Brave Girl Eating (12 page)

The rats on the high-fat diet, by contrast, didn't go into exercise overdrive. Their activity levels rose, but only a little, and they didn't lose weight. Only one of the fifteen rats in the high-fat group died, and that one had increased its running more than most of the others.

So something about the higher-fat diet protected the rats from running and from starving themselves to death. Barboriak and Wilson didn't speculate on cause and effect; they simply reported
what happened. I want to know why, so I can keep Kitty safe from the same deadly cycle.

For now, I suppose, it's enough to know that fat is an important part of the equation. Knowing will help me resist both the demon's imprecations and Kitty's fear of eating fat.
^*
It's so tempting to want to spare her suffering, to avoid some of the trauma. To feed her the foods she feels safest eating and hold off on the others until later. But I'm beginning to understand that there won't
be
a later if we give in to Kitty's terror, if we enable the demon in any way. There is no compromise possible. The stakes are too high and the process is too painful.

For instance: the next day I make one of our favorite meals, homemade pizza, which Kitty used to love. We've been keeping Kitty out of the kitchen during meal prep, but she sees the dough rising on the stove and falls apart instantly. “Oh my God, not pizza,” she cries. “I already feel so fat, Mommy. My thighs are jiggling. Please don't make me eat it.” She is keening now, there's no other word for it, crouching on the floor, rocking back and forth, arms wrapped around herself.

I feel like the worst parent in the universe. I am causing my child so much grief and fear and pain. My job is to protect her, not hurt her. I want to give up. I want to go back to the way things used to be, I think, before anorexia. B.A. Ha. We're all getting an education in eating disorders. An education we don't want and could live quite well without.

Then I think, If I feel this way, how must Kitty feel? I can take a walk, read a book, shut out the anorexia for a little while. But it's
inside her. She can't get away, not for a second. And every minute she spends trapped with the demon must be hell. Pure hell. My child is going through hell. I could sink down right now onto the floor beside her. I could howl and cry and tear out handfuls of my hair. That's what I feel like doing. But that would be self-indulgent. That would be abandoning my daughter.

In our family, as in all families, my husband and I have taken on certain roles. Jamie is the one who fixes things: the vacuum cleaner, the car, the computer, the broken chair. When someone gets a splinter, he's the one who pulls out the hydrogen peroxide and tweezers. My role is to figure things out. I'm the one who makes the plans, who asks the questions (sometimes obsessively) about what it all means and what we should do. I'm the one who calls people and goes online and tears through the library looking for answers to whatever the problem.

The point is, Kitty needs both of us now. Jamie's strengths and mine are complementary, and she needs every shred of power and steadiness and stubbornness we possess. No matter how much I feel like giving up, I can't. Jamie can't. There is no way we're abandoning her. No way in hell is the demon going to win.

I slide down onto the floor beside her and put one hand on her back, to let her know I'm here. I sit beside her and I stay with her until she's all cried out. Until Not-Kitty is gone, and Kitty is, for the moment, wholly herself.

Impulsively, I say, “This is really hard on you, isn't it?”

Kitty hates the idea of anyone feeling sorry for her. Some of her biggest outbursts in these last few weeks have come in response to someone's expression of sympathy, or empathy. I brace myself for her reaction.

But instead of stiffening in anger, Kitty simply turns her face
toward mine. She's always had beautiful eyes, my daughter, and they are still lovely, large and complex, the dark irises flecked with light. Now they look too big, out of proportion, like the oversized, pathos-filled eyes of puppies in flea-market paintings. I was raised to think thin is beautiful, that there's no such thing as too thin. I will never again believe it.

Kitty leans her cheek into my hand, a rare moment of connection in our newly adversarial relationship. Once upon a time she trusted me. Once upon a time Jamie and I were not the enemies. Now the feel of her skin against my palm tells me what we have to do next. Each time we've raised her calorie intake, Kitty has suffered, her anxiety and terror flaring out of control. It's as if we're peeling away a Band-Aid, inch by agonizing inch. Wouldn't it be kinder to rip it off in one go?

“What if we raised your calories to three thousand now, in one fell swoop?” I ask Kitty, bracing myself for panic, rage, the demon's hissing.

But instead, she says slowly, “In some ways that would be easier.” As soon as she says this her eyes cloud, she claps one hand over her mouth, and she begins to cry.

“What is it?” I ask, but I already know. She'll pay dearly for saying this, my brave and honest daughter. She'll suffer guilt and terror at the hands of the demon inside her for even this small defiance. I'm her mother; I'm supposed to be able to protect her. Instead, I have to make it all worse, at least for now.

I remember a picture book we used to read when Kitty was small that described a family who ran into obstacle after obstacle—a swamp, a bear, a mountain—on their way to a picnic. Each time, they tried silly tactics to avoid the obstacles, and each time they succeeded by confronting rather than evading them. Kitty and I
used to chant the refrain together each time: “We can't go over it. We can't go under it. Oh, no, we have to go through it!”

It's the same with anorexia. We can't go under it, we can't go over it. Oh, no. We have to go through it.

 

The week after we
start our higher-calorie regime, Kitty gains three pounds. I feel like dancing around the doctor's office, but I keep my face neutral. I stay in character as The Mother.

“I did good, right?” asks Kitty anxiously. “Did I do good?”

What do I say? It depends who's asking, Kitty or Not-Kitty. My daughter or the disease. Either way, my answer could provoke a meltdown. My instinct is to speak to my daughter, and deal with the demon if it shows up.

“Good,” I say calmly. “You did really good.”

I see the conflict in Kitty's eyes, guilt and relief and fear swirling together, and wait for one of them to win out. “OK,” she says eventually. We move on.

For weeks now we've lived in a kind of bubble. We've seen few friends, kept no social engagements. I've barely gone to the office; I've done the essentials of my job at home, late at night, after Kitty and Emma are asleep. I'm usually too anxious to sleep, anyway. Our lives have narrowed to a few basic activities: shop, cook, eat, clean up, watch movies, do it all again. We're lucky, if you can call it that, that it's summer, when schedules are more forgiving. But school will be starting in two weeks. Fifth grade for Emma, and ninth for Kitty. If she goes.

That's the question: Should she start high school? Some of the answer depends on what happens in the next few weeks. Right now, Kitty stays close to home, literally and metaphorically. Can she
handle the emotional demands of high school, or would it be cruel to send her? Would it be crueler to keep her home, setting her back in a way that will feel humiliating? Then there are the practical considerations, like the logistics of lunch and snack, which have to be eaten with one of us.

From the time Kitty was a toddler, she's been an intensely social person, always wanting playdates, always up for going places and seeing people. She's the kind of person who's reenergized by hanging out with friends. This year, though, she doesn't want to see her friends and she doesn't want to go to school. I know a lot of her anxiety is a by-product of both the anorexia and the refeeding process. But I can't help wonder if on some level she's always felt anxious about school, and just never told us. Does the illness give voice to feelings that have been hidden to her, or does everything get mixed up in its chop and churn?

Ms. Susan says it's not helpful to get tangled up in this kind of thinking. She says people in recovery from an eating disorder do best when they limit the stress they're under, and I believe her. On the other hand, to keep Kitty out of school entirely would create a different level of stress for her. She'd feel like a failure, a freak, a weirdo. And, to be honest, it would be good for all of us—including my relationship with my staff and my boss, who have been immensely patient—to have her out of the house for a few hours a day.

One late August afternoon Kitty sits in front of a milk shake and weeps with anxiety. This is her talking, the real her in her own voice, not the creepy distorted voice of the demon. And yet—and yet she's irrational. She stares at me, her face full of worry, and says, “I don't want to go to high school and have everyone look at me and say, ‘Look at Kitty, she got so fat over the summer!'”

“You're not fat!” I say, but I might as well be speaking in tongues, because she can't hear or understand.

“I'm so fat, everyone will be talking about me,” she insists.

I don't want to tell her the truth: that kids
will
talk, but not about how fat she is. God. They'll be gossiping and speculating about the fact that she has an eating disorder. They will comment on how she looks, but it will be about how thin she is. And yes, some of them will say and do stupid, insensitive things. Not that teenagers have a corner on the insensitivity market—some of our acquaintances have made some appallingly hurtful comments.

Like the acquaintance I run into at the food co-op, who had us to dinner early last spring, before we realized Kitty was sick. Now she leans across the sweet corn and says, in a voice dripping with concern, “How
is
Kitty?”

I don't know why it rubs me the wrong way. She means well, I tell myself. “She's doing all right,” I say, and then, to shut down the conversation, “Thanks for asking.”

She leans in closer. “You know, I could have told you she had anorexia,” she confides.

What I want to say is “Then why didn't you?” Instead I grit my teeth and say, “How so?”

She smooths her glossy hair. “I noticed the way she cut all her food into tiny pieces and pushed it around her plate,” she says, her voice low and intimate. She gives me a look of concern and adds, “She didn't eat a thing. Didn't
you
notice?”

Now I feel like slapping her. No, punching her in the mouth. No, garroting her. Anything to make her stop talking. “I have to go,” I say, leaving my basket on the floor. I manage to get out the door and into my car, where my rage quickly evaporates, leaving an acid bath of shame. Of course people know exactly what's going on. And of
course they blame us. Hell,
I
blame us. We're Kitty's parents; we're supposed to be in charge. We're supposed to protect her.

What I didn't realize was that they would blame Kitty, too. That they would see her behavior as willful and manipulative. That they would ascribe to her a kind of devious intention, not just now but always. That they would recast her whole life in the light of anorexia, and judge her harshly for it. So while Kitty's completely deluded on one level, her emotional radar is working. She's right to be self-conscious; she's right to feel judged. Just not for being fat.

Later that night, for the first time in weeks, Kitty will not eat her bedtime snack. Jamie's reading to Emma downstairs while I sit with Kitty in her room. Her snack tonight is four pieces of toast, with butter and cinnamon sugar on them—a nursery meal, one that both my daughters have loved since they were small. Kitty takes one tiny bite and spits it out, and the demon is back, with its infantile, singsong voice and vicious words.

I've learned by now that there's no point in arguing. Words seem irrelevant, so much more fuel for the self-loathing and despair. Usually the demon runs down eventually, but not tonight. Not-Kitty rants on and on, possessed by a manic energy, pacing, practically leaping around her room. I take hold of her shoulders, both to comfort her and to stop her frantic motion. The toast lands on the floor, and I don't want to leave her to make another batch.

“Come on, Kitty, you can do this,” I encourage, but she gives no sign of hearing me. Jamie opens the bedroom door, holding a bottle of Ensure, bless him. “OK, you don't have to eat tonight,” I tell her. “Just drink this.”

She knocks the bottle out of my hand, spraying its sticky contents all over herself, me, and the floor, and begins hitting herself in the head with her closed fist.

Jamie grabs for her wrists. “Kitty! Stop it!” I shout. My words are tiny feathers in a blizzard of hail. I plead. I threaten. I tell her if she doesn't eat or drink the Ensure we'll take her back to the hospital for the feeding tube. She flails and shrieks, and even though I'm right up in her face I don't think she can hear me.

Jamie wraps his arms around her and pulls her down to the bed, trying to keep her from hurting herself. I phone Dr. Beth and Ms. Susan. Neither of them is on call. I call Dr. Newbie and leave a message with her service. She's not on call either, but another psychiatrist calls back and suggests, just for tonight, letting the snack go and giving her one of the sedatives Dr. Newbie prescribed. I'm afraid Kitty won't take it, but she does, and we sit with her as her sobs subside and the demon's voice falters and trails away. She falls asleep in Jamie's arms. Together we pull down the sheets and lift her into bed, clothes and all, turn out the light and tiptoe out of the room.

Now I know what “just in case” meant.

Emma is standing in the hall, her face blank and unreadable. I put my arm around her shoulders and take her to her room, sit with her while she undresses, brushes her teeth, gets ready for bed—all the ordinary moments in a ten-year-old's evening ritual. Yet this night is anything but ordinary. The demon has upped the ante, or so it feels to me. We're in a different place now, the country of mental illness, and it scares the hell out of me. I don't know how we got here and I don't know how to get home and I don't want to be here. I don't want any of us to be here. What if this refeeding process doesn't work? What if Kitty wakes up tomorrow and it's more of the same, if she won't eat and won't eat? I've heard of girls tethered to feeding tubes for months and girls who rip out feeding tubes. I've heard of girls dying, their hearts giving out in their sleep, just
like that, and I can't help imagining Kitty dead in her bed, the sharp point of her chin, her sunken eyes closed, the demon getting the last word.