Jamie and I have backed off a little in our scrutiny. If I’m sitting with her at the table, I might get up and stir something on the stove, leaving Kitty at the table for five or ten seconds. I’m still in the room with her, just not at the table. But one afternoon during snack, when I get up to get the newspaper from the living room, Kitty puts down her fork.
“You left,” she says when I reappear. “Where’d you go?”
“I had to get something. I’m back now.”
Kitty picks up her fork and resumes eating, turning the pages of her book with an apparent lack of concern. We say no more about it. But the next day I re-create the experiment. At breakfast I dish up her oatmeal, wait for her to stir in brown sugar and whole milk. After the first few bites I get up and begin rummaging in a cabinet, my back to Kitty for a few seconds. When I turn around, I see that she has indeed stopped eating. I give her an oblivious smile. “How’re you doing?” I ask cheerfully, and she starts eating again.
Later that day, I pick Kitty up at school for an appointment with Dr. Newbie. After she climbs into the front seat, I hand her a protein bar. “You’ll have to eat your snack in the car today,” I say.
She tears open the paper wrapper and takes a bite as I pull into traffic. She chews for a second, swallows, and says, “You’re watching me, right? I can’t eat if you’re not watching. You can see me out of the corner of your eye, right?”
“Yep,” I say, my eyes firmly on the road. “I see every bite you take.”
Over the next few days Kitty asks again and again whether we’re watching, and I know what she’s really asking: You’re making me eat this, right? I don’t have any choice here. Do I? She needs us to take the responsibility for her eating because the compulsion to not eat is still so powerful.
Which is why, I realize, more traditional treatments are not just ineffective—they’re cruel. It’s cruel to insist that a child in the throes of anorexia “take responsibility” for eating, and absurd to suggest, as many therapists and treatment programs do, that unless a person with anorexia “chooses” to eat, she can’t recover. Kitty’s reactions make sense to me now. What wouldn’t make sense would be to turn my back on her. To have her life hinge on her doing something she cannot do.
Because I believe this with all my heart: Kitty cannot choose to eat. Not yet. The time will come when she’ll have to do that, of course, when she’ll have to maintain her weight and her health herself. And when that time does come, I think we’ll know. She’ll tell us, just as she’s telling us now that she’s not ready to go it alone. Just as she told us when she was ready to go away to camp, stay home alone, stay up a half hour later. All along she’s been telling us, through words and action, what she needs in order to grow and become more independent. All we have to do is listen.
Kitty’s spirits have improved as her weight has inched up. And I’ve learned I can occasionally head off the demon by refusing to acknowledge it. On Halloween night, for instance, Kitty asks if she needs a snack. She hasn’t collected or eaten any candy. I say yes, she needs to eat two ice cream sandwiches. “Do I really need two?” she asks. “My stomach hurts.” I hear the beginning of an edge in her voice.
“Yep, that’s what you need,” I say matter-of-factly, and turn away deliberately to talk to Emma. Kitty eats the ice cream sandwiches, and the moment passes.
This strategy doesn’t always work. A few nights later Kitty erupts into a sudden rage when I bring out her bedtime snack. The plate flies across the room and breaks, a shower of yellow shards. When I jump up to get the broom and dustpan, she bolts out the front door, yelling, “I’m going to run away!” Jamie finds her down the block, on her bike in the dark, and half carries her back to the house, bike helmet and all.
I feel blindsided and stupid, shocked all over again. It’s been a few weeks since we’ve seen the demon, and already I’m forgetting its claws and fangs, its flicking tongue. How quickly the