Projectile Vomiting as the First Step to a Happy Marriage

On culinary terror disguised as hospitality

Photo by yasmeen hill on Unsplash

“Eat up, finish everything! Why aren’t you eating? Here, have some more potatoes!”

For hours, I had been desperately trying to empty my plate, but food just kept appearing on it, piling higher and higher like something out of a magic pot.

“Come on, eat! What is this? You’re not eating anything at all!” my future mother-in-law reproached me.

I put on a stoic smile and forced another bite down my throat.

“Here, have some more meat jelly, go on… Why aren’t you eating? Is the meat jelly no good?”

“This is the most delicious one I’ve ever had in my life,” I assured her.

And in the very next second — still wearing that polite smile — I started vomiting.

Right onto that damn jelly.

“Well well, who is this Thumbelina we have here?” she asked instead of a greeting several hours earlier when I first crossed their threshold, incredibly nervous. I had no idea yet what a humiliating disaster this first meeting would turn into.

Quick note: I didn’t exactly qualify as a Thumbelina in either height or weight. Lean, sure, but nobody would ever call me petite.

The living room table was groaning under the weight of the food — my family didn’t lay out this much even for Christmas.

Panic set in. “Is anyone else coming?”

“No, just Mom and us two,” my new boyfriend (and future husband) reassured me, adding with a grin, “See? She likes you already.”

All I could actually see was her fluttering around, shoving a plate and fork into my hands while obsessing over how “tiny and skin-and-bones” I was.

“Mom, you looked exactly the same at her age,” her son laughed.

“Oh, who cares about me? She’s the one who needs to eat! Pack it away, sweetie, so you have some strength and health!”

Wow. Even my late grandmother had never shown such aggressive concern for my health. At home, no one ever forced me to eat. Here, I felt like any second she’d drop the classic line from my childhood nightmares: “You’re not leaving this table until you finish your plate!”

Come on, this is ridiculous, I told myself, and confidently piled my plate high with fragrant potatoes tossed in butter and dill. I wasn’t in kindergarten anymore, getting scolded over unfinished porridge. This was my boyfriend’s mother; we were all reasonable adults here.

“Eat, eat! Clean the plate!”

I flashed her my most charming smile and started digging into those delicious potatoes.

After the potatoes came the Olivier salad, then a piece of still-warm shashlik, followed by a stuffed pepper, and then a smoked chicken leg.

(Dammit, I’m getting nauseous right now just remembering that dinner.)

“Eat up!” she insisted, and I froze, feeling like I was three years old again, with a strict kindergarten teacher looming over me, shoving my face into that repulsive, lumpy semolina porridge and forcing me to keep swallowing.

I don’t remember if I ever actually threw up in my bowl back then, but I definitely will right now if I dive any deeper into that memory. So, we’ll skip any further descriptions of the porridge, sorry.

“Eat, clean your plate!” kept repeating the woman whose son I wanted to marry. And she wasn’t saying it as a joke, or softly, or out of mere politeness. It felt as though her own happiness and health depended entirely on whether I handed back an empty plate at the end of the night.

“Eat!” So I ate submissively, because the mere thought of disappointing her — or, God forbid, making her angry — scared the absolute hell out of me.

“Here, take some fish, too,” — I kept eating, and she just kept piling it on, again and again.

Funny thing was, my husband (technically still my boyfriend at the time, as you remember, but it feels so awkward to keep calling him that) had been sitting there for God knows how long over the exact same half-mangled piece of fish on his plate, casually sipping beer glass after glass. For some reason, this didn’t bother his mother at all, even though by her standards, he could have qualified as a Thumbelina too.

I tried cutting the tiniest possible pieces, chewing for as long as I could, and washing down every single bite with water, but the nausea was relentlessly creeping up my throat. In waves now.

“Oh, I’m so full, everything was absolutely delicious!” I chimed in cheerfully, hoping a compliment would distract her.

“Oh, what do you mean full? You barely ate a thing!”

Dammit.

But I’m a polite girl, and I don’t want to upset or disappoint anyone. This is his mom. If this is so important to her, I should make an effort, right?

Well, and then came the meat jelly — and you already know what happened next.

I spent the final hour of my visit crouched on all fours, facing the toilet bowl. My husband hovered around me anxiously, for some reason surrounding me with towels from every angle. Was he terrified I’d barf on his mom’s pristine white rugs?

After purging the entire dinner from my system, I drank water straight from the tap — was too terrified to ask his mother for a glass, fearing she’d use it as an excuse to make me eat something else. Then I called Grandpa, begging him to come and pick me up as fast as possible. I think I lied and blamed it on a stomach flu. Grandpa sounded incredibly worried.

It seemed certain I would never be invited back to that house again. But I had already come to terms with the inevitable. After all, we hadn’t even been dating for that long so it wasn’t the end of the world.

As you’ve probably guessed, we didn’t break up. By some miracle, his mother bought the stomach flu story hook, line, and sinker.

“To her, food is sacred,” my husband tried to explain to me later. “When I was born, there were days when we didn’t have a single crumb of bread in the house, and absolutely no money to buy any.”

I wondered how that was even possible — how a young family with a newborn could be left without any help from their small army of relatives, all living in that very same town.

“They did help, of course… whenever they could themselves. There was never much wealth to go around there, you know?”

I honestly tried to understand.

“But why was she forcing only me to eat?”

“She wasn’t forcing you! She was just terrified you’d stay hungry. She was showing hospitality.”

Ah, so that’s what it’s called? Good to know.

Some seven or eight years later, my mother-in-law and I were having lunch, this time at my table. True to habit, she dropped her signature line:

“Eat up, you’re not eating anything at all!”

Unfortunately for her, absolutely nothing remained of the polite Thumbelina she had hosted all those years ago.

Without a second thought, I grabbed the bowl of steaming hot plov and piled a generous, overflowing mountain of it onto her plate:

“Eat, you’re the one who needs to eat! Look at you, you’ve lost so much weight! Come on, eat up!”

My mother-in-law blinked, completely flustered.

“I don’t want that much…”

“Oh, eat, don’t be ridiculous!” I waved her off dismissively. “Clean your plate! I’ll go chop up some more cucumbers right now.”

She looked at me with something bordering on pure horror, and I flashed her a charming smile in return. I mean, what’s the big deal? We’re all reasonable adults here, right?

I’m just showing hospitality.