This Crazy Life

If you have never been grocery shopping with someone with an active eating disorder, consider yourself lucky.  I had to take my daughter Sunday.  I try to avoid this like the plague.  But she left programming early because she didn’t feel good, so she had to eat dinner at our hotel and I was unprepared for that.  I tried to get her to stay alone in our hotel, but she’s 12 and didn’t want to.  So, to the grocery store we went.  We talked about what we were getting before we left.  We had a plan.  It was still an agonizing experience.  All the food.  All the labels.  All the calories.  It was like walking into a pit of venomous snakes and you are deathly terrified of snakes.  Except the pit was the grocery store and the snakes were calories.  They were everywhere.  She tried to act sly and not make it obvious she was checking calories.  But she most definitely was.  Thinks that maybe looked good, she couldn’t get because the calorie count was too high.  Foods she wanted she had to find the least calories for it and try not to let me know that’s what she was doing.  We were in the grocery store for way too long and bought only a handful of groceries.  I’m actually surprised she didn’t come home and shower to get off all the calories that somehow seeped into her through the air.  But she didn’t, so maybe that is progress?  It just makes me hate it for her so much.  It’s so hard.  And I was there to help her.  How will she ever survive a grocery store trip alone?  As an adult?