Metabolism

Mine & Hers

When daughter Louise was getting married, her aunt, Lacey’s sister, proposed a toast in which she said to Brooks, Louise’s about-to-be husband:

“When you’re driving somewhere and Louise says she’s getting hungry, don’t assumer you can just look around for a good place to get a bite when you run across it. Being interpreted, what ‘I’m hungry’ means, is ‘Get me something right now or I’m going to bite your head off.’”

Lacey, her three sisters, and their daughters all share a fierce metabolism that devours what they have eaten in astonishingly brief time, and then hunger overrules everything else in their experience until sated.

Many’s the time Lacey and I have found ourselves in a fierce argument over some obscure issue I don’t understand. Lacey will tuck into some yogurt, then look at me and say, “Oh, I guess I was hungry. I didn’t realize it.”

I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced hunger they way she does. I know it doesn’t totally take over my psyche the way it can hers. She and her sisters can get an aura leading to a migraine if they delay too long.

Whether it’s another instance of my guy-self being unaware of bodily feelings, or that I really rarely feel hungry, can get by for days on occasional snacks, as I do when Lacey’s away. That can be a source of frustration for Lacey as she assumes when hunger strikes her that it’s time for both of us to eat. For me, eating is maybe more a social event than tending to a bodily requirement. Not surprisingly, my taste buds are dormant compared with her discerning taste.

A simple, seemingly straightforward thing like hunger and eating can challenge the strongest marriage. You’d think, after more than four decades married, we would be alert to those fraught moments.

Sometimes. Too often not.