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.I know what I want to do.What we need to do.For the next several days, Jamie and I talk and argue and grieve together.“I can’t understand it,” he says, over and over.“Why won’t she just eat?” I can’t understand it either.But my gut tells me that we’re asking the wrong question.The question isn’t why but what: What do we do now?What it boils down to is that we have three choices: Send Kitty away.Keep doing what we’re doing.Or try some version of FBT, the Maudsley approach.In the end the decision is easy.The next morning I call Dr.Beth and Ms.Susan and tell them our plan to begin family-based treatment with Kitty.Ms.Susan has heard of FBT and thinks it could be a good option for Kitty because she’s young and hasn’t been sick for long.(How long is long, I wonder? Because I feel as though Kitty’s already been sick a long time.Too long.) Dr.Beth has never heard of it but promises to do some reading and call me.FBT comprises three phases: Phase 1 is weight restoration, Phase 2 is returning control over eating to the adolescent, and Phase 3 is resuming normal adolescent development.Phase 2 seems a long way off; there’s no way we’re letting Kitty control her eating anytime soon.I have no idea what “resuming normal adolescent development” means, and frankly, at the moment, I don’t care.We are solidly in Phase 1.Kitty has lost only six or seven pounds since June, but it’s painfully clear that she’ll need to gain a lot more than that to recover.Dr.Beth graphs Kitty’s height and weight from birth, plotting her natural growth curve, and gives us a number to start with: twenty-five pounds.That’s how much Kitty needs to gain, at least for now.In true FBT, I read, a therapist meets weekly with a family, supporting them as they figure out how to get their child to eat.The therapist doesn’t tell the parents how to do this but rather empowers them to find strategies that work.I think back over the last few months of family dinners, remembering one in particular, a week or so before Kitty’s official diagnosis, during the time I knew something was wrong but didn’t yet understand what.We had company—my mother-in-law was visiting, along with my best friend from college and her young daughter—and we’d gone out to a restaurant, seven of us sitting at a round table.We had to send the waiter away three times because Kitty was negotiating, in a tone of rising hysteria, what she would order.The menu was full of dishes she had once loved: mussels in buttery broth, spaghetti carbonara, salmon in creamy dill sauce.She wanted a salad with grilled chicken, dressing on the side.I looked at my emaciated daughter, the flat hollows under her eyes, the protruding knobs of her shoulder bones.I looked across the table at friends and family who had traveled thousands of miles to see us, whose eyes reflected their concern and bewilderment even as they pretended not to hear our agitated whispers.If we’d been alone, I probably would have let her order the salad, thinking At least she’s eating something.But in front of the people who knew us best in the world, I felt sudden shame.Kitty was too thin; we knew it, they could see it.We weren’t doing our job as parents, Jamie and I.We were failing our daughter.And so we argued, behind our menus: You love mussels—order that! Or the carbonara.Remember how much you used to love carbonara? The more we pushed, the more frantic Kitty became, and the more determined I felt that she would order something reasonable and eat it.Now I was embarrassed about the scene we were making too.Finally Jamie put his hand on my wrist.He’s more private than I; his tolerance for public scenes is low.He shook his head.I knew what he meant.What did it matter, really, what Kitty ordered? We both knew the problem went far beyond one dinner.And so she ordered the salad, and pushed it around her plate, while the rest of us, as if to compensate, ate heartily, sopping up sauce with slabs of Italian bread, forcing the conversation away from the drama we couldn’t talk about.It was as if my daughter’s ghost sat at that table, untouchable and alone, watching through an impenetrable scrim.We drove home that night in despairing silence.Another meal—or, rather, another no-meal.Another turn of the screw pulling Kitty’s skin tight across her sharpening bones.Another twist of the knife that now sawed away at my heart, night and day.And now, I think, what next? I’d give anything to avoid another dinner like that.We’ve been failing with Kitty for weeks.How will things be different? How will we get Kitty to eat? I want someone to tell me exactly what to do.We have no FBT therapist, because there are none in our small midwestern city.But we do have Ms.Susan and Dr.Beth.And we also have something no one else in the world has: we love Kitty best.No one else in the world can possibly want her to get better as much as we do.No one else loves her as fiercely, as nonjudgmentally, as unconditionally as we do.And so we make a plan, Jamie and I.We’ll take charge of Kitty’s eating [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]