The Skinny Daughter or The Healthy Daughter? My Mother’s Nightmare Dilemma.

When I fell into the arms of an eating disorder, my mother didn’t know which side to take. Now I wonder if she really cared.

The first signs of my eating disorder bubbled to the surface in 2009, when I was reeling from my first “big girl” breakup. Feeling totally out of control, I stopped eating and threw myself into hardcore calorie counting. When that wasn’t giving me the cuts I wanted, I committed to a raw vegan lifestyle and restricted myself even further.

I was lost somewhere between orthorexia and anorexia. Everything I ate was raw, clean, and green. I shopped at farmer’s markets and in organic supermarkets.

But I never let myself eat more than 500 calories per day, and most days I restricted myself to a single pack of instant oatmeal and some lettuce.

As life in college became more chaotic and I aged out into adulthood, navigating the path my orthorexia demanded became too challenging. So, to fit in and ease the pressure on myself, I leaped into the arms of bulimia.

Anything I ate came right back up. Every. Single. Meal. At least once a week (but usually more than that) I would fast for a whole day. I barely ate or drank anything, all in the pursuit of seeing my ribs a little more clearly in the mirror.

I cut weight fast and I got a lot of compliments, which only made me double down in my commitment to my disordered eating. Men (and women) were more attracted to me than ever before, and it seemed like the skinnier I got the more valuable my ticket to ride was.

It Took Years For My Mother to Catch On

The funny thing about an eating disorder is that it convinces the person on the inside that all of their secrets are safe. Like the serpent of the bible, eating disorders coil themselves right around the hearts of their victims and whisper sweet promises into their ears. You are in control. No one could possibly know but you.

Never mind running to the bathroom within 15 minutes of eating and turning on the shower. Don’t think they’ll notice that you’re taking a drink of water before every bite of food, or that you cover some of your food in vinegar so you don’t have to eat it.

The point I’m making is that I was a fool. For a good three or four years, I thought that no one knew the two-fingered shame I was living with. They couldn’t smell the vomit on me, I told myself. They didn’t think it was weird that I didn’t sit down for meals, or that I guzzled entire bottles of water as soon as I was done eating (and before my bathroom trips).

It was around the three-year mark that my mother finally said something to me.

“You’re getting too skinny,” she said in an off-the-cuff comment. Her eyes were strange, mixed with emotions that didn’t look like concern. “You need to eat something.”

“I do eat something. Every time I come to visit you.”

“You should eat more.”

That was the end of the conversation and one of only 2 comments that my mother would make to me about my increasingly out-of-control disordered eating. Why?

Because my eating disorder was one of my mother’s greatest conflicts.

On one hand, she loved having a skinny, “beautiful” daughter that people praised her for. I was so fit and healthy, I was so pretty (like her). That was what friends and co-workers used to tell her all the time. She loved that attention and she loved taking credit for the “beautiful” young woman I was turning into.

But that wasn’t the whole of the conflict…

My mother also resented me for my looks. Not because I was prettier than her or any arrogant thing like that. My mother resented me and the beauty of my youth because her youth had passed her. I was a constant reminder of days she had not taken advantage of, of beauty she hadn’t appreciated or celebrated in herself.

For a Mother Like Mine, Concern Is a Mask of Conflict

I can see now that my eating disorder was a total conflict for my mother. She relished the praise she got for having me in her trophy case, but she resented me for being seen as the trophy she wanted to be (and had been). It went way beyond simple jealousy. My mother and the concern she performed were caught between the show and the darkness. A constant state for the narcissistic person.

The Envy

Hard of a pill as it is to swallow for me, I know a big motivator for my mother’s (minimal) interference was envy. In the final years of her life, my mother struggled with a lot of health problems that made her weight fluctuate up and down. Couple that with a lifetime of treating her body poorly and punishing it with stagnancy and the worst dietary habits known to man.

That afternoon in her Huntsville, Alabama home, when my mother questioned my weight, it wasn’t with the intention of stopping me. Not from a caring place anyway.

A part of her wanted me to stop losing weight because she saw me as a form of competition. Though she would never admit it, my mother hated it when I started getting attention as a woman. To her, every glance, every flirtation, was somehow devaluing her.

When my boyfriend told me I looked beautiful, she took it as him saying she wasn’t. When the women in the dress shop told me how stunning I looked in my prom gown, my mother took that as being told I was more beautiful than she had been in her prom gown.

This is what it is to live with a narcissistic mother. Everything is a competition, whether you’re competing against her or not. Her paper-thin attempts to question my eating disorder were a part of this.

My mother wasn’t saying, “I’m worried about you. What’s going on?” When my mother questioned my eating disorder she was saying, “Stop losing weight, you’re leaving me behind.”

The Show

There’s another side to the concerned coin when you’re dealing with a narcissistic mother like mine, and it’s no easier to accept or enjoy. Looking back now, I see it clearly. While my mother was functioning from a place of envy, she was also putting on a good show. That’s what mothers like this do. they make sure to cover their tracks so the world knows what good mothers they are.

I see this in my mother’s minimal efforts to intervene in what was obviously a bigger and bigger crisis in her daughter’s life. More than genuinely getting between me and what was going on, she was creating a shield of plausible deniability for herself.

In short, her concern was all a part of the mask. When my mother told me I was “too skinny” she was meeting her “obligations” so she could be seen to be the “good mommy” and in the right when things went entirely south (which they did).

The Last Time My Mother Mentioned My Eating Disorder

There is no way to know if my mother ever reconciled these concerns and resentments within herself. In all truth, I don’t know if she ever admitted to herself that her daughter was dealing with some kind of significant eating disorder. The last time she mentioned it to me, it was in passing a few weeks before her death.

“You were wasting away when you were living here,” she told me. “You were too skinny.”

“I was miserable,” I told her honestly. “I was dying.”

That was it. No more questions. She never mentioned the word “eating disorder”. My mother never asked what made me feel so out of control, or why I felt the need to punish my young body for the way it carried me.

The conversation was changed, no doubt back to some topic about her and the coworkers she couldn’t tolerate.

That’s what it was to live with my mother. To receive care for the things she found important and a strange kind of dismissive neglect for the things she felt did not touch her. To this day, I don’t know how to feel about it, and I’m grateful she kept her hands off me during this time. Or, did I really want more connection from my mother? Was I screaming out for help?

In the end, I rescued myself.

I climbed out of the trenches of my eating disorder and found a healthier and happier way to live.

Today, I enjoy my food. I eat 3 meals a day and I enjoy cooking and sharing meals with the friends and family who I have chosen to surround myself with. Gone are the days of running to the bathroom, sticking my toothbrush down my throat in a panicked attempt to regain some control of my life and my body.

But I can’t help to wonder…where was the line for my mother? When, if ever, would she have made a meaningful stand for me?

It’s a question that I will never have the answer to, but one that I have learned to ponder only every now and then. After all, this life that I have, this world that I have created for myself, she’s not a part of it. She has no place here, and maybe she’s not really the point of the memory at all.

Maybe the point is that I rescued myself and you can too…

© E.B. Johnson 2023

I am an author, coach, and podcaster who helps women create their ideal lives after trauma and abusive relationships. Join my mailing list for *free* weekly advice or click the link to learn more about me.