My Eating Disorder Almost Killed Me — & Changed My Relationship With My Mom Forever

Editor’s note: The following essay includes discussions of anorexia and self-harm. If you or anyone you know is suffering from an eating disorder, self-harm, or suicidal thoughts, reach out for help at the 988 Lifeline. You can find more resources, including a screening tool and treatment options, at the National Eating Disorders Association.

Perhaps the only thing worse than losing a child is watching them die in front of you.

This is precisely what my mother has been doing for the last four years. She sent me off to college as a healthy, good-on-paper daughter: salutatorian, varsity track captain, and all-around golden child to boot. It wasn’t until she received a call from university mental health services, less than a semester into my freshman year, that she realized I was dying all along. 

At my worst, I weighed 83 pounds, had a 14.2 BMI, and racked up four hospital stays. The day my mother received the call telling her that her daughter was on the verge of death, she was in the middle of teaching phonics to a classroom of kindergartners who couldn’t even spell anorexia. 

She’d say it was the worst day of her life, but that’d be a lie. Every day after that was worse than the last, her stress mounting as she anticipated the call asking if she needed the number to her local mortuary. Each night the sun set, she was up wondering: Will I still be a mother tomorrow?

—

Growing up, my mom always told me I needed to develop a “healthy fear” of her. She was well-intentioned, raising me to be independent and strong-willed, but all the strict rules drove a wedge between us—and I definitely didn’t feel like I could come to her for help or advice with my teenage problems. 

If my relationship with my mother wasn’t great, though, at least my relationship with food was. There was nothing I loved more than coming home from school and going straight to the cupboard to devour a whole Costco-sized bag of tortilla chips. My favorite snack was a heaping plate of rice dripping in butter with a tall glass of chocolate milk on the side, and as for what my body looked like—I couldn’t tell you. I was always on the smaller side, but I didn’t give a damn about how flat my stomach was. I simply ate. 

That is, until family dinners were replaced with Marie Callender’s Chicken Pot Pies waiting for me in the freezer while my mom skipped dinner for CrossFit classes. 

It didn’t take long after my mother’s intense fad dieting habits picked up that I started to pay attention to the little idiosyncrasies piling up around the house and, subsequently, my own eating habits. The stacks upon stacks of MediFast bars in the cupboard caught my eye when I went to grab a snack, and of course it was hard to ignore the woman in the living room sweating out a hundred calories a minute as she followed an exercise video. 

None of this directly changed my eating habits or my relationship with my body. If anything, it made me grateful that I wasn’t the one putting bikini models on vision boards in hopes of one day ‘fixing’ myself to look like them. 

But then I joined the cheerleading squad. 

Even as I write this at 21, well into my recovery, I can’t help but roll my eyes at the cliché. It’s the anorexia narrative painted in every form of mainstream media: Every girl wants to be a flyer, so she starves herself skinny in hopes of one day being on top of the pyramid. It’s trite, it’s overplayed, it’s kitsch—and for me, it was true. 

My parents didn’t pick up on the red flags of going vegan at 13 and following ten-minute ab videos in my room. I was a smart kid, so a baggy sweatshirt and a trendy pair of loose jeans hid the fact that I hated my body enough to want to get rid of it entirely. 

It wasn’t until I moved away to college that my habits became detrimental—and noticeably so. Removed from my roommates, my friends, and my family, I poured my energy into losing weight. I walked, I lifted weights, and I starved until I lost around 28% of my already-small body mass. But no matter how low the number on the scale got, there was still a voice screaming at me inside: If you get skinnier, your life will be better. I thought a 24-inch waist would bring my boyfriend back. Get me friends. Fix the mess I’d gotten myself into. 

Little did I know, the thing that would save me was what I feared most of all. The ultimate decision to let my mom in is the reason I’m still standing here today.

—

I knew I was going to die unless I got help. But I had distanced myself so far from my family and friends that I thought there was nowhere to go, no one to turn to. My eating disorder was all I had left. I consciously knew my mother would be all ears to my struggles, but memories of childhood lectures and stringent punishment kept me from outing my personal demons to her. I needed help, but I didn’t think I could find it in her.  

The day I went to UCLA’s counseling center, the first thing that came out of my mouth was, “Please don’t tell my mom.” Before showing them the scars on my arms, telling them the number on the scale, recounting the 300 calories I’d eaten that day, the only thing I could think to ask was to keep my mother in the dark. 

I didn’t want her to know. I wish I could say it was because I cared too much about her to make her worry, but truthfully, I was just afraid.

My therapist refused to treat me unless I signed an information release allowing her to disclose my eating disorder to my mother. Freshly 18, I resisted—I was an adult, so what did I need my mom for? I scoffed at the notion that her knowing my deepest, darkest secrets would somehow pull me out of the pit I was in. 

But I knew treatment was the only option for me, so I acquiesced to my therapist’s conditions and let her call my mother. I was shocked to be met by nothing but love. My mother was in shambles, sure, but she cared about me, about my life, enough to encourage me to start a partial hospitalization program at UC San Diego Eating Disorders Center. 

For 10 hours a day, six days a week, I sat in group therapy rooms between meals with more calories than I used to eat in an entire day, learning how to regulate my emotions and come to terms with the fact that I am a human with a body who is worthy of happiness regardless of the way that body looks. The days were grueling and long, but no matter how many tears I shed, I was able to exhale a sigh of relief at the thought of my mom waiting for me at home. 

I took time off school and moved back home during my treatment stay, one of the hardest decisions I’ve made in my life. Somewhere below the layers of aspartame daydreams, calorie labels, and size 00 jeans, though, I knew that the choice to stay at home was a choice for life. I repaid my mother’s countless hospital visits with family sessions and a feelings wheel that I hung on the fridge; I educated her on the importance of carbohydrates in a balanced diet; and she watched me grow both physically and mentally into the woman I am today. 

Addressing the contribution she had in my decline was perhaps the single greatest factor in my recovery. We healed, together. She was there during my darkest days, and it’s changed our relationship for the better. 

My mother has frequently recounted to me that the hardest moments of her life were the drives to the hospital she would take to see me. Pulling into the medical center parking lot was a brutal reminder that her daughter was one bad day away from getting a feeding tube installed, a reminder that the life she produced nearly two decades earlier was dwindling before her eyes. A reminder that, worst of all, she was powerless. There was nothing she could do to save me. 

But the moment she walked into the hospital room and saw my sunken face smiling at her, her worries melted away. She saw me for the person I was, the person who was fighting for life while wrapping her in the biggest bear hug she’d ever had. She’d curl up next to me and watch an episode of retro TV on my small laptop screen while we ignored the heart rate monitor beeping next to us. There was no more right or wrong. The best thing I could do for her was simply be. Exist. Live.

My brush with death may have only temporarily shifted my mother’s role in my life from a helicopter to a caregiver, but it permanently made her into a trusted ally. That’s what it means to be a parent who has a child changed overnight. No longer did “care” mean monitoring and control; now, it meant lending a shoulder to cry on and accepting me for everything I was. Facing my mortality together brought us closer in ways I could never have expected, granting us both perspective on one central truth: Through every minutia of day-to-day life, the only thing we have is each other’s beating hearts. The prospect of death reforged our relationship into one of trust, empathy, and compassion. 

Since opening up to my mother about how her yo-yo dieting contributed to the development of my eating disorder, she’s ditched the low-cal options and thrown out her scale. She no longer supports me from a distance—instead, she has accepted my invitation to confront the childhood trauma that brought me to the brink of death and move forward with me to heal. Gone is the “healthy fear.” Now, unconditional compassion underlies our relationship. 

I’m now allowed to go out at night and make less-than-optimal choices that I am sure to grow from. My mom doesn’t bat an eye when I come home with a poorly-covered hickey on my neck—she’s just grateful I’m alive. That life brings us closer, redefining maternity and childhood to return them to their roots; that is to say, together. 

Our relationship is still nowhere near perfect, but it is ever-expanding. Every day we inch closer towards healing it, just as I still work to heal my relationship with food and my body. Confronting my mortality together, though, has made our relationship deep, strong, and, more than anything, whole again.