risk, and the medical establishment and society simply went all in on it and never got out. Now there’s huge moneymaking to be had in the weight loss business, and as a culture we may never set ourselves free from calorie-counting or the marketing of guilt-free food, as if any food should be associated with guilt or rigidly doing math before eating in the first place.

I politely told the nurse that I am willing to do some initial baseline testing, but I don’t cut food groups. I also do get exercise, I am still breastfeeding, and at 6.6, I don’t see a reason for this level of continuous blood sugar testing, so after some initial testing she may have to just write in her chart that I’m noncompliant.

Then I asked for trauma-informed, body-positive, non-diet culture resources for diabetes. She said she would look. But I’ve already checked. Aside from a few Instagram accounts that are really trying, these still don’t seem to exist.

She referenced mental health as she said she would also check into a continuous glucose monitor. I said ok and got off the phone.

I stood on my soapbox later, furiously texting with a friend about what it’s like to be fat in a medical setting, which is often only slightly better than being fat in my mother’s house.

“You know that exact spot where you’re like ‘functionally this seems a bit nonsensical, or ego-driven, doesn’t it?’ Nope. It’s SYMBOLIC. The fat person must be made to confront failure and be pushed - by someone with the moral high ground - toward success, presumably kicking and screaming, or else they’d have already done it themselves. We are not at all removed from treating gluttony as a sin. And even if medical care workers don’t know that that’s what they’re perpetuating, they’ll feel right at home doing so, due to society and their training and any personal bias that gets thrown in.”

Anyway, I look at 2025 in the midst of all this and I want to once again center myself on positive things that may happen or seem to be in the works. But it’s hard to see it with how many incoming Presidential cabinet members are either billionaires or authors of Project 2025. It’s hard to see it with how my home city had such a horrible New Years trauma intentionally inflicted before daybreak. And it’s hard to see it with how I am now being confronted with more diet culture and behavior modification attempts being put out there as, despite what I’ve conveyed about what it brings up for me, good for my health.

I found myself wishing so bad that it wasn’t icy in the middle of January, with frozen months ahead. I want to be able to put my shoulders in the sun while I go into my garden and settle my nerves while plant the mirlitons that are sprouting in a plastic bag in my kitchen out along the fence. (Seriously, what on earth do I do with them at this early stage?!). I want the winter season and the winter doldrums I feel to just be over.

I want to have Mardi Gras begin safely and hear music that says it will all be ok, that we are each much more than our physical appearances and health struggles and misunderstandings and pasts. That we are all more valuable than what we’ve said to people who don’t listen and try to convince us otherwise.

I wish the beginning of this year did not feel somewhat like Groundhog Day, my past barreling full tilt towards me again, just in a new iteration, but here we are. It is how I feel.

I know that this time of year brings something regenerative to the living things that have learned to survive winter. Hibernating tree buds and pregnant animals. Water being stored in the form of ice that the crocuses will use come spring.

Probably it is up to me to learn or handle or develop something new from all this. Maybe this time around it is me that is stronger, more independent, different, so what may seem like similar circumstances are in fact not similar at all. Maybe it is me that will not be held back by others’ rigidities or beliefs, which experience has taught me are actually not about me but about themselves.

So I made a New Year’s resolution that I hope will be easy to keep, because it’s one that I already kept going most of last year, as I found myself able to maintain a sense of curiosity and lifelong learning, recentering myself with kindness towards my body no matter what it was going through or being characterized as, and trying not to take the brokenness of society fully to heart.

So I have a resolution for this year. It is that when I am faced with some difficult thing that I cannot escape, I will not abandon any of my hard-won love for this world or myself.