For Lorri, she watched while her daughter gathered tools for a successful future, but she also warns parents and loved ones that recovery works one day at a time.
“Taryn did get through the centers, and she did get tools and coping skills and insights into things. Recovery takes time. They go forward a few steps and then back a few steps. Nobody’s perfect and is going to fix it the first time.”
And for Taryn, this might be more validation from the mother who loves her most who brought her to where she is today: twenty-one years old, healthy, she’s a new mother with a two-month-old baby boy.
“I’ve learned to surround myself with people who really care about me, friends, and relationships. Once I knew I wanted to recover, therapy helped, but it was later that I reaped the benefits.”
Sharing their story with the world might be one of those benefits.
“We have a different relationship today.” Lorri said. “By writing this book together, we’ve analyzed this more than most people, but we have a strong, close, trusting relationship. There was a time when trust was not possible, and I wondered if it ever would be.”
To get back to that place of trust, Lorri has a few tips for parents.
- Know your role and limits. “Your role up to this point has been to fix things. You kiss the ‘boo boos’ and make the bad things go away and now you’re up to something that you can’t fix. Their journey is about the disorder. You can totally lose yourself in your child’s disorder, but it’s not your eating disorder. Separate your journey from your child’s, which for a mother, is hard to do. And there is a limit to solving another’s problems. A doctor said to another relative of mine, ‘I don’t understand why she doesn’t just make her eat.’ Sure, I can force feed her, but unless she solves the problems herself, there’s nothing I can do to change that.”
- Be patient. “I kept thinking if I could just find the one thing that was going to work for her, then this was all going to go away. I sent her to the best place in the country. I kept getting devastated. I kept getting let down by the process. You have to have patience. You have to realize that there is not a magic bullet for this. What works for one woman is not going to work for the next.”
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