'We Want to Make Our Babies Better'

摘要

Thirteen Fathers stood in a circle holding hands. each one of us had a different story about how we got to this place. Thirteen of us standing together at the Laureate Psychiatric Center in Tulsa, Okla., trying to understand how to help our children, and ourselves. Each of our kids was trying to recover from what I have come to learn is as insidious and life-threatening a disease as exists today. What we had in common was a feeling of powerlessness coupled with the very real sadness that our children were dealing with something so hard to understand, so upside down, that all our natural instincts-of protectiveness, of support and of control-were ineffective. We had learned, or had at least been told during family-therapy sessions, that despite the popular notion, we the parents were not responsi-ble for our daughters' illnesses. Individuals are thought to be genetically predisposed to eating disorders, so maybe we were off the hook. On the other hand, these were our babies, and we wanted to make them better.