“Bragging, she admitted she had endured intestinal unrest in 21 countries. To my grandmother, a severe case of gastric rebellion was some sort of traveler’s badge of merit, suggesting—and satisfying—a willingness to forsake the nerdy, picturesque, but wilder black waters of the world. In Syria, she had consumed a bowl full of sheep’s eyeballs, which she reported tasted exactly like one would imagine sheep’s eyeballs to taste. She was more adventurer than connoisseur, but made careful entries about her diet. In various parts of the world, she had dined on caiman’s tail, the poisonous flesh of blowfish, which made her fingers numb, and shark fillets, ostrich eggs, chocolate-covered locusts, and elvers pickled in brine. For years, I thought she had eaten elves instead of tiny eels. Antelope liver, goat genitals, and boiled python. After studying her diet, one did not wonder long over her recurrent bouts of gastric rebellion. One only wondered how she kept herself from offering the meal back to the plate from whence it came—softened, reshuffled, and transformed by the journey, much like my grandmother herself.”

Loose paraphrase / inspired by Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides (not a direct quote).

In The Prince of Tides, there’s that unforgettable kind of woman who turns suffering into theater—part confession, part performance, part badge of honor. Emotion becomes weather in the room: pressure systems, sudden squalls, a front moving in whether anyone asked for it or not. Reading it, I felt that familiar recognition—because I grew up around my own version of that force, and I learned early to watch for the moment the air changed.

My Nana didn’t slam doors or throw plates. Her body did the talking. When Aileen—my adoptive mother, my “doctor mom”—worked herself into one of her tirades, Nana would go quiet, go pale, and then disappear behind the bathroom door. That was the signal: she’d had enough. In our house, the storm warning wasn’t thunder. It was porcelain.