Dealing with An Eating Disorder

I read this poem when I was in college about a kid who had to watch her mother fight internal demons daily as she sat at the kitchen table in front of a white plate with a single white scoop of cottage cheese. Each day, tears poured down her mother's face as she tried to force herself to eat the tiny scoop, which, by the way, resembled a breast.

Having suffered with a double whammy combo of anorexia and bulimia since my junior year or High School, when I decided that fending off the scary advances of boys was a priority over my present or future health, I had a natural interest in the mother, and a fascination with what the little girl must be going through, witnessing her mother's turmoil.

Until now I had considered this mostly a personal battle, but with wrenching clarity, I was forced out of a very small and closed world, to see another side of my disease. My own mother had not suffered with an eating disorder, but she certainly had suffered, watching me decline. Frankly, I wanted to melt into the floor and never be seen by human eyes again when she discovered me throwing up for the first time, and screamed at me for ruining her life and to "clean up this bloody mess" I had made, as my fingers quite literally dripped with vomit.

It was in some ways hard to see the bitch at the table as myself, causing her daughter to be all kinds of fucked up. I saw her in turns, with distain, and with hideous sadness, just as I saw myself, and the resulting analysis was a furious depiction of a daughter raising her emotionally crippled mother, who I saw as laying the disease way too far out I the open. I was angrier with her for not hiding it well enough, than for not seeking help.

I have stopped vomiting, for the most part, and by God, nobody will ever catch me in the act again. But I have also become the woman with the cottage cheese. Not quite, because my daughter has full disclosure on my past with the disease, and we talk often about my "issue" with food control, and how devastating and invasive it is. That is supposed to excuse me from causing my own daughter to develop an eating disorder, and so far she shows none of the tell tale signs, and is healthy and open. But so far, she is only fifteen. I know I haven't dodged any bullets, but this thing still has me in a vice grip.

Every night she watches me take my portion of protein (sliced turkey),and fiber (Triscuit crackers) and vegetable (V8 juice) upstairs to eat in bed because I don't eat with everyone else. I don't measure. I eat candy too. But if I eat too much, I vomit. For three years, I stopped vomiting completely, but that is three years out of my entire adult life.

My cottage cheese comes in a different form, a little bigger portion now, and my allowable weight has been upped since I was 17, but I am fundamentally the woman in the poem. Sometimes I think I am still angrier at myself for not doing a good enough job of hiding it than for not getting adequate help.