If there wasn't enough going on around here, a new problem has surfaced. Kit isn't eating. He's always been skinny and his appetite fluctuates with his anxiety level. For the first year and a half here he was eating fine and putting on weight. But a couple of factors have changed. First, he's become weight conscious and more important, one side effect of his anxiety meds is loss of appetite. We've been battling it, making sure he eats full balanced meals but we seem to be losing the battle.
Grammo is a recovering anorexic. She became anorexic in her teen years, suffered from it all through her adult life and now has so many digestive and stomach problems as a result of the damage she has an extremely limited diet. So we are hyper aware of eating issues and we are using whatever tools we have make sure Kit doesn't develop a problem.
His new propensity to be thin falls in some ways into the his whole cross sexual behavior. It's an interesting phenomenon that with every stage of his development he's expressed issues and attitudes that are more common with girls - even deeply rooted ones. Like infatuation over fashions and filling out "my perfect date" quizzes, obsession with weight is one of those things. And he thinks he's fat - which is normally a weight conscious girl issue - so he might be deliberately suppressing some appetite as well. Anorexia is an all too common extension of that. Fifty years ago, Tish would hide her skin and bones under bulky sweaters, offer to clear supper dishes with her plate half full and eat nothing when no one was there to serve it. It's still the same routine for young girls all these years later.
Kit has a physical this week with his doctor and we'll see what we can do about the meds. If we're lucky that will solve things. However, the social environment of wanting to be thin is a different issue. If this does become part of the problem, and it is too soon to tell that, we need to avoid making an issue over food. This might take finesse but what other dance have we been playing these past 2 years.
