What Box?

When I was a child I was the favorite but as I approached puberty my mother attacked everything I did. I just kept morphing and retreating into my wild imagination, and sometimes leaving my body. 

I have since learned that was my coping mechanism and my ultimate gift.

I remember as a child wanting to heal my perpetual stomach pains. I was determined to find the root cause and fix it. I discovered vegetarian cooking and whole-grain bread and yogurt. But my mother objected: "You eat too much! You eat too much yogurt!"

So I began making my own yogurt from scratch and cultivating it in the oven, using the pilot light to incubate the glass jars of milk. I learned to bake my own wheat soy sesame bread. I ate my meals alone, in the middle of the night.

But my mother said "You can't eat yogurt for breakfast!" "Your bran muffins look like camel dung!" 

She was going to attack me for finding any freedom from her "sick child" script. She was a Munchausen-by-proxy mother, and I was her proxy.

And when I walked thru Grand Central Station seeing hundreds of faces from around the world, I thought somebody here eats yogurt for breakfast. In India everybody does, they do in California communes, in Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, France, and beyond.

Anyway I learned that you can always step back and see where else on Earth people are doing this or feeling that. My mother tried to put me in a box. Now I say "What box?"