National Eating Disorder Awareness Week: One Mother’s Story

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eating disorderI am that girl. That girl with a secret. A secret I don’t often talk about. My secret is that I had an eating disorder.

The cat is out of the bag.

I have spent the better part of the past twenty years struggling with food. I have similarly spent countless hours reflecting, both by myself and with professional help, to get to the root of this struggle.

Legend has it that when I was three years old, I had the tantrum to rival all tantrums because the loops of my shoelaces were uneven.

From my earliest memory, I had an extreme need to be perfect. This pressure was not placed upon me by my parents but seemed strangely innate and genetic, like a birthmark.

And while my parents did not place any undue pressure upon me at any point in my life (we were squarely a “try your best” household), I placed that pressure upon myself because anything less than perfect was, put quite simply, failure.

By the time I reached high school, I was incapable of managing stress. After years of setting and reaching lofty goals for myself, I had cultivated a lifestyle defined by stress yet hidden under a mask of the girl who had it all.

Rather than acknowledge that I was imperfect and entitled to fail, I found the one thing I could control in my life: food. And so began a years-long battle with and within myself.

Part of my unwillingness to talk openly about this struggle is the shame I felt for suffering from a disease when I had lived a privileged life, free from the hardships, losses, and traumas that many others had faced. And unlike some, who are diagnosed with diseases beyond their control, I had brought this upon myself.

Though I now know, after years of forced self-awareness, that the perfectionist brain that I was born with, the same one that could not tolerate uneven shoelace loops, needed particularized coping mechanisms to make its way through life’s struggles, which I was unable to realize on my own as a young adult. 

And so, now I am a mother of two beautiful children, never more acutely aware of how important it is for me to find healthy ways to channel my negative energy when I find myself upset, confused, or under stress. I give myself the time and space to step back, get to the root of how I am feeling, and do what I have to do for myself to put my body and mind into a healthy space, whether that be taking a walk, going to bed early, or pulling out a coloring book.

Equally important, I am now the mother of a daughter who exhibits the same perfectionist traits as I did as a child. During the first weeks of Kindergarten, she threw a pencil across the classroom because she drew the loop of a lowercase ‘b’ the wrong way, such that it looked like a lowercase ‘d.’ In having a heart-to-heart about what happened, she told me she wants everything she does to be perfect.

Not long ago, I wrote about raising a confident girl. I am committed to history, not repeating itself. In doing so, I have looked critically at myself and my own childhood. I am conscious of and intentional with the actions I display and words I choose in front of my children, especially my daughter. We are open and honest, and I hope that openness and honesty will help our children talk to us about their struggles instead of internalizing them as I did.

We all have skeletons in our closets – those things we are afraid to talk about openly for fear of being judged. And while these words are years in the making, in the end, I hope that someone might read them, maybe another mother who has walked in similar shoes, and they will help that person be open with others about her struggle. 

And so, if you have made it this far, thank you for reading these words. If you have struggled as I have, I see you, and you are not alone.

If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, please ask for help.

You can find more information here

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