The Game of Playing Food Police Makes Me Vomit

I spent the entire month of March running on no food at all.  I was living on small sips of Gatorade.  Soon every interaction with my parents had to do with them playing food police on me.

“Just take ‘one little bite’ or ‘just one little sip of this every fifteen minutes’. But anything i swallowed I vomited right back up within minutes. No one believed that this was out of control, even though my parents could visibly see that i wasn’t sticking anything down my throat to make me puke. My pediatrician, psychiatrist, and therapist were just going by what my parents said, after all, I was the kid, and they were the adults.  My therapist just kept asking me probing questions as if somehow she was going to uncover some huge trauma to explain this “eating disorder” that I didn’t have.

I’m Not Scared of the Big Bad Adults Playing Food Police

Everyone was threatening to put me in the hospital. I was so used to their threats; I didn’t take them seriously anymore. Besides, part of me wondered if I’d be better off in the hospital where they could run some tests and figure out what was wrong with me.

I was scared too.  When I looked in the mirror, I could see all my bones sticking out and the size 4T clothes hanging off my emaciated ten-year-old body. It was painfully apparent to me that I was too skinny.   If I could eat or drink something and hold it down my first plan would be to go to an all-you-can-eat-buffet and stuff my face. At the very least, I would eat an ice cream sundae with my gymnastics team. It wasn’t like my parents playing food police was going to help anything.

The real underlying problem that everyone refused to investigate further was that I had some sort of medical issue.  It was Dr. Monroe’s fault. When I went to see her for my 9-year-old check up the year before, it was right when all my issues had started. All Dr. Monroe did was press on my belly a few places while I yelped in pain.  Then she listened to my belly with a stethoscope. Under her breath, I heard her comment.

“Huh, can’t hear much.”

After that, she listened to my heart and lungs.  To her credit, she did order an x-ray of my belly.  However gastroparesis as well as multiple other GI conditions don’t show up on X-ray.

Dr. Monroe called us in for another appointment when the results were in.

“There is aboslultey nothing physically wrong with her. All of this behavior could be best explained by her eating disorder.

Playing Food Police and Getting Jailed

Now we were living in a pressure cooker at home.  My parents insisted that I could eat if I wanted to.

“Just stop being so stubborn and eat the damn apple,” they would tell me, holding an apple out in front of me, but my stomach was roiling arojj that I was just being stubborn. Other times they told me I needed to work harder in therapy because I had some type of deep-seated psychological trauma I needed to work on, and I was covering it up with my “eating disorder”.

“There’s something physically wrong with me, I need to see a stomach doctor.  I at least need a different regular doctor to look at my belly and figure out what’s wrong with it.  There is something very, very wrong with it and with me in general, I could get super sick, I could even die,” I would yell back at them.

They would always have some sort of reaction, always wanting to have the last word.

My mom and dad would never stop playing food police with me. I felt like I was in jail.

The Wrong Kind of Attention

That March when I had completely stopped eating, I started having frequent appointments with Dr. Monroe.  My parents had to drive me back and forth to bring me into her office every single day.  When they weren’t driving me to Dr. Monroe or playing food police they were threatening me with hospitalizations or feeding tubes.

 I got a lot of attention, but I hated it.

Too Busy Playing Food Police To Take Max to Play Therapy

My brothers were both struggling with serious issues of their own.  My two-year-old brother Max suffered from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) even as a toddler.  He threw marathon temper tantrums when he misplaced a wooden block from his building block set. 

Half the time he was afraid to play with his toys because he thought he might get them dirty. He was in play therapy but my parents were too busy playing food police and trying to stop me from starving to death. They kept canceling his appointments and putting him on the back burner. My life was in immediate danger, Max’s wasn’t.

Getting Jonathan an IEP is Not As Life Threatening as my “Eating Disorder”

Jonathan (my 5-year-old brother) was struggling in kindergarten.

“I think he might be on the autism spectrum,” I heard his teacher say to my mom when we went to his classroom to pick him up. The school kicked me out after I got dizzy in class too many times. When they sent me to the nurse’s office for it, my blood pressure would be so low that they would have to call my mom to bring me home and make an emergency doctor’s appointment with Dr. Monrioe. They decided that I couldn’t go back to school until I was eating three meals a day and had a doctor’s note clearing me to return.

That day the teacher pulled my mom aside, my mom sounded angry.

“He is not, autistic” my mom glared at Jonathan’s teacher.

“He needs testing done if he ever wants to graduate kindergarten.  At the very least he has severe learning disabilities.”  The teacher told my mom, as Jonathan stared intently at a skid mark on the linoleum floor.

Playing Food Police is Causing Chaos in Our Family’s Life

It was another whole year before Jonathan got the testing done.  He had to repeat kindergarten.  But again, Jonathan wasn’t in immediate danger of dying, so my issues were the ones put front and center, and all my parent’s energy was thrown into playing food police on me.

 It’s been almost twenty years, and my brothers still resent me for all the chaos I caused in our family’s life.

“Just eat something,” Jonathan kept telling me.

“I can’t” I tried to tell him, just like I told everyone else who were playing food police with me. It hurt though.  I knew both my brothers were suffering because of this and the guilt was engulfing me, but there was nothing else I could do about it.

The Stench of Fear and Anguis

There was a lot of yelling, arguing, and walking around on eggshells on everyone’s part. My brothers walked around with wide, bug-eyed, eyes, and hunched-up shoulders as if they expected chunks of our lives to come crashing down on their heads.

My brothers didn’t understand what was going on, but the fear and anguish in the house hung so heavy it almost left a smell in the air.  We were living in a situation that was made up of the elements used to build nightmares.