Spoon Theory
Morgan DePue on how good memories, childhood trauma, and chronic pain can all rest in the hollow of that wooden spoon you hold in your hand.
This wooden spoon is an antique by now. Stolen from my Momma’s utensil urn when I left home at seventeen, it’s been packed from house to house, surviving each of my twelve moves of the last sixteen years better than my body has. They say my fibromyalgia might have a link to trauma, to a disrupted nervous system response, a vagus nerve that fails to regulate appropriately after cumulative complex or discrete traumatic experiences. It’s a chronic illness, incurable, excruciating, something you learn to live with.
In the chronic illness world, folks talk about “spoon theory” as a way to measure pain and energy levels, an analogy to convey our body’s carrying capacity for proper functioning from day to day. The short of it is this: the ability to function fully comes in spoonfuls. You get a set number of spoons a day, and some days you can even borrow spoons, but this is rare and leaves you indebted to the future. (And I don’t know if it’s the mountain in me or what, but I hate any sort of indebtedness.)
Different activities require a certain number of spoons, and everything counts, even things like brushing your teeth or making tea. So, you can do a certain number of things until you run out of spoons, then you’re done. If you leave yourself in a deficit, you pay severely with pain, fatigue, flares, fog, or other chronic-illness party tricks. It works for a lot of folks. Many will even brand themselves with spoon tattoos like a logo to signal to other “spoonies” that they, too, have at least one chronic illness. Seems cool, I dig tattoos, but I never liked that goddamn theory.
Packing, I just stare at the fourteen-inch spoon in my hand, weighing whether or not it should come with me on this next move into a home of my own. An heirloom. A relic of a childhood I haven’t stopped running from. Is this something I should save or something I should shatter? It is the longest spoon I own, and the truth is that I don’t think it’s right or proper to stir apple butter or mix Texas chocolate cake with anything but a long, sturdy wooden spoon. That doesn’t change the way my synapses fire when I think of how these spoons were more than kitchen tools. They were paddles—tools for spanking. Used that way across Appalachia, or at least West Virginia.
“All you need for this cake is this right here,” Momma said as she raised a long-handled wooden spoon, worn and stained from use, soft yet sturdy. And we made one hell of a good cake.
But trauma is funny. Funny ha-ha sometimes. Funny weird all the time. There are times when I can flip through all the beatings in my mental rolodex and laugh—like that time I kicked my brother into the Christmas tree. I’d been sleeping on the couch, and he slammed some sort of Playskool easel-type toy into my midsection like a folding chair in a WWF cage match as a wake-up call. My fight reflex kicked in. He deserved it. I got punished. Three licks with a wooden spoon, no cake batter in sight. Ha-ha.
Then there are times when I look at these spoons and all I think about are the good moments in the kitchen of the house I grew up in, the one we lost in the 2008 financial crisis, the same year I moved out anyways. Momma would teach me how to cook in that kitchen, and she started me young. I was interested in it. Obsessive about it, some would say. Once I got the box cake down, she taught me to make Texas chocolate cake, her favorite and her mom’s favorite. I was getting the utensils out, and I grabbed a hand mixer with eight-year-old hands.
“Aht! What’re you doin’?!”
“Gettin’ the mixer for the cake.”
“Don’t need it. All you need for this cake is this right here,” Momma said as she raised a long-handled wooden spoon, worn and stained from use, soft yet sturdy. And we made one hell of a good cake.
Then there are times when the trauma is just what it’s supposed to be: unsettling, yet distant, like seeing a snappin’ turtle through pond water just muddy enough to make it fuzzy but clear enough to let you know it’s there, a constant threat seeding terror. Like the time before my parents’ divorce when we still lived in South Carolina, so I must’ve been three or four, and I’d done something wrong. Something really wrong. I don’t remember what. But I know in that moment Momma was nothin’ more than fury bound by rage wrapped in flesh as she screamed at me that I was getting a whoopin’, both our eyes full of tears, and bent me over her knee. She wailed on me with a wooden spoon while I writhed and screamed and cried and flailed. I heard a snap, and I let out a piercing scream ’cause for all I knew, something on me had just broken. Momma lifted me by the arm and thrust me onto the floor as she got up and stormed toward the kitchen. “We’re not finished yet.” She came back with another wooden spoon for another round. That spoon didn’t break.
Spoons. Spoon theory. How many spoons did that beating cost me in my lifetime? How about all the others? Does the number deduct from the total number of spoons that normal folks have? Is that how this theory works? Is this pain that manifests like flame throughout my body, but especially on the right side, the side that bore the brunt of beatings, calculated by some standard number of spoons? What about actual spoons that make the materiality of my own childhood trauma? Should I keep this thing? Does holding onto it make me resilient or a martyr? A masochist or a good daughter? Do I get to add it to my chronic-illness spoon collection? Is it a trophy of abuse or an heirloom? Am I rejecting my Appalachian culture or violating it or honoring it? I shouldn’t be writing this. I should burn it.
Perhaps it could be an effigy burned in a ritual of release to set this piece of me free. I don’t know how that’ll fold into the spoon theory, but I know from prior experience that there’s something to be said for releasing trauma from the mind to help release stored trauma from the body. I know that from moments on the yoga mat spent sobbing as emotion bubbles up in the midst of a deep hip stretch. There’s release in the stretching and the stillness. There’s also release in ritual, in burning.
In my mind, I bind it with white, black, and blue ribbons, twining them around the handle in a braided pattern until it’s almost the pretty of a healing bruise. When I touch it to the flame of a candle, it blazes and is cast to ash in a moment’s passing.
The ache in my right hip has been inescapable for weeks—in a different way than what I’m used to. Like the base level of pain has increased. Stress has been higher and so has my rumination on spoons, wooden spoons. Is this throbbing ache that flares like fire the link between fibro and the neural network that encoded the spoon as a weapon? Will a sacrifice rewire my programming, or will my lack of neural pruning bind me to this pain in perpetuity?
I stare at the spoon. It’s the only spoon I’ve ever had in the fucking spoon theory, and I use it every day, but I can’t ever use it. I am forever in a deficit.
I balance the wand-like wooden relic in my palm and hold it steady in my gaze. In my mind, I bind it with white, black, and blue ribbons, twining them around the handle in a braided pattern until it’s almost the pretty of a healing bruise. When I touch it to the flame of a candle, it blazes and is cast to ash in a moment’s passing.
But in the half-packed kitchen, I still hold the thing in my hand.
I lay the last wooden spoon into the tote filled with kitchen tools. It rests atop mixing bowls and measuring cups and gadgets crammed in crevices. I layer on kitchen towels and dishrags, tucking the spoon in tightly, wedging it in place with gentle weight. There are some parts of myself I’ll never escape. I think spoons are just spoons anyways.
About the author
Morgan DePue is a neurodivergent Southern Appalachian poet with deep West Virginian roots. She lives in Ashe County, North Carolina, with her partner and teaches at Appalachian State University. She holds degrees in Sustainable Development and English. Her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Bloodshot Journal of Contemporary Poetry, Main Street Rag Magazine, Pinesong Anthology, and Women Speak Anthology. When not writing and teaching, she can be found wading in rivers, wandering hills, and cuddling her cats, Ti Jean and Creachie.