Photo by Erin Patrice O’Brien
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Like Mother, Like Daughter
By Anne Krueger, January & February 2005
One eats too much, the other not enough. Together they are facing their food demons—and winning
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When I tell people that my older daughter, Halley, has anorexia nervosa,
some of them lean close to me and say, "You know, that's a
mother-daughter problem." These are the people I no longer spend a lot of
time with. I don't need help making myself feel terrible. I already blame
myself that my daughter liked herself so little that she restricted her diet to
the point where she was taking in only 400 calories a day and walking six to
eight miles a day on the treadmill. And, of course, I've worried that she
took one look at overweight me and said, "Omigod, I'd rather starve
than look like my mom."
Although disordered eating can run in families, there's not a lot of
evidence in Halley's case that my weight issues created hers.
"It's always hard to know how much of the illness is genetic and how
much is environmental," says Marlene Schwartz, Ph.D., author of
Helping Your Child Overcome an Eating Disorder: What You Can Do at
Home (New Harbinger Press, 2003). "But I don't think the fact
that you have struggled with your weight is a key factor in your daughter's
issues." Indeed, Halley is the first to admit that her desire to be thin
springs from her need to be perfect and find her place among her peers.
"It has nothing to do with you, Mom," she says with great
disdain.
Still, my daughter and I sometimes seem to fall into similar vicious
circles. She feels bad after she eats. I feel anxious, and so I eat. She
doesn't eat enough and promises to "do better" tomorrow; I eat
too much and promise to "do better" tomorrow. Her
obsessive-compulsive restricting of food and insistence on exercise make her
dangerously thin; my compulsive eating makes me dangerously fat.
Since she's come back from a summer-long residential treatment program
for anorexia, Halley has been willing to share some of the coping techniques
that she's learned. And we've discovered that we need each other in
order to beat our food demons. For every time I fix her a yogurt-fruit parfait
to try to get some calories into her, she helps me with a "Are you really
hungry, Mom?" when I reach for the bag of Cheetos. For every time I've
sat in a therapy session with her and her psychiatrist or dietitian, she has
sat with me strategizing ways to make our family meals healthier and to get me
to exercise more. "I'll be your personal trainer, Mom," she says
one day, planning how we'll walk the dogs together and work on the fitness
ball. And that's when I know that we will both get better.
Whether or not it was a mother-daughter problem, it's going to be a
mother-daughter solution.
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