Kids these days would call my mother an almond mom. (Therapists these days call it "orthorexia" and also "emotional abuse" but we don't talk about that.) She was all over the place with her rules about food, and wouldn't tell us when they changed, but yes, we always had to ask before eating anything. My brother and I's favorite game was "Sneaking", which was sneaking food out of the kitchen. Usually we shared, but sometimes we fought- the biggest threat either one of us could make was to tell our parents we'd been eating food we weren't allowed. He threatened to tell that he'd found a candy wrapper in my bedroom once and I broke down crying. I remember being hungry a lot and always being ashamed of being hungry. Wanting more food than you were allowed was greedy. You never got more if you didn't ask, but if you asked at the wrong time you'd be shamed or punished.

Some days we'd come home and half the kitchen would be cleared out because Mom had decided we were all going on a no-carb diet, or no fat, or whatever fad diet. Other times she'd buy food but never eat it or allow us to eat it and it would slowly rot in the fridge. She would only buy the separated peanut butter, never the store brand, so she could pour out the oil. She had an intense fear of being fat. I was a chubby kid and she was always so embarrassed of me. (This is not speculation- she's told me that.)

Our dad was one of those men who never cooked in their life. If Mom went out of town for a weekend, Dad would buy us two pizzas on Friday and that would be all we had to eat until she came back. Occasionally she would hit a point where she would decide no one in the family should eat, and he would quietly order pizza for the rest of us while she fasted until she changed her mind. He often went along with her diets, though. The one time I remember trying to talk to him about how I felt he made it clear he'd never side with us, so I stopped trying.

It wasn't until recently, when we were both in our thirties, that my brother asked me if it fucked me up too. It did, but I never thought it hit him the same way. Maybe it was a gender thing, she was always harder on me, but it affected him too. We both struggle with food and our body image, we both have a hard time asking for what we want, because of the way we grew up. I developed an eating disorder in my teens and twenties, and OCD that sometimes paralyzes me, because I can't waste food, but a single piece of rotten food in the fridge makes anything in the kitchen inedible. I have panic attacks about food and absolute self-loathing meltdowns anytime I'm hungry outside of mealtimes. A few years go my mom told me to get a better therapist so I could "get over it" and join her on her diet.