Last month our family enjoyed dinner in a fancy French restaurant. What's so hard about that? Only this: When a member of the family has been severely ill, going out and having fun is a big deal. When the disease is an eating disorder, even bigger.
In our previous post, my daughter, Lisa, explains what that dinner meant to her.
Our dinner marked one "special" birthday, as adults tend to say when the decades fly past 30. But the real turning point was that Lisa enjoyed it with us. She has suffered with eating disorders for eight years.
For most of those years, Lisa counted every calorie as an enemy and disdained people who didn't. She rarely sat down at the table with us at home, let alone made the effort to go out. In the depths of anorexia, she didn't go out with friends, either. As she wrote in our book, Hungry: A Mother and Daughter Fight Anorexia (Berkley Books, 2009):
"I was extremely cold at night and tired all the time. I barely went out on weekends because I had no energy after 10 p.m. ... I turned down any invites that included food in the plans, which severely decreased my social life. Every weekend, my friends went to eat and hang out downtown, or to the nearby taqueria. If I did go out, I didn't eat. I hated the thought of anyone else seeing me eat, as I assumed they were assessing each bite I took, examining my plate and thinking how fat I was."
She cut out red meat, fried foods and a social life. She became bulimic, which allowed a façade of normalcy, but also suspicion and dread every time she got up to go to the restroom, which she did a lot. She became angry, sullen, mean. We stopped begging her to eat with us.
But my mom, my husband and I all have birthdays within two weeks in the summer, and we have celebrated by meeting at a special restaurant in San Francisco since I met Ned. We pick a different restaurant every year. Last night, at La Folie, the amiable Michelin-starred chef-owner Roland Passot came by to wish us happy birthdays, his brother Georges Passot helped us pick great reasonably priced wine, and the server apologized to Lisa for asking, "Three glasses or four?" At 25, she looks 16.
She laughed it off. Stunning. During her years of anorexia and bulimia, any sense of humor and perspective had left the building.
Even better, Lisa loved the food. Not long ago, she would have ordered fish, no sauce, and a vegetable, steamed.
Last night, the meal began with a soupçon of lobster and then a creamy organic egg poached in its shell, surgically shaved, topped with a potato crisp and stab of chive. Lisa ordered beet salad and lobster risotto, enjoyed every bite and even tried her dad's foie gras. Last night she said, "That was one of the best meals of my life!"
Even a few months ago, Lisa would have bristled not only at being carded but also about an event not focused on her.
There used to be four of us. Dad died four years ago, and we have included our son, Jake, who appreciates good food. But this was the first time Lisa wanted to join us. In the depths of anorexia and bulimia, the special restaurant, the "special" birthday, the three other birthdays that weren't hers, all of it would have repelled Lisa.
Eating disorders destroy essential bodily systems and can be life-threatening. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. Bulimia's side effects range from severe dehydration to kidney failure. But eating disorders take more than a physical toll. They take the special out of special events. The anorectic, bulimic and/or binge-eater become so self-absorbed that family and friends can't possibly celebrate milestones with their whole hearts. When a loved one is suffering as Lisa did, pain and desperation are constant companions, crowding out everything else. Joy doesn't have much of a chance. You have to wonder: Is it even permissible to enjoy yourself? Will it ever be all right to have a good time?
The answer is yes.
