My disappearing daughter
I watched my confident teenager head off to college. A few months later, I greeted a fragile, frightened apparition -- 35 pounds thinner than when she'd left. A story of anorexia, guilt and understanding.
By John George
Jan. 17, 2003 |
When I sent my 17-year-old daughter off to college a little over a year ago, what I saw was a confident, smart teenager excited about the future and eager to get off on her own. She was a dead shot from the foul line in basketball and a whiz at math and physics, she looked gorgeous, and she could write circles around her dad. I remember thinking, with a mixture of pride and regret, as she headed skyward, "Well, that's one child all grown up and off on her own. One more to go."
That December, at the end of the first semester, my wife and I waited excitedly at the airport for our daughter to come home for the holidays. All that term, she'd been sending home regular e-mails that talked of funny adventures, good times with zany friends, the occasional problems with courses or boys -- in short, a typical first semester away at school.
We expected an exhilarated student; instead we were confronted with an apparition: A 5'6" scarecrow pushing 100 pounds, about 35 pounds less than when she'd headed off to school, who looked so frail and terrified that I wasn't sure it was my child I was staring at.
We were shocked into silence. We didn't know what to say or how to bring it up. On the ride home, we talked about school and the plane flight, and the whole time I had this lump in my throat -- a scream that wanted to come out, a panicked plea to know what the hell had happened. Finally, after almost 15 minutes or more of this uncomfortable avoidance, in a voice that was more of a whimper, she asked, "Aren't you going to ask what happened to me?"
We did, and we are still asking what happened. There are, we've gradually learned, no easy answers. As it turns out, we are hardly alone. Colleges -- especially top colleges and universities -- are reporting that stressed-out and exhausted students are turning to dangerous and self-destructive behaviors with alarming frequency. Whether that is the result of over-the-top parental pressures to succeed, a byproduct of society's hyper-focus on getting ahead and securing a good job, a response to the spiritual vacuity of our modern consumer culture, or all of the above, it's clear that young people are crashing and burning in college at an alarming rate. And eating disorders are one of the more dangerous ways they're doing this. The National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders estimates that 7 million girls and women, and 1 million men and boys, suffer from anorexia.
Up to that moment at the airport, anorexia was not a disease I had given much thought to. From that awful day, it became my life. It became my wife's life. We read about it. We worried about whether it would kill our daughter. We struggled with its pernicious effects on our own lives. We tortured ourselves over what role we might have played in driving our daughter to it. We wondered if it would ever go away.
The first thing we did upon discovering that our daughter was facing a life-threatening health crisis was to call around frantically to find treatment options. Fortunately, our insurance plan covered anorexia treatment and psychological therapy. We located a nationally known program in the area that had both an in-hospital program and a day program, and after consulting with the head of the program, a well-respected psychiatrist specializing in eating disorders, we opted for the day program.
Those first few weeks were a nightmare. I would find myself crying inconsolably in the middle of the night, convinced that I was going to lose my daughter (anorexics can simply die in their sleep, victims of chemical imbalances in their blood that lead to heart failure, or they can die slowly as their starvation leads to the wasting away of heart muscle). In those dark moments alone, I was certain I was to blame for something I'd done or said sometime in her young life; or maybe I simply failed to see, early on, that something had gone terribly wrong.
We'd always been a close family, open about discussing things, not judgmental, not punitive. I couldn't imagine what my failings had been, but I was certain they were there. My wife and I were both consumed with feelings of guilt, panic and helplessness.
My daughter assured us that it wasn't our fault. Maybe she believed that. We weren't so sure. We had, after all, dragged her around through several difficult moves when she was younger, including moving to a new town just as she was entering high school -- a particularly difficult time for teenagers. We had been slow to respond to vicious teasing she had suffered at one point in elementary school. And while we had never pressured her to get into a particular college, we certainly, as two intellectuals ourselves, had always cheered and encouraged her academic success, which might have led to her feeling pressure to excel.
Her own explanation for her anorexia was "stress." She could never really define what the stress was, but clearly going away to college triggered something in her that made her turn to starvation as a response.