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Living FULL. Danielle Sherman-Lazar
Читать онлайн.Название Living FULL
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781633538757
Автор произведения Danielle Sherman-Lazar
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
I stood there speechless, tears falling onto my hair and soaking the top of my T-shirt, nose leaking into my mouth.
Then Elizabeth—who, being my polar-opposite best friend, normally didn’t get emotional—interrupted our conversation, taking my hand.
“Dani needs to go home,” she said, her blue eyes filling with tears. “She’s miserable here. Please take her home.”
That must have been enough to show my parents that this was serious, that it was more than just homesickness.
With that, we packed up all my belongings and were off. Nothing more was said about it, at least until we got home. Then my mom was all over me, peering around every bend with her snooping eyes:
“Dani, is that all you are eating?” “Dani, what are you doing for dinner?” “Dani, is that enough?” “Dani, please let me make something for you.” Kill me.
Oh, and if I wasn’t embarrassed enough about having a tutor for my processing issue, it was because I was never told I’d have to start seeing a therapist. Never, that is, until now. That’s the confirmation I needed to prove that I was a total wack job. Mom, not being familiar enough with eating disorders to realize what was going on, was worried about my anxiety issues and why I was so unhappy at camp.
“Dan, I found a therapist for you and I am taking you to your first appointment tomorrow.”
“Okay.” I was so happy they’d let me come home, and I didn’t want to ruffle feathers. If it made her feel a little more at ease and kept her off my back, I was completely okay with said shrink for said wacko.
While previously my weight had gone up during the school year, then down at camp, then up again by fall’s end, this time I kept to my diet, and I was heading into seventh grade skinnier than when I had been rescued from camp in July. What differed is that this time I went into the camp experience with a poor body image triggered by my perfectionism, rather than homesickness. Homesickness can be left behind at camp. These new problems? Not so much.
In late August, when Elizabeth got home, my mom and I met with her and her mom for lunch. I ordered my staple favorite to appease my mom: chicken fingers with French fries. When the order came, everyone dove into their food while I carefully picked at the chicken fingers, trying to get beneath the fried batter to the white meat, while I quarantined my fries to the edge of my plate.
“Dani, stop this, and eat your fries. You like them!” my mother ordered.
You know when someone holds their breath to the point where they feel a head rush, and then they finally exhale—panting and breathing maniacally? Well, she basically couldn’t hold her tongue anymore, which led to an explosion of words: “What are you doing to yourself? You don’t need to lose another pound. What do you want to do, disappear?”
Actually, I never considered that, but maybe—disappearing sounded so magical, like poof and abracadabra, then you are gone…no more worries. How blissful.
Elizabeth and her mom looked at me like I had five heads, six limbs, and acne on every inch of my skin. But that didn’t worry me as much as the fact that I had made my mom mad. I grabbed the dinkiest fry from the banished pile and ate it. That was honestly the best I could do.
“Look, I am eating, are you happy?” I whispered, trying to shift the attention elsewhere by being discreet and quiet, making light of what she’d just brought to the attention of the entire freaking table—thanks, Mom! Mindset: if I brush it off, they will too. Yes, discretion. Clearly my mom wasn’t familiar with that concept.
Elizabeth’s mom was an extremely healthy eater, or at least a dieting pro. In fact, she was quite helpful simply by example. By observing what she ate, I had learned that French fries were in the “bad food” category, something I’d never considered before. I learned what “good” foods and “bad” foods were, according to Diet 101, Elizabeth’s Mom Edition, at least. “Good” foods were any type of steamed and plain or “dry” fish and chicken, salad with no dressing, vegetables cooked without oil, and egg whites. The “bad” foods were basically too numerous to list, but the general rule was absolutely no carbs, which meant avoiding pizza, fried food, Mexican food, anything ethnic that wasn’t steamed, and so on. Basically, anything that tasted good.
As an impressionable and insecure middle-schooler, all I knew was that Elizabeth’s mom was beautiful, smart, happy, confident, and thin. She had it all together, the answer to everything, and on top of that, she fit in. Oh, to have her confidence and ease around people. I wanted a fraction of it. If I dieted, maybe I could have what she had.
By the time I turned thirteen, I became hyperaware of the bodies of girls and women around me, including my own mother. People told me how much I resembled her, which I thought was utterly ridiculous. “Yeah,” I’d say with sarcasm, “I’m the troll version.” My mom didn’t like it when I said that, but I had proof! When the movie American Pie came out later that year, I became known as the Shermanator (a loser character who loved Terminator movies) to my peers, while my mom was voted, by the same peers (thank you, horny middle-school boys!), number-one MILF (Mom I’d Like to Fuck)—the only social honor I’d be remotely associated with, by the way. She thought that was gross. I thought it was way better than being the Shermanator.
I had a one-track mind and continued to be meticulous about what I put in my mouth, when, and how often. My weight was slowly decreasing, but not to the point where the doctor my mom took me to found it concerning.
“Linda, she is really active. I really don’t think anything is wrong. This has been happening since she was little,” the doctor said, adjusting his thin glasses onto his slightly crooked nose.
“I know, but I am just making sure, because she seems to be watching herself lately,” my mom said in a low voice.
I wanted to scream and signal with my hands, “Yoo-hoo, Mom, I can hear you. I am right here,” but I refrained.
“Dani, is this true?” I felt the doctor look at me, his big brown eyes like spotlights. He knew me so well, having been my pediatrician since I was a baby. It was hard for me to lie to him. Hard, but not impossible.
“No,” I quietly answered, twisting my curly brown hair into a bun on top of my head and wondering how I could similarly twist this conversation.
“Then you won’t mind if we add milkshakes to your diet to help you gain weight?” he inquired, as if testing me by my reaction to his request.
“As long as it’s vanilla,” I instinctively blurted. “Can I have that instead of vegetables?” I added, trying to sound like the naive child they hoped I was.
And BINGO, they loved that answer. My mom and the doctor were both satisfied with my fake childish request, but, the truth was, all I could think about was how I was going to compensate for those shakes.
They didn’t know how good the empty pit in my stomach felt. They didn’t know how satisfying it was to have control over one damn thing in my life. I couldn’t control how hard it was for me to keep up academically without anxiously studying 24/7 or what people thought of me, and gosh it gets tiring trying to please everyone. In fact, nothing seemed to come naturally to me but this—dieting. And I wasn’t going to be the one to let them in on my secret, that it was deliberate, especially when they were so intent on taking it away from me.
To placate my mother, I drank those awful milkshakes twice a day to gain back some of the weight. After just a few weeks and pounds gained, my mom let me go back to “regular eating.” She even stopped watching over me, thinking I must be fine. The physician hadn’t said I had an eating disorder. GPs weren’t as aware of identifying and responding to eating disorders as they are now. Eating disorder awareness and knowledge of it as a mental illness wasn’t as widespread back in the ‘90s. He just said I should gain a couple of pounds and, once I did, that was