Brave Girl Eating Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 sense of them. It’s like the visual phenomenon called edge induction, where the brain fills in visual gaps in a scene or landscape that’s poorly lit or hard to interpret. On some level, we see what we expect to see, or what we want to see.
    I knew even then what I wanted to see: that Kitty was all right. That she didn’t have a problem.
    I just couldn’t make myself believe it.
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    By the end of June the summer had turned hot and humid, the kind of weather that constricts your lungs and slows everything down to a dreamy, underwater pace. Our house had no air-conditioning, but Kitty wore a jacket and long pants, even to bed. We were all fractious and tense. More than once Emma ran from the dinner table, hands over her ears to block out the sound of us arguing over what Kitty was and (mostly) wasn’t eating. These were battles, now, and we lost every one. We never got Kitty to eat even a bite more than she’d allotted herself.
    Once upon a time, family dinners had been a ritual I looked forward to, a time when we came together to talk and laugh. Now Idreaded them. I developed a Pavlovian response to the approach of the dinner hour—headache, churning stomach, sweating palms—and by the time we actually sat down at the table, I couldn’t eat either.
    I was glad when Kitty was at the gym, even as I worried about her. I went to sleep worrying and woke up worrying, and by the day of our appointment with Dr. Beth, my anxiety was nearly as high as Kitty’s. Hers was now undeniable. She fretted for an hour over what to wear to the office, what would happen there. “Dr. Beth is going to help us help you,” I told her, over and over, and hoped to God it was true.
    As we waited in an examining room, Kitty clutched my hand and I held on, feeling as though we were on a raft heading out to sea and Dr. Beth had the life preserver. She came in with her usual smile, took Kitty’s pulse, looked at her chart, and sat down across the room from us. “Now tell me why you’re