Lucky Charms, Or The Epiphany Of A Pandemic Binge-Eater
By Jen Lockwood George
It’s 10:45 p.m., and I am eating Lucky Charms. Dinner leftovers are cooled and in the refrigerator. Beside me, the dishwasher hums along, taking with it the smells of grilled salmon and asparagus. In the past, the running dishwasher heralded the close of the day. I would stand in my clean kitchen and enjoy the quiet swishing before heading off to read or knit. Tonight, however, the dishwasher covers the sound of me raiding the cabinets. I am not hungry, but I long for the hardened, yet slippery sweetness of dehydrated marshmallows and the sogginess of oat cereal. Despite my efforts to ignore the craving, the call of the red Family Size box with the cartoon leprechaun on it is too strong, and here I am, leaning against the kitchen counter rather than sitting down so as to avoid committing to eating when I should be asleep. If I’m not sitting at the table, it’s not a real meal, right?
I served myself the cereal in a drinking glass to limit my serving size, but I know I’ll pour another cupful and splash on some more soy milk before I stop eating. This has been my ritual for more than one hundred days.
Dunk. I push down a green clover-shaped marshmallow with the tip of my spoon. It pops back to the surface of the milk a few millimeters away. I do the same thing with a little rainbow shaped one.
This cereal is not filling. I can eat two bowls of the stuff without feeling satiated. My burgeoning stomach is ready for a rest, ready to try to process all the torture I’ve put it through today, but I’m not satisfied. If anything, I feel even emptier now than I did before I began this nighttime nosh.
Presently, I hear heavy footsteps plodding down the hallway. Not the thumps of my husband’s feet, but the slightly softer footfalls of my oldest child, now seventeen. He pauses to take in the sight of his mother hugging a cup to her chest, spooning sugary cereal into her mouth like she’s seven years old. He smiles.
“You too?” he asks, and I nod.
With that, he reaches into the same cabinet and takes out the same red box. Skipping the farce of the cup, though, he pours his snack into a bowl.
When my son was little, I never allowed Lucky Charms into the house. Any cereal he ate had ten grams of sugar or less per serving; I was militant about that. But now my world is falling apart, and I am no longer concerned with sugar intake or balancing carbs to protein, neither for him, nor for me. Lucky Charms feel good, and I need that right now. We stand crunching together for a bit before I give him a sideways hug and he returns to the computer game in his room.
Again I am left alone with my Lucky Charms.
Why this cereal, of all the unhealthy junk I could buy? Swiss Rolls taste better. Brownies are more filling. I’m a good baker; I could whip up something magically delicious for myself. But I don’t.
I suck thoughtfully on a marshmallow whose color I did not observe. The sweetness triggers a memory.
I am little, maybe seven or eight years old. It’s breakfast time on a summer day, and I have no worries on my mind. The grown-up drama of my family’s life had not yet affected me. My mother is smoking her morning cigarette across the table from me. I am planning to play in the yard, then take a walk to the library with my sister or ride around town straddling the rack on the back of my mother’s bicycle. I have marshmallow cereal. Maybe not Lucky Charms because they are expensive. The generic is just as tasty to my immature, uncultured tongue. I eat all the bell-shaped cereal pieces first, leaving my favorite part, the marshmallows, for last. I take my time swirling the spoon around in the milk, letting the marshmallows form a lily pad ring around the edge or the bowl. Then I pluck them up one at a time, favorite colors (green and yellow) first. This ritual is slow, but that doesn’t matter because I am not in a hurry to do anything.
I snap back to the present and set my cup down on the counter. Lucky Charms belong to a different time in my life—a time when I was innocent, safe, and happy. If I felt empty a moment ago, I am an abyss now, and not even a whole box of cereal can fill me up.
Has my Lucky Charm habit been an expression of all the negativity that has invaded my life this year? The fear, loneliness, grief, and uncertainty? Have I been quite literally eating my feelings (or perhaps the feelings I missed having)?
As a mysterious and frightening disease sweeps its way around the world in wave after wave, as I spend months withdrawn from my friends and extended family in attempt to hide from the grim reaper’s long and indiscriminate scythe, as store shelves are empty and people panic and argue over blame and face coverings, I consume the comfort of a time before I became acquainted with death. As the nation rises up against complicated and corrupt systems that have oppressed the people they pretended to serve, I consume simplicity and peace, or childlike ignorance. As I wonder where my next paycheck will come from, I scarf down feelings of security. As I venture into my forties with the stinging grief of my mother’s recent passing, I eat up memories that do not hurt.
Somehow, without my awareness, my hippocampus has told the rest of my brain that a kiddie cereal would make everything all better, make the nightmare that has been the past two years go away. I eat to wake myself up from the fever dream. I eat to evade sadness. I eat the tide of emotions that threaten to overwhelm me.
But I can’t eat forever.
The sweet taste sits on the back of my tongue, but now I know that it is meaningless. No amount of dehydrated marshmallows is going to erase my pain.
I leave the cup of cereal on the counter unfinished.
Guest essay written by Jen Lockwood George. Jen lives on the coast of Maine, where she writes in her car and teaches writing to college freshmen who live in little Zoom boxes. To date, she has not eaten another glassful of Lucky Charms. She is a Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing alum. Her work has appeared in The Kankakee Daily Journal, Muse, Youth Imagination, Celebrities in Disgrace, Stonecoast Review, The Ginger Collect, Not Very Quiet, and The Beautiful Stuff.