I'm Glad My Mom Died(79)

Then I was told to track my binges and purges for two weeks, as well as every single thing I ate and the time that I ate it. Tracking my purges made sense to me, that was a thing Laura had me do, so I expected it, but tracking my food intake confused me. Isn’t tracking food a part of disordered eating? Isn’t it a compulsive, unhealthy thing to do?

“Yes, tracking what you eat is going to be a behavior that we want to knock out with time. In fact, eventually I’ll have you keep a tally on how often you track, so that we can work toward getting that number to zero.”

“So, tracking… tracking.”

Slight chuckle. Abrupt ending. “Correct.”

“All right. So then why am I tracking my foods now if I’m supposed to work toward not tracking them?”

“I need to get a sense of your behaviors around food. Seeing what goes into your body and when will help me understand that.”

After two weeks of tracking, Jeff reads over my worksheets while stroking his beard.

“Hmmm. Yes. Interesting. Hmm. Yes.”

What? What, Jeff? What?

“Interesting…”

“What’s interesting?” I ask finally, when I can’t hold it in any longer.

“So you skip breakfast almost every day, and then you eat a late lunch, around two thirty or three p.m. But it’s not really a lunch. It’s not a full meal. I’m seeing eight bites of salmon on Tuesday—very specific—a protein bar on Wednesday, two eggs on Thursday. Why did you purge the eggs?”

I shrug.

“We’ll get there. Okay, so you’re having these very late, incomplete lunches, and then around eight p.m. it looks like you have dinner, which is also incomplete every night. Then, and here’s where things start to really click, around eleven p.m. you have what you describe as a binge. An entire plate of pad Thai with fried rice, plus a burrito from Del Taco. And then it looks like you purge whatever you eat around that time, every night.”

Yes, I know, Jeff. I wrote the list.

“Right,” I say, pretending like I’m learning something.

“So here’s the thing, Jennette. You’re starving yourself for the first part of the day. You’re not eating breakfast, you’re having late and incomplete lunches and dinners, and then you’re so famished by eleven p.m. that you’re eating because your body is begging you for it. And it makes perfect sense the foods you’re choosing to eat around this time. Because you’re so famished you want something hearty, something that will sustain you. But then, of course, because of your judgments around those foods and because of your deeply entrenched destructive thought patterns, you purge them up. And then repeat the cycle the next day.”

“Honestly, this was a good week,” I explain. “I think because I want to ‘do well’ in therapy or whatever.”

“That makes sense,” Jeff assures me. “No need to overanalyze it. Just take it as it is. A step up.” He nods politely, then lowers his chin and looks at me with determination. “But I think we’re capable of more.”

I believe him. He’s so sure. And an umless man isn’t sure of something for no reason. An umless man is sure of things that he is sure of.

“Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna normalize your eating. Three full meals a day and two snacks, each at predetermined times. No negotiations. Before starting the eating normalization process, we need to identify your risky foods. Risky foods are the foods you have a lot of judgment around—the foods you feel more compelled to purge.”

Don’t have to tell me twice. I start rattling off a list.

“Cakes, pies, ice cream, sandwiches, french fries, bread, cheese, butter, chips, cookies, pasta…”

“Great, great,” Jeff says as he takes rigorous notes but refuses to ask me to slow down. It’s the achiever in him, I can tell. The pen flies. He’s going for the gold. He crosses the t in “pasta” and looks up at me.

“So one of our ultimate goals here in therapy is to reduce judgment around food. All judgment. We want you to neutralize food. It’s just a thing you eat, neither good nor bad. Regardless of whether it’s pineapple or pancakes.”

“I see both of those as bad, because they both have a lot of sugar.”

Jeff blinks once.

“Right, so that’s what we’re gonna work on.”

“Okay.”

“And I’ll warn you, Jennette, normalizing your eating patterns and mentally neutralizing food is not gonna be easy. At all. It’s gonna be hard emotional work. For so long, your eating has been so… fucked up.”

Didn’t expect that F-bomb, Jeff, but I appreciate the fervor.

“It’s gonna be intense. But I’ll help you through it.”



* * *



I’m sitting here with my salty tears falling onto my plate of spaghetti, watering down the marinara sauce. Jeff was right. Normalizing my eating and neutralizing food is hard emotional work.

The crying gets heavier to where my chest starts heaving. I get mad at myself for crying. It makes me feel dramatic. Out of control.

Tears fall onto my worksheet and blur the ink. Fuck. I try to blow on the wet spot to dry it, but snot drips out of my nose and falls onto the page and makes it worse. I crumple the worksheet into a ball and throw it across the room toward the trash can. It doesn’t land anywhere close. Jesus Christ.