A mother’s story
I was terrified I’d pass my anorexia on to my daughter
When I was thirteen, I decided to lose weight. We’d just moved house, and I was the new girl at school. Maybe I was conscious of being stared at, or maybe I was influenced by the fact that so many adult women seemed to be on some kind of diet. But I think it was just an experiment, like trying out make-up or having a new haircut.
The point about anorexia – which I thought everyone knew these days – is that it isn’t about food or dieting or wanting to look good. It can seem to start that way. But not everyone who decides to lose a bit of weight ends up starving themselves. Anorexia is about control. It imposes structure on feelings of fear, bewilderment and despair. It seems – ironically for something that has the highest death rate of any psychiatric disease – to be a lifeline in a world of chaos.
By the time I was sixteen, I was down to 1,000 calories a day. Looking back, I’m not sure why I was so unhappy. I was under pressure at school. But the prospect of Oxbridge – or, more accurately, the prospect of not getting into Oxbridge – terrified me. My parents were stressed at work, so there was an atmosphere of tension at home. And the thinner I became, the more approval and admiration I got from my friends, as if I was succeeding at some kind of competition to conform to the ideal female body shape.
But none of this caused anorexia. You can’t point a finger at family rows, or emaciated catwalk models or a culture of body-shaming and say, ah, that’s why teenage girls starve themselves. Anorexia plays with your head. Once you’re held in its iron grip, you can’t think straight. Your rational mind knows your behaviour is mad and self-destructive, but your starved brain is louder and more insistent.
By the time I was doing A-levels, extreme hunger took most of my concentration. Light-headed, shivering in anything less than hot sunshine, I remember the walk home from the bus stop as an interminable marathon, stopping to rest by each lamppost. I became fascinated by the appearance of bones that had previously been hidden, particularly my ribcage. My periods stopped.
I cried a lot. I felt angry, frightened and lonely. But I kept all of this secret. I lied about meals I hadn’t eaten and stomach upsets that took away my appetite. I wore layers of clothing to hide my thinness. I didn’t know anorexia was an illness. It felt like the logical outcome of my inability to rebel. Everyone else had the bits of me they wanted – good student, good daughter. All I had was rigid control over what I ate. Anorexia became my friend, my gaoler, my penance.
Recognition of the disease wasn’t good in those days (I’m not sure it’s much better now). I saw a counsellor once, at university, who was kind but not that helpful – all she said was that listening to my story made her feel hungry. It wasn’t until my midtwenties, when sharing a flat with my friend Alison, that I started the slow process of recovery. It’s not appropriate to mention how much I weighed at my lightest – anorexics use references to actual weights as targets, and the last thing I want is to contribute further to anyone’s mental illhealth. Watching Alison, I realised that you didn’t have to obsess
over every mouthful. She was happy, healthy and beautiful – and ate chocolate every day.
A few years later, I met my husband and we had three children in quick succession – two sons and a daughter. Anorexia’s legacy still hung around me. Each time I was pregnant, I closed my eyes and stuck my fingers in my ears when I was asked to step on the scales. Even today, I don’t know – and don’t want to know – how much I weigh.
Those early days were an intense period of looking after babies and longing for sleep. Then, as the children grew up, the focus was so strongly on making sure that they all ate a good balanced diet that I managed, most of the time, to forget about the black hole of eating disorders. I never mentioned my mad past and was careful to eat normally at family meals.
But when my daughter Alice became a teenager, I was catapulted back in time. All the old fears came flooding back. What if history were to repeat itself? I was desperate for her not to go through the same souldestroying experience.
This was, as it turns out, a reasonable anxiety. Recent research suggests that anorexia runs in families – that you’re genetically predisposed to it. Maybe I should have been equally worried about her two elder brothers, but I felt – perhaps wrongly – that she was under greater pressure.
While anorexia isn’t ultimately about appearance, being made to focus on your body shape makes you vulnerable. We are still the sex that comes in for the most criticism in the media (you can’t just sunbathe – you have to be ‘bikini-ready’). It’s as if men start from zero, while women have to struggle to get out of minus figures.
So, I started to talk to Alice about the importance of sticking up for yourself. You don’t pick fights, but you say when you’re angry or upset rather than burying it all inside. We talked about how assertiveness can be hard for women, and all the ways that women are sidelined and made to feel unimportant. We talked about the violent hormonal mood changes that make you cry one day and dance with joy the next. We wondered how you can feel fat – that premenstrual conviction that you’re a huge amorphous blob – even though no one else notices any difference in your shape at all.
Throughout all of this, we discussed the pressure on women to conform – how beauty is reduced to one figure type (large-breasted but size 8), why ‘plus size’ seems to mean size 16, and how big hips (the usual shape for British women) hardly ever feature in magazine fashion spreads.
But probably our most important conversations centred on the fact that Alice had the right to determine her own future, regardless of other people’s prejudices or expectations
I don’t think I’ll ever be completely relaxed about food. I still get anxious if my jeans are tight – as if I’ve failed some kind of moral test. I still drink Diet Coke and skip meals – not with any kind of bravado, but as a cul-desac of habit before I consciously realise what I’m doing. I don’t like being photographed. But I think – I hope – this tangled knot of misery and confusion stops with me. My daughter eats when she’s hungry. She doesn’t choose clothes solely on the basis of whether they make her bum look big. She doesn’t hide behind make-up, and she sticks up for everyone’s right to look exactly the way they want.
Years ago, Susie Orbach said that fat is a feminist issue. I think she’s right. Body image is in your head. The more you talk about the way the world shapes and defines you, the more likely you are to keep your thinking straight.
Which is why when Alice was a teenager, we didn’t talk about anorexia. We talked about feminism.
Don’t Get Me Wrong by Marianne Kavanagh is published in paperback by Text Publishing, priced £10.99. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
‘I had control over what I ate. Anorexia was my friend, my gaoler, my penance’ ‘I was desperate for her not to go through that soul-destroying experience’