My relationship with my dad, and the effort that we continue to make to be real with each other, is one of the layers of protection that stands between me and a full-blown eating disorder. He may not be as observant as my mom, but I know that my dad sees my body and that he would notice if it shrank. I know that he thinks I’m pretty now, and that he would still think I was pretty with ten more pounds. I know that he makes a concerted effort to be a part of my life, even the messiest parts, and that he will endure some embarrassment for the sake of that goal. And as he and I have learned, awkwardness often leads to authenticity.
The Switzerland of Parenthood
So many father-daughter pairs avoid being uncomfortable around each other, and thereby sacrifice their capacity for authenticity. It is a dance, of course—daughters must take responsibility when they waltz right past their dads as times get tough. But it is the fathers, as the hormone-neutral adults, who must let their daughters know that they are open to being embarrassed, that they want to share even the tough stuff, and that they choose not to father as their own fathers did.
Instead, so many fathers claim to be neutral third parties. There is no such thing in a family. These dads spend most of their hours at the office and come home to the aftermath of fights, steering clear of the storm. Many don’t initiate uncomfortable conversations about girlfriends or crushes. Granted, most girls are relieved to have one less third degree each day—moms sometimes make their daughters feel perpetually cross-examined. But in the long run, this policy of moms delving in and dads opting out is not good for anyone. It sets the expectation that fathers, and other men, don’t have to deal with the messiness of life— that mothers and other women do. It says that fathers don’t have insight into the complexities of human relationships, bruised egos, love interests; fathers aren’t interested in their daughters’ daily travails, their struggles with the weight and acne that come with puberty. Mothers are sensitive and involved; fathers are strong and silent. This is the still-clinging residue, like burnt rice on the bottom of an old pot, of the traditional family model—the Cleavers, the Bradys, the Cunninghams.
Often still today the only time a red-blooded American father gets riled up about something having to do with his daughter is when she brings home a boyfriend. Then he bristles like an agitated porcupine and gives the young man a talk about respect and curfew. The lesson for the daughter is that her father’s role is to protect her pristine body from being violated, not to empower her to protect herself or make choices that prevent her from having to worry about protecting herself. The message is that men are either violators or protectors of women’s bodies; they are not involved in the process of understanding, politicizing, or healing those bodies.
The myth of neutrality is especially ridiculous and potentially damaging during adolescence. When a girl is coming to understand her body and its meaning in the world, she is drawing on every resource possible. Her mother’s thwarted diets and self-criticism hurled at the mirror, her big sister’s one hundred sit-ups a night, her health teacher’s brush over the female reproductive system are all part of this understanding. And yes, even her father’s avoidance of everything to do with what femaleness is coming to mean—menstruation and bra shopping, food restriction and fitness—is a message. For an adolescent, an adult’s inaction is an action. Silence is a speech.
Alexandra* immigrated from Armenia to the American South when she was just four years old. Her parents manifested the American Dream, clawing their way up from poverty to provide a relatively comfortable life for their three daughters, and Alexandra, for her part, adopted a truly American mentality: “Everything has to be perfect. I know I will never have the perfect body, and that really angers me.”
She recognized how hard her father worked. Her family did not have a BMW or a Lexus, like their neighbors in the small, wealthy town in North Carolina, but they were definitely middle-class until her father lost his job and their financial hardships started. Her sister dropped out of high school at sixteen and started working at a day-care center to contribute to the household. Her father, already quiet and uninvolved in his daughters’ lives, became even more withdrawn. The family kept their financial insecurity secret from others.
Alexandra’s perfectionism was intensified by her family’s struggles. She didn’t want to end up like her sister, so she worked obsessively in school. This obsessive behavior bled into her body image. She read about the latest diets on the Internet and bought all the best sellers. She tried every fitness fad that came around—yoga, Pilates, kickboxing, spinning. She spent all her graduation money on a personal trainer.
Now she is putting herself through college with loans, a part-time job, and a few precious scholarships. She is still close to her mother and her sister, though thousands of miles away, but feels as distant from her dad as ever. She says, “My dad is hard to talk to. He only cares about how I am doing in school and issues of that nature. We’ve never had a relationship beyond that. He doesn’t know how to deal with girls and what they go through.”
All the stress of being financially independent and so hard on herself—“My grades have to be perfect or I will freak out”—has caused Alexandra to eat more than usual. “I think about food 24/7,” she admits. “It gives me comfort, and I guess I really feel like I need comfort right now.” Alexandra estimates that she has gained twenty pounds since she started school. She explains, “I am always looking in the mirror and feeling disgusted with myself. Although I didn’t think so at the time, I used to look really good in high school. Now I have love handles, cellulite on my thighs, and countless other imperfections.” Alexandra doesn’t have an eating disorder—“I would feel too disgusted to stick my finger down my throat”—but she feels deeply ashamed. She won’t let her new boyfriend touch her waist.
When she calls home and her dad answers the phone, they don’t discuss any of this. Instead, he asks how her studying is going, and she tells him about her latest A paper. She doesn’t ask about his job search for fear it will make him feel bad. After an awkward silence, he hands the phone to her mom, and she can finally burst into tears.
Fathers like Alexandra’s surely see their daughters in three dimensions but treat them as if they see only one—school. Grades are finite and simple, leading to concrete discussions about college or career aspirations. Girls should be encouraged to study hard, achieve excellence, look forward to college and beyond. Fathers stick their flags resolutely in this even ground of grades and goals, claiming it as their jurisdiction. It is a noble commitment, but there is another country closer to home that they neglect to explore.
This is the country where girls’ self-esteem lies, where they struggle with their identities, where they wrestle with the meaning of their changing bodies. If fathers pretend none of that is happening, they essentially shut out a critical dimension of their daughters’ development. Turning a blind eye to Alexandra’s unhealthy obsession with working out or getting perfect grades, her father teaches her that she is invisible unless accomplished, that no price (including her mental health) is too high. His silence, now that she is in college and gaining weight, sends a clear message that her swelling body is shameful, something he cannot talk about because it embarrasses him.
Alexandra uses this word, shame, repeatedly. And shame, as we have learned from our mothers’ movement, is intertwined with silence. In the coded language spoken between daughter and father, shame and silence are often interpreted as one and the same.
On a visit home for her twentieth birthday, May* had a bunch of friends over for her mom’s famous homemade cake and real English tea—her mother is a wealthy anorectic woman obsessed with feeding others. Her stacks of cookbooks filled whole shelves in their San Francisco town house, and she had killed forests of trees since she discovered how to print recipes off the Internet. For college, May had relocated to Chicago, far away from her mom, her eternally empty refrigerator, and piles of pictures of food, recognizing that it all contributed to her own ten
dency to be self-loathing in spite of her gorgeous looks.
As her mother fretted about the right forks, the temperature of the tea, the consistency of the cake, May assured her that everything was perfect, teasing her about being such a meticulous hostess. They giggled together, hugged frequently, recounted old birthdays in vivid detail.
May’s physician father was in his office, checking his e-mail.
Her brother lay on the couch, reading a philosophy text for school.
There was a complete and total division between the world of the women—homemade cake and loving jabs—and the world of the men—business correspondence and philosophy. The women were worrying that everyone would have a good time, that the cake’s hint of lemon had been maintained in the baking, that they each took only the tiniest, most demure taste. The men were involved in things, apparently, more urgent than cake or celebrating May’s birthday.
This separation illustrates a complete and total incapacity on the part of May’s father to engage in the real life of his daughter. This is about his total ignorance of her total obsession with the size of her thighs. This is about the thousands of hours May’s father has missed of her childhood because he was in surgery, saving someone else’s life. This is about the check he writes every month to pay her exorbitant psychotherapy bills—the specious relief he gets from signing his name on that check and feeling like he is “fixing” the problem of his daughter.
May’s father would come to Chicago to take her out to dinner at expensive restaurants. She listened as he held forth on the latest PBS documentary or political controversy. She smiled and tried to fit in a smart, ironic word here and there to show that she was informed. As they left the restaurant, he would slip a hundred-dollar bill into her coat pocket. She would shake her head, say, “Oh, Daddy!” but not return it. As they parted, he would kiss her on both cheeks, and she would thank him. Then they would walk in opposite directions like two strangers after a first date.
May never spent much time with her father outside these formal dinners and carefully planned vacations. She had a strong sense of her parents’ political views, their philosophical leanings, the musicals they loved, and the classic movies they adored. But she knew nothing of her father’s soul. She knew nothing of what made him tick, what drove him, what scared him. She knew nothing of what he loved most.
And he knew just as little about her. He didn’t know that she went through wildly different diet phases: one week eating only grapefruit and cottage cheese, the next only drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, the next consuming everything in sight. He didn’t know that she despised her own body, saw it is as the seat of her inability to take control of her life. He didn’t know that she jumped from adoring guy to adoring guy, searching for some affirmation to fill up the hole inside where self-love was supposed to be.
Or worse yet, maybe he did.
“Father Hunger”
Nearly a quarter of young women were raised by no father at all. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, whereas 77 percent of kids lived with two married parents in 1980, that proportion has continued to drop—now holding steady at 68 percent. Twenty-three percent of children lived with only their mothers in 2004. Much has been written about the characteristics of a largely “fatherless” generation, which psychologists claim is especially bad for boys, who have no partners for playing catch, no sense of security, no male role models. Less has been written about the fallout for fatherless girls.
Dr. Margo Maine, a psychologist specializing in eating disorders, is convinced that missing fathers are among the major contributing factors to eating disorders among young women today. Either an absent father or a deficient relationship with a present father, she argues, contributes to the pangs of a gnawing feeling called “father hunger.” She defines it as “a deep, persistent desire for emotional connection with the father.” When that connection doesn’t happen naturally, girls often try to force it.
When daughters don’t feel seen, they sometimes try to make themselves impossible to ignore. Some girls get fixated on being thin and beautiful in order to win their fathers’ praise and, they hope, their overdue attention. Some girls eat to fill the hollow place where their fathers’ love should be and in the process get bodies that their fathers can’t help but see because they are big and getting bigger. Some girls become obsessed with sports, convinced that they can win their fathers’ love by beating them at their own game. Some girls, like Delilah,* get pissed.
As a tween growing up in a working-class family in a suburb of Boston, Delilah brooded over pretty average concerns; she thought that she was disproportionate, her nose too big, her waist too thick. The truth was that Delilah, like her mom, was a petite, pretty girl with a smattering of freckles across her pale Irish skin. But she wasn’t convinced, especially not once puberty hit. “We never talked about puberty in my house,” Delilah remembers, “so I wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening.”
Denial is a family trait. Delilah’s dad was often verbally and emotionally abusive while she was growing up. She remembers, “My mother covered for my father really well, so I thought he was a terrible, terrible man. I didn’t realize that he was a terrible, terrible drunk until I was in my midteens.”
At fourteen Delilah was caught drinking and punished severely. She was enraged at being grounded for a month for something her father did nightly. After a week stuck in her tense home, she started trying to make herself throw up. Strangely enough, she didn’t associate this behavior with her mother, who she knew had suffered in her twenties from bulimia so severe that she had been hospitalized. Delilah’s mom, frightened by the resemblance to herself she saw sprouting in her headstrong, self-critical daughter, had deliberately told Delilah about her affliction.
“It didn’t feel like I was throwing up to lose weight like my mom,” Delilah explains. “It felt like I was throwing up because I was angry about something. I remember hovering over the toilet, crying hysterically, blood vessels breaking on my face.”
Eventually Delilah’s friends took notice and told on her. Her mother was crushed, her father angry. The drives home from her weekly therapy appointments, she remembers, were hell: “He was scared I was telling the therapist it was his fault, so he would harangue me afterwards. ‘What did you talk about?’ When I said nothing, he would scream at me, ‘You’re fucking lying to me. I’m paying for these appointments!’ ”
Delilah stopped throwing up because it was too easy for others to detect, and started starving herself. She would avoid breakfast altogether, drink a glass of juice for lunch, then eat a bowl of Raisin Bran for dinner. As she shrank, her brother and her mother grew more desperate and her father drunker and angrier. She would arrive home from babysitting, and he would wake up from his drunken stupor on the couch and scream at her, “You selfish bitch, waking me up! You think you’re the only one who lives in this house!” and then drag himself upstairs.
At some point his rage got so bad that he crossed the line and physically pushed Delilah’s mother. She filed for a divorce the next day, and he moved out. Delilah would visit him in his childhood home, which was located in an old graveyard, and leave depressed at both his condition and his criticism. “My father was always very tough on me,” she says in an obvious understatement. “He told me how chubby I was, that I had tree-trunk legs, that I was selfish. I have a lot of faults, but being selfish is not one of them.” Unfortunately, Delilah wasn’t able to convince herself that the other criticisms weren’t valid either.
Her father’s peace offering to drive her to Duke University, where she would attend college, got ugly when he packed a cooler full of beer in the car. She was grateful to be rid of him finally when he took one last teetering turn into the campus parking lot, shadowed by tall and impressive buildings so unlike where she had come from. When the last of her things were unpacked and her father drove out of the lot, it felt like a new beginning.
But it wasn’t long into her first college year before Delilah started purg
ing again. She remembers, “I was throwing up constantly. It was actually breaking the toilet in our dorm sometimes. I was having to do minor toilet repairs.” She memorized the least populated bathrooms on campus and started frequenting them between classes. Her junior year, for the first time she tried ipecac—an over-the-counter syrup made from plant extract designed only for people who have ingested poison.†
Delilah packed it in her bag when she went home for the summer, and her mom found it, immediately sending her back to therapy. This time Delilah wanted nothing more than to stop purging. She finally started to make the connection between the anger she felt about her dad’s behavior and her disease, but it didn’t mean automatic healing. Her father hunger ran deep.
She continued to throw up off and on through her senior year. Her dad continued to make drunken phone calls to her cell phone, blaming her for her parents’ breakup in slurring epithets: “You put too much fucking pressure on the relationship, Delilah. You always were selfish!” But Delilah’s future was bright, her mother was doing well on her own, and she had created healthy relationships with her brother and younger sister.
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body Page 10
