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Misery loves company: What's worse than one child with anorexia? Two of course...

 So after 4.5 years my youngest has copied the eldest in order to manage her stress with anorexia. I can only describe this as the world contracting around me into a miasma of gloom, where no light shines anymore. To see a horizon requires a combination of incredible presence and a naïve optimism that is the irrationality of a dying traveller seeing a mirage in a desert.  I know, objectively, I have to resist this temptation, but living in the moment and being able to see the good and the joy, just becomes exponentially more difficult when you're trying to keep two teenagers from starving themselves to death and are failing. The hardest is knowing that what they need - a father who is present able to share in their joy and be open enough to them that they can talk - is almost impossible without a supreme effort. After each setback (and these are both big and small and populate every day, one after another out until god knows when...) as you crumble internally and the buzzing i...
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What is better?

 Today, somehow I feel a bit better. Not 'good' by any means but not as bad as yesterday... Why? I suspect it was being able to 'speak' the words I hadn't said out loud in yesterdays blog post. For some reason, on Tuesday, because I was a bit optimistic, I didn't discuss the depths of where my despair had been over the previous week. I think that was an mistake I shouldn't make again. On Monday my wife and I talked and she share that my daughter had at least talked about being depressed and some of the reasons for that, that had then led to the anorexia coming back. For her that was actually progress, as she was basically non-verbal the last time she was deep in her anorexia... But I should have told my therapist how much I was spinning out of control the days before Monday. we talked about how it was very soon to be retraumatised after I had only really just unpacked all of the last time, but I didn't have any idea how overwhelming it would be. A small ...
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It begins again...

 So my eldest daughter has anorexia. It started when she was 12 She's now 16 and has started to relapse for the third time I don't think I can make it The pain, anxiety and fear are unbearable The mental health system, everywhere, is overwhelmed. Her life literally needs to hang in the balance to get admitted to the clinic Getting heart scans to determine to what extent your daughter is at risk of a heart attack, because she has starved her body of food to 'control' her stress is a level of anguish I can't describe Watching her eat less and less, watching the skin slowly stretch over her bones, skin recede into visible eyesockets, teeth poke out from a malnourished face all this is pain on an unimaginable scale for a parent...I do this every day, three times a day at meals, where I can think of nothing else... I am 'preparing' myself for this process for the third time in 4 years... By preparing myself, what I really mean is trying - and mostly failing - not...
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