Pancakes For Dinner

I wanted pancakes for dinner. 

Mom offered, as she did every year, to make me whatever I wanted for my birthday dinner, and I wanted pancakes. Bacon. Orange juice. A chocolate cake from Kroger with the satiny sweet frosting piped in violet rosettes along the border. I was twelve, maybe thirteen. 

I remember the scene like a home movie in my head, chaotic and a little fuzzy around the edges but alive. I’d come from basketball practice, and the little hairs that escaped my ponytail had frozen around the base of my neck in my commute home from the gym. Wafts of meaty bacon and butter filled the air as Mom shuffled back and forth from the griddle to the table with fresh batches of pancakes. I filled a tall glass with orange juice, chugged it, and refilled the glass, my body soaking in the sugar after two hours of running dogs—my coach’s interpretation of suicides, where instead sprinting and touching each line, we had to slide, bruising our bums and burning up our knees as we got back up to continue sprinting.  

If any of my family had objections about eating cake for dinner and dessert, they didn’t communicate them to me. I certainly didn’t feel any. I didn’t think twice sloppily bathing my pancakes in maple syrup, letting it also coat the bacon for a sweet and salty bite. I finished every drop of that second glass of juice without inhibitions. As my family sang the birthday song and prepared to cut my chocolate cake, I thought of nothing but how luscious a blanket of frosting would feel on my tongue, how sweet of an ending it would be to my birthday meal. 

I would journal about this later. How insane I was to eat nothing but sugar for dinner. How I needed to start getting serious about my health. How I wished I was anorexic, that would make everything so easy. 

Birthdays can feel complicated, or at least over the years they have for me. This one feels a little like all of my past birthdays at once. I’m going to get burgers and milkshakes later, and as I write about this plan my stomach is grumbling with equal parts desire and fear. I am channeling the girl who chugs two tall glasses of orange juice because her body asked for more. And with as much love as I can muster, I am listening to the girl who wished for—and eventually fell into—anorexia and walking the other way. 

I’m 34 today, and I’m still trying to trust myself and my desires. I get so wrapped up in the quest to decipher the one truest thing it is that my body is trying to tell me it needs, when the truth, of course, is that it’s usually more complicated than that. I don’t need two glasses of juice, but when my body craves it, I want to savor the way it makes my cheeks pucker. I don’t need cake and pancakes, but when that’s my birthday wish, I want to listen. I want to bask in excitement as I lick the frosting from the candles and watch the knife cut into tender cake. Today, I want burgers and milkshakes, and I want to acknowledge that I understand why that desire worries some small part of me. All these years, she was just trying to help. 

My birthday wish is for everyone to listen to their bodies today. They know so much more than we give them credit for. Lots of love to you <3