Stress Eating

There was a very triggering post this morning on my local moms discussion board about weight, overweight, and what to do to “control” an overweight daughter. It seems the mom in question visited her daughter at college and saw that she had gained a lot of weight. The mom was “repulsed” (her words). The daughter was having a difficult transition to an intense campus and was taking an SSRI and seeing a school therapist for depression and binge eating.

It sounded like a pretty mundane story to me, like the transition story of many first year students at college, who often gain weight as a matter of course, and yet the mother was writing “Help me!” and asking if she should “tell the therapist” to take the adult daughter off the SSRI, or force her daughter into playing a sport.

It made me both sad and angry. My first years at college and law school were difficult and unsettling. Food has often been the mechanism by which I seek comfort or stuff down my feelings. I don’t drink alcohol because I take medication to control seizures – which works – but like many people with epilepsy I’m prone to depression. It’s just part of the package of the disorder that adds a little more fun to the mix. I’ve lost and gained weight so many times in my life and felt better or worse about my own worth as a result.

When I moved to start law school, I left behind a guy I thought I’d been in love with. We’d talked about marriage but he was a Peter Pan type and I subsequently broke up with him that fall in light of the distance I now had from him, and the excruciatingly competitive new friends I was making at law school, all of whom wanted to be Supreme Court Clerks or Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review, or save the world in some fashion.

I was very sad about the break-up all the same, and that fall there was a bad cold spell that brought temperatures down to about zero for a couple of weeks. It was really really cold in my old apartment, and I was eating sweets, and studying, and outlining, and getting ready for my first exams, and when they were over, my classmates hit the bars. I did not. I ate. And then, on a whim, I bought myself a bottle of Syrup of Ipecac to make myself throw up. It was the beginning of a very bad cycle in my life that was to last for almost eight years.

I can’t believe looking back now how much energy I put into having bulimia. It’s a very time-consuming disorder. I remember one horrible fight with a close friend I had who I promised to meet at High Holidays Services, but then I stood him up because in my mind I had eaten too much and needed to make myself throw up. He was irate and baffled about my no-show and who could blame him?

Eventually, with the aid of a very good therapist, and an SSRI, I stopped making myself throw up. It was right after my first nephew was born. It had been tapering off gradually, and then Matthew arrived. Initially, I think I was feeling a little jealous and maybe displaced because the entire family was discussing Matthew non-stop (he’s the first grandchild on both sides) and his perfection, his beautiful face, his perfect mouth. What about my mouth when I was a baby, I’d think? Then I thought to myself, really, I’m not four years old. He’s not competition for love, he’s someone new to love. He’s a new chance, a shiny penny. And I decided to make his birth the reason I stopped purging completely. So I did.

What does any of this have to do with Sarah? She was going to be a shiny penny too, and in so many ways she was. I loved her little female body in a way I’ve never been able to love my own. She was so perfect and beautiful.