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