Brave Girl Eating

by Harriet Brown

  “Yes,” I said, wondering where this was going.

  “I think I have OCD, too,” she whispered.

  This was…unexpected. “Why?” I asked.

  “Because I can’t stop worrying!”

  “Worrying about what?”

  She shook her head, her eyes still hidden from me, and said no more.

  I told her I’d noticed she seemed a little worried lately. And I had noticed, because Kitty had never seemed fearful or anxious before. Cautious, yes; she was the kind of toddler who watched and waited rather than throwing herself into a new activity, who studied the stairs for weeks and then one day walked down them carefully, perfectly, one step at a time. But she loved travel, meeting new people, going places. She wasn’t shy or nervous; she’d never been afraid of the dark, or burglars, or dogs. I would never have described Kitty as anxious, and anxiety is something I know a lot about, because I’ve had panic disorder my whole life. But Kitty was nothing like I’d been as a child. At age eight, she insisted on going to overnight camp for two weeks and wasn’t homesick at all.

  “How about if we go talk to someone?” I asked her now. “About the OCD thing.”

  Kitty was shaking her head before I finished. “I’m not crazy!” she insisted.

  “Of course you’re not crazy,” I said. “It’s not about crazy. Everyone needs a little help at some point.”

  She said she wouldn’t talk to anyone and she didn’t need any help. She just needed more Mommy time, that was all. I didn’t point out that we’d just spent four hours together and she’d done nothing but cry. Instead I handed her a tissue and said, “If you change your mind—”

  She blinked. “I just want to talk to you about it,” she said. “Only you. Promise me.”

  “Of course,” I said. I hardly knew what I was saying.

  She scrambled out of my lap and ran into the house.

  That night Jamie and I went over the conversation again and again. What was really going on with Kitty? He hadn’t noticed her counting or arranging things, or showing other symptoms of OCD, and neither had I. But something was making her worry.

  Maybe we’d never know. After all, we told each other, she was fourteen, an age one friend described as “the lost year.” Her daughter spent most of her fifteenth year in her room, coming out only to snap at the rest of the family. Then one day she simply reappeared, her earlier personality restored, and resumed the civilities of family life.

  I remembered fourteen. You couldn’t pay me enough to be that age again.

  Was Kitty going through the kind of adolescent angst that’s triggered by hormones? Maybe. She barely had breasts; she hadn’t gotten her period yet. Late bloomers are the norm in both our families. Then, too, the kind of intense gymnastics training Kitty was involved in could delay development. But that could be a good thing, couldn’t it? I’d written an article years earlier for Health magazine on research showing that teenage girl athletes who delay menstruation have a lower than normal lifetime risk of breast cancer, which runs in our family.

  In the end, Jamie and I decided, we weren’t that worried. Kitty was smart, savvy in ways I certainly hadn’t been at her age. She was growing up, that was all. We agreed we’d keep an eye on her, though we had no idea what we were looking for.

  And yet. Most parents of an anorexic child can look back on a day when they should have done something but didn’t. A day when they first realized something was very wrong but still had no words for it, just a feeling—a prickle at the base of the neck, the hairs on their arms standing up, something in them recognizing danger. For me it was the next day, the Monday after Mother’s Day, when Kitty called me at work to ask what we were having for dinner on Friday night, five days later. She’d never done anything like that before, and I was, frankly, flabbergasted.

  “I don’t even know what we’re having tonight,” I said, laughing. Maybe she was joking.

  “I have to know,” she said. “Why can’t you just tell me?”

  I wish, now, that I’d paid attention to the frantic tone in her voice, to the anxiety driving this odd and insistent questioning. What if I’d made an appointment that day to see “someone”? Would that “someone” have seen what we couldn’t, yet?

  I’ll never know, because instead of making a call, I got annoyed. I’ve never been good at meal planning; I’m the kind of parent who rummages in the fridge and throws something together on the spot. When Kitty wouldn’t stop pressing me, when she didn’t back down, I said in exasperation, “Spaghetti, OK? We’ll have spaghetti on Friday night.” And when that calmed her down enough to get off the phone, I forgot about it.

  Only I didn’t. A few days later I stopped at the library on my way home from work and checked out a video called Dying to Be Thin. I didn’t go looking for it, and I couldn’t have told you why I checked it out. I brought it home and put it on my desk in the living room, where it was quickly covered by a pile of papers. It sat there for weeks, long past its due date, but I never watched it.

  Much later, Emma told me that when she saw that video on my desk, she knew Kitty had anorexia. “Why else would you have taken it out of the library?” she asked, with incontrovertible ten-year-old logic.

  If only I’d paid attention to my own signals.

  As May wore on, Kitty’s mood continued to deteriorate. She cried more; she was testy one moment, clingy the next. She kept up with her homework, as usual; she’d always been disciplined about school. Too disciplined; anything less than an A on the smallest assignment could send her into a spiral of anxiety about college and law school. In her chipper moments she couldn’t stop talking about her new passion for cooking. “I want to make a dinner party for your birthday, Mom!” she announced one day. My birthday is in October, but that didn’t stop her from making elaborate plans—dinner for thirty, place cards, fancy dress. She spent hours reading cookbooks, marking pages with yellow Post-its, making lists of ingredients—lobster, Cornish game hens, heavy cream, tarragon, butter. She called me at the office where I was editor in chief of a magazine to read me menus for the kind of four-course meals you could cook only with a kitchen full of Williams-Sonoma equipment. She flopped down on my bed at night to debate the relative merits of scallops versus shrimp, sweet butter versus French butter. She begged for a subscription to Gourmet magazine.

  I’d been trying to get Kitty to cook with me since she was three years old, to no avail. Was it possible for a child who had never shown the slightest interest in baking chocolate chip cookies to suddenly care about making a roux? Maybe I’d simply been boring her all these years with my pedestrian suggestions for brownies or spaghetti, and now her gourmet abilities were making themselves known. That didn’t exactly feel like the right explanation. But then what was going on?

  I grew suspicious—of what, exactly, I couldn’t say—and then questioned my own suspicions. I’d always been a practical cook, more apt to produce a one-pot casserole than an elaborate menu. Was I threatened by Kitty’s new expertise in the kitchen? What kind of mother was I, to be wary of my daughter’s new interest? Why couldn’t I just support it? Talking about food was the only thing that made her eyes light up. Even gymnastics, which she’d loved for years, seemed more of a chore than a pleasure these days.

  The thing was, she didn’t actually eat what she cooked. A bite here, a nibble there, that’s all. She always had a reason: this dish upset her stomach, she wasn’t in the mood for that one. Jamie and Emma and I ate what she cooked, and it was delicious. But still Kitty’s behavior left a bitter aftertaste.

  I started watching her. Watching what she ate, and didn’t eat. Watching the way goose bumps ran up her arms on a sunny afternoon. How her head suddenly looked too big for her body.

  At her eighth-grade graduation in early June, Kitty wore a blaze-orange halter dress she’d borrowed from a neighbor. From across the crowded gymnasium, I saw my daughter with different eyes, away from the usual context of our lives, and what I saw made my heart begin to pound. In
an auditorium crowded with eighth graders, she was by far the thinnest girl in the room.

  As the other parents in the bleachers clapped and cheered, Jamie and I sat alone. It was as if someone had turned off the sound. When I dared look at my husband, I saw my own terror mirrored in his eyes. We didn’t say a word; we didn’t have to. The next morning I called Dr. Beth’s office and took the first appointment offered—for the end of June, three weeks away.

  If I’d said it was an emergency, we could have gotten in earlier. But I felt oddly fatalistic about the appointment. We would take the time they gave us, and until then, I told myself, I would stop worrying about it. Stop thinking about it. I knew, then, on some level; but I still didn’t want to know. I was engaged in the magical thinking of denial. If I don’t get upset about this, it won’t be a big deal. I’m a writer; putting things into words is not only what I do, it’s how I think and feel and process the world. But I didn’t think in words about what was wrong with Kitty, and I certainly didn’t say them out loud.

  Over the next three weeks, Jamie and I behaved like travelers stranded on a small and isolated island. We knew the big ship would come, and that once it did, everything would be different. We were scared of the change that was approaching and also anxious for it, and so for those three weeks we lived in limbo, in the time between before and after.

  Usually, I talk to Jamie about everything. In our relationship, I’m the garrulous one; talking to him helps me figure out what I think and how I feel. And over the twentysome years we’ve been together, my naturally taciturn husband has come to appreciate and participate in the process of hashing things out aloud. But I didn’t talk to him about Kitty now. I could see some of my feelings mirrored in his face—fear and distress and hope—but he did not bring them up, and I didn’t ask. I longed for the day of the appointment, when Kitty’s doctor would put a name on what was happening to our child. When she would tell us what to do. And I feared it, the moment when I would have to say the word I’d been avoiding in my head all these weeks.

  But I knew what was going on now. I couldn’t help it. I saw that Kitty was starving herself. I just didn’t know what to do about it. I cooked her favorite foods and watched in frustration as she pushed them away, or took two bites and insisted she was full. I got mad. I yelled. I wanted to both shake her and wrap my arms around her. I wanted to scream, “I don’t understand!” And I didn’t.

  In mid-June we took a family vacation to Door County, a peninsula that extends into Lake Michigan like the thumb on a glove. The bed-and-breakfast we stayed in was freezing and rustic. Kitty spent the week wearing every piece of clothing she’d brought, her teeth literally chattering. Because we were eating in restaurants, for the most part, we didn’t feel like we could make a scene about what or how much she was eating, and so she ate even less than before. We were all relieved when it was time to go home.

  I kept waiting for her to fall apart, for her hunger and malnutrition to catch up with her. But Kitty kept up her demanding schedule: gymnastics practice four nights a week and days spent working at the gymnastics day camp. Her functioning confused me; how bad could things be, really, if she was able to manage all that? Maybe, I thought, Kitty just didn’t need as much food as other people.

  Looking back, I recognize that it wasn’t just Kitty who was under the sway of an eating disorder; Jamie and I were too. Our thinking was also distorted, by fear and anxiety, confusion and hope. That’s one of the strangest things about eating disorders: they affect not just the person who has them but everyone around that person too. They’re so insidious, so counterintuitive, that the brain just can’t make sense of them. It’s like the visual phenomenon called edge induction, where the brain fills in visual gaps in a scene or landscape that’s poorly lit or hard to interpret. On some level, we see what we expect to see, or what we want to see.

  I knew even then what I wanted to see: that Kitty was all right. That she didn’t have a problem.

  I just couldn’t make myself believe it.

  By the end of June the summer had turned hot and humid, the kind of weather that constricts your lungs and slows everything down to a dreamy, underwater pace. Our house had no air-conditioning, but Kitty wore a jacket and long pants, even to bed. We were all fractious and tense. More than once Emma ran from the dinner table, hands over her ears to block out the sound of us arguing over what Kitty was and (mostly) wasn’t eating. These were battles, now, and we lost every one. We never got Kitty to eat even a bite more than she’d allotted herself.

  Once upon a time, family dinners had been a ritual I looked forward to, a time when we came together to talk and laugh. Now I dreaded them. I developed a Pavlovian response to the approach of the dinner hour—headache, churning stomach, sweating palms—and by the time we actually sat down at the table, I couldn’t eat either.

  I was glad when Kitty was at the gym, even as I worried about her. I went to sleep worrying and woke up worrying, and by the day of our appointment with Dr. Beth, my anxiety was nearly as high as Kitty’s. Hers was now undeniable. She fretted for an hour over what to wear to the office, what would happen there. “Dr. Beth is going to help us help you,” I told her, over and over, and hoped to God it was true.

  As we waited in an examining room, Kitty clutched my hand and I held on, feeling as though we were on a raft heading out to sea and Dr. Beth had the life preserver. She came in with her usual smile, took Kitty’s pulse, looked at her chart, and sat down across the room from us. “Now tell me why you’re here today,” she said with her characteristic directness.

  “I think Kitty has anorexia,” I said.

  There it was, the terrible word, out in the world. Pandora’s box, opened now, never to be closed again.

  I ticked off the symptoms. Kitty was way too thin. She avoided eating. She cried a lot. And now there was something else, a sour smell I’d noticed in the last week or two. A smell that reminded me of our elderly cat shortly before she died of kidney failure. Ketosis—the smell of the body digesting itself.

  Dr. Beth turned to Kitty. “What do you think?” she asked. Eyes closed, my daughter moved her head a fraction. It was the first time she’d acknowledged that she had anorexia. And it was the last time, for more than a year.

  There was no leaving the room this time. Dr. Beth examined Kitty, talking soothingly as she listened to Kitty’s heart, took her temperature, felt her glands and belly. Kitty’s heart was beating only forty-two times a minute (normal is sixty to eighty). She weighed six pounds less than she’d weighed the previous December, and she’d grown half an inch. Suddenly she was at least twenty pounds underweight.

  After Kitty pulled her sweatshirt back on, Dr. Beth took one of her ice-cold hands. “I know this is hard,” she said. She looked at Kitty, but she was speaking to both of us. “I know you don’t feel well, and you’re scared. I won’t lie to you. Anorexia is a very serious disease, and there’s no quick fix for it. But I promise you, Kitty, that a year from now, you’ll feel better.”

  Of all the gifts Dr. Beth gave us over the next year, this was the greatest: she gave us hope. Her words kept us going through the nightmare that was still to come.

  She spent a long time talking to Kitty that day, reiterating why and what she had to eat. She encouraged her, talked to her about what was happening in her body, how much better she would feel if she ate. She held Kitty’s hand, stroked her shoulder, smiled into her eyes.

  Afterward, while Kitty waited in the exam room, Dr. Beth talked to me in the corridor. She had two pieces of advice: try to get Kitty to eat, and find a therapist, fast. What she didn’t tell me, what I read for myself later, was that the average length of time for recovery from anorexia is five to seven years. That most people with anorexia bounce in and out of hospitals, recovering and relapsing. That anorexia is the deadliest psychiatric illness; close to 20 percent of anorexics die, about half from starvation and the other half from suicide. Nearly one-fifth of all anorexics try suicide; many succeed.


  There was relief in having Kitty’s illness out in the open—on the table, so to speak. But I still couldn’t see the path to recovery. I was numb and terrified; I felt like a block of stone with a tiny crack in one corner. The crack would widen, with stress and time, and the stone would come apart. The only questions were when and how.

  Dr. Beth sent us downstairs to the lab for blood work and to check Kitty’s vitals, including her heart. She said she wasn’t too worried because Kitty was a gymnast, and athletes have slow heart rates. I was reassured by her words, though later I learned that anorexia can cause cardiac arrhythmias and heart attacks.* I wondered, later, if Dr. Beth, too, was in denial about how serious Kitty’s illness was. Or maybe she was simply trying not to overload us with terrifying news.

  The lab technician lifted Kitty’s sweatshirt, and for the first time in weeks I saw my daughter’s naked chest. The sight made me want to howl. Her skin stretched tightly over her sternum. I could see the arching curve of each rib, each nick and indentation of her collarbone. Her elbows were bowling balls set into the middle of her matchstick arms. She looked like a concentration camp victim, right down to the hollow, hopeless look on her face. My bright, beautiful daughter lay broken on the table, her eyes dull, her hair lank. I could not bear it.

  And then the tech smiled at Kitty and exclaimed, “You’re so nice and slim! How do you keep your figure?”

  If I’d had a gun in my hand, I swear I would have pulled the trigger.

  My daughter closed her eyes and turned her face to the wall. This wasn’t the first compliment she’d gotten on her slenderness, just the most inappropriate. That spring, strangers stopped us on the street all the time, wanting to tell Kitty how attractive or darling or stylish she was. In a shop one afternoon where I was trying on clothes, the saleswoman turned to Kitty and said, “Aren’t you lucky—you got the thin genes!”