thinking about food

When my daughter was still in my life, she had an eating disorder. Her relationship to food, to sustaining her body, to keep herself alive, was broken. Over the last few years that I had Katie in my life, I believe her eating disorder caused her quite a lot of suffering. To a lesser extent, it caused me quite a lot of grief as well. I realized, as I tried to please my daughter around the complexity of maintaining our shared lives, I realized that feeding one's child is central to the act of mothering. So how do you mother a child that does not wish to eat? Someday, maybe, I will write more about my perspective on anorexia-bulimia.

I mentioned Katie's eating disorder to give a little context to a comment she made to me once after she had gotten very sick. "People think anorexics hate food, Mom. The truth is, we love food. We think about food all the time. We want it all the time. It hurts all the time that we can't have it. We love food."

I have thought about Katie's statement that anorexics love food a lot. In the past few years, I have worked hard to change my eating so I can manage my diabetes. My success is measured once or twice a day by testing my blood glucose. Days, weeks and, even, months would go by in which I would carefully follow my nutritionist's guidelines but no matter how carefully I ate, my blood glucose levels stayed high. It was very hard to deny myself carbohydrates day in and day out only to read on my glucometer that my blood sugar was still high.

I did lots of exaggerated things to change that blood sugar. For one whole month in the summer of 2004, I swear I didn't eat any carbohydrates. Welll, there are carbs in dairy. Carbs, for readers who don't know, turn into sugar once they enter your blood stream. Fruits are carbs. Bread, pasta, pastry, starchy vegetables are carbs. My nutritionist told me that there are more carbohydrates in a bagel than I should ever eat in one single day, ever again.