It was strangely comforting to write about Meg as my funny, independent little girl. And now I’m beginning to see another reason for writing about my daughter: to reveal her as authentic human being and not merely an anorexic.
For so many years after Meg became anorexic, she was the elusive young woman fading in and out of our family who may or may not show up for key events like Dad’s retirement, Grandpa’s funeral, Sister’s wedding, or promised visits home for the holidays. I think she always wanted to be there, but hated the scrutiny. Family and friends, especially me, have placed so much focus on the last seventeen years of Meg’s life that we’ve forgotten the first eighteen. We’ve forgotten her spirit. So I’ll continue on, and try to explain what I believe happened to Meg’s spirit. But now I’ll be leaving comfort behind because I have to talk about our move from Virginia to Hawaii and what happened to Meg there that lay the groundwork for her disease.
Looking back, we were very happy in Virginia. My husband, Joe, was able to extend our tour so we actually lived in one place for four years. Meg at fourteen was finally part of a great group of kids who just graduated from middle school together. Her sister, Kae, was in her first year of college in NYC and loved coming home on all her holidays and breaks to the smell of my homemade Italian sauce simmering or her favorite chicken casserole baking in the oven. Since we lived on base, Dad was able to walk to his job a block away and after work, walk two blocks to the marina and his precious sailboat. As for me, I was in an honor’s program at a local junior college finally feeling that I was doing what I was meant to do. Then Dad came home with the bad news: we had to transfer to Hawaii. There were loud protests from all three females. Meg indignant, said “But it’s soooooooooooo far away!” Over the phone Kae begged, “Couldn’t Dad get his assignment changed.” Dad tried but the answer was no.
Military life isn’t easy, but this move was excruciatingly painful. We had established, what to us was, a “wonderful life”. And for the first time, our tight-knit little family was split because, of course, Kae needed to complete her college education. When we left, she was still only eighteen. Leaving Kae in New York City at such a young age to go so far away was the hardest thing I’d ever done. If you had seen our facial expressions while waiting for our flight to Paradise, you would have thought that we were being transported to the “Seventh Level of Dante’s Inferno.”
When we arrived in Oahu, the military put us up at the Hilton in Waikiki while we looked for a house because the base facilities were so limited. Meg had a ball in their huge pool and met some other military kids to hang out with. But when we moved far from Waikiki to Mililani, the land of the pineapple, things were very different. In Waikiki, every one of all nationalities caters to the tourist. Tourist no longer, in Mililani, we were now just Haoles, a Hawaiian word for white people, the minority in a predominately Hawaiian and Asian community. My Pollyanna surfaced again: I thought it would be a good for us to experience, in a small way, what so many in our country live with every day of their lives. But for Meg it was just one more problem added to the fact that we moved to Hawaii at a sensitive time in her life. She was a teenager now and resentful of the disruption. And the fact that Hawaii is one of the most body-conscious places in the world didn’t help and actually played a big part in what happened to Meg.
In fact, very soon after we arrived in Mililani, a thoughtless boy at our neighborhood pool made a negative comment about Meg’s figure. Now Meg was not overweight but not thin, and she had a little tummy in the land of sunshine, hard bodies, and tanned-bikini-clad girls. After that unkind comment, we couldn’t drag her to the pool, and it was hot in Mililani far from the trade winds of Waikiki. She cheered herself by eating junk food and watching more movies and TV than I thought humanly possible so naturally she gained more weight. My funny girl had turned sullen and rebellious that independent spirit was now turned against us. Our home became a battleground. We both felt guilty that we had to take our daughter so far away from a place where she was happy. But what were we to do?
After all the psychological strategies learned from books and classes failed me, we insisted that Meg find a part time job and go to meetings at the high school about the coming school year, and to church in the hope that she would make friends since most other groups were disbanded for the summer. Doing what I usually did for each move, I made an appointment with a guidance councilor and received a copy of Meg’s schedule so she could familiarize herself with the location of her classes before school started. But finding her classes was a minor problem considering the fact that she was entering high school in a new place over weight and without a single friend.