Hope and Other Luxuries: A Mother's Life With a Daughter's Anorexia

by Clare B. Dunkle

  That night, I couldn’t fall asleep. I lay in bed and worried.

  This was a habit I’d taken away from my librarian years. Back then, every waking minute had been stuffed full of activity, but I had sworn to myself that I’d stay in touch with how my family was doing. So, after bedtime, I would lie awake and go back over the day. This was when I pinpointed problems and brainstormed solutions to try out the next morning. This was when I got all my best mothering done.

  A good day could roll by in five minutes. But a bad day took time. This day had been so unexpected and awful that I went over it again and again.

  Maybe it was housemother trouble. Elena often butted heads with certain housemothers. The mothering she did of the younger girls interfered with their own brand of mothering, and she was such a vigorous crusader against injustice that she often stirred up trouble for those authority figures who liked to play favorites. Elena despised bullying in any form. Under her care, the misfits and the weak girls had a chance.

  And then there was the simple matter of culture shock. Elena might be a veteran of the school now, but that didn’t mean she had let it change her character. I recalled a conversation with one of the housemothers during a visit to the school last year.

  “Please talk to Elena about her negative behavior,” she had said to me in crisp Hochdeutsch. “When we tell her a rule, she wants to know the reason.”

  “Oh,” I had answered. “I’m not quite sure I understood that. So, you tell her a rule and she asks why?”

  “Yes.”

  “And . . .” I could feel myself floundering. “And you said something about negative behavior, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please, exactly what is she doing wrong?”

  A dent had appeared between the housemother’s eyebrows. “What I just told you,” she had answered. “When we tell her a rule, she wants to know why!”

  I had gasped, “Oh, I see!” And I did. But there wasn’t very much I could do about it.

  Now, as I lay there in the dark, pondering this and other possible explanations for Elena’s unusual behavior, I heard small sounds coming from the other side of the living room. I pulled on my robe and went to investigate.

  It was Elena. She was pacing the room in the dark, scanning the bookshelves by the weak light from her cell phone.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered. “It’s one in the morning!”

  “I can’t sleep,” she whispered back. “I was looking for something to read.”

  I felt her forehead again. At least this time she didn’t jerk away as if I’d tried to slap her. But it was cool.

  “Are you sure you’re not getting sick?” I asked. “Sore throat?”

  “No.”

  I sat down and watched as she prowled the room in the dim light, bending close to read the titles of books.

  “So, what’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Nothing? Really?

  In the years I had known this child, I had heard many explanations of what was wrong. She had told me once, eyes filling with tears, that she was sad because her father would die one day. She had told me that she was afraid thieves would target her window out of every possible window in the house to jimmy open in the middle of the night. She had told me that crickets have been known to get lodged in people’s ear canals and that we swallow eight spiders per year. Over and over, she had told me she’d had a bad dream. Cross an anxious, excitable temperament with an overactive imagination, and the result is that I had never once heard that nothing was wrong—

  Until now.

  “So . . . Really? Nothing’s wrong?” I prodded. “Nothing at all? Everything’s fine?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  I watched her continue to prowl.

  “How’s Mona doing this year?” I asked. “Is she managing to keep out of trouble?”

  This was a blatant fishing expedition. Raising the topic of Elena’s roommate was usually enough to start a good half hour of entertaining talk. Like Elena, Mona had a larger-than-life spirit, coupled with a lively distaste for rules and routine. That and her unsettled and somewhat tragic home life made her a great character for Elena’s stories.

  But not this time. This time, Elena just said again, “Mm-hmm.”

  She chose a book and went back to bed.

  For the whole weekend, Elena stayed preoccupied and silent. And for the whole weekend, I worried. Each day, I alternated between giving her alone time to sort out her troubles and giving her opportunities to confide them. Valerie stayed away from her, too. On her own, Valerie was cheerful and relaxed, but she tensed up around her sister.

  I heard no happy voices raised in chatter that weekend.

  Silence was so unlike Elena that I could think of no precedent for it. Even when she had had the flu last year, she hadn’t stayed in bed. She had continually bundled herself up and come to find me to tell me stories. But now she barely spoke, she barely ate, and she barely slept.

  Elena was one raw nerve.

  I’ll wait until the next free weekend, I thought. Maybe things will have worked themselves out by then.

  Three weeks later, my girls came home again. This time, they both seemed subdued and touchy. Elena was thinner. I could tell she wasn’t eating well. Once again, I cooked her favorite foods, and once again, she barely touched them.

  But at least this time, Elena had some stories for me.

  She told me that she and Mona were storing beer on their windowsill. It was the perfect windowsill for it, she boasted, because no other window overlooked it. One of the older girls had brought her stash of beer to Elena and begged her to hide it. The housemothers knew there was beer in the dorm, so they searched high and low. One of them even stood right by the window. All she had to do was push aside the curtain! But she didn’t. They didn’t find the beer. They had no clue.

  Needless to say, this story didn’t thrill me.

  “Why are you doing a thing like that?” I said. “It’s wrong, and it could land you in serious trouble.”

  Elena rolled her eyes. “Oh, please!” she said. “Everybody does it.”

  Since when had this creative, confident girl cared about what everybody else might be doing?

  “So there’s this new housemother,” she went on. “She’s really young, and she doesn’t have much of a brain. Maybe she’s even, you know, a little behindert.”

  I did know. That was the German word for disabled.

  “So anyway, her door was open,” Elena said. “So Mona and I sneaked into her room and read her diary.”

  I frowned. “What did you do a thing like that for?”

  Elena shrugged. “Why not?” she countered. “She shouldn’t have left it where we could find it if she didn’t want it to get read. Anyway, turns out, she has this huge crush on this guy in the choir, and all the way through the diary, she calls him her bunny. Can you believe it?” She laughed. “‘My bunny!’”

  As laughs went, it wasn’t very nice.

  “The French call each other little cabbages,” I pointed out.

  “That’s stupid, too,” Elena said. “So, Mona and I followed her around, and we kept talking about bunnies. ‘Am I your bunny? Can I be your bunny?’” Elena giggled again. “And finally, this stupid woman figured out what we were talking about. She busted out crying, and she ran out of the room! Can you believe it? Bawling like a baby!”

  I turned around and stared at Elena. She had many faults, I knew that perfectly well, but cruelty had never been one of them. Weaker characters had always flourished around Elena: she sheltered the loners, and she tutored the slow ones.

  And now, here she sat, this warmhearted, idealistic girl, telling me about a heartless prank.

  “Elena!” I said. “How could you?” And I really meant it. How was this even possible?

  Elena’s mouth set in a hard line.

  “She’s a housemother. She deserved it!”

  I saw the look in my daughter’s eyes, and God help m
e, I understood. I had seen that look a thousand times in my own mirror. The jaded, bitter look of the changeling child stared at me out of my daughter’s face.

  Elena’s world had blown apart.

  “Elena! What’s wrong?” I said. “There’s something wrong! You can tell me.”

  “You mean, besides the fact that the school is hiring behindert housemothers to look after us?”

  And Elena walked away.

  Several weeks later, I got a phone call from the boarding school, but when I answered, I didn’t recognize the voice. A very polite-sounding young German woman was on the line, speaking in English.

  “My name is Anna Anton,” she told me. “I am in the twelfth class at your daughters’ school.”

  “Hello, Anna. I think I remember you. Didn’t I get to meet you last year?”

  “Yes,” she said, sounding a little pleased and relieved, but still very serious. “My call is because . . . I am the Tischmutter at Elena’s table.”

  Tischmutter. That meant table-mother, the student who was in charge of making sure the younger girls ate a good meal.

  “I am worried about Elena,” Anna went on. “She doesn’t want to eat. She is sick all the time.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve been worried, too.” And that question dug into me again: What was wrong?

  “I am afraid,” Anna said, “that Elena doesn’t want to live.”

  WHAT??

  I was out of the house ten minutes later. I drove all afternoon to get to the school. I met with the housemothers. I met with Sister. And then we all met with Elena.

  “Hi, Mom!” she said as soon as she saw me. “What are you doing here?”

  In light of this scary phone call, I tried to see my daughter with new eyes. Yes, Elena was thin. But then again, she’d always run a little thin. She hadn’t grown a single centimeter all year. But she looked more relaxed than she had the last time I’d seen her, and when she heard why I’d come to the school, she laughed.

  “What are you talking about?” she said with an amazed smile. “That’s ridiculous. I’m fine!”

  And when she left the room, I could see her friends surrounding her in the hallway: “Leni, what was it about? Are you in trouble? Can I help? Do you want some of my candy? Do you want to come on a walk?”

  As I drove home through the darkness, I tried to decide what to do. Over the years, I had read a number of books and seen a number of documentaries about childhood trauma, and the victims had all said the same thing: “I needed professional help.” This resonated with me now as I thought back on my own childhood. Professional help was probably what I had needed then to help with the rejection and depression.

  “Something’s wrong with Elena,” I told Joe that night when I got home.

  “She’s different,” Joe agreed. “But it’s not like we can force her to talk to us.”

  “That’s true. I think we need to get her to a professional.”

  So Joe and I talked about options, and the next day, I called the only psychiatric professional we knew of. His name was Dr. Eichbaum, and he was a child psychiatrist who came once a week to work with several of the girls at the boarding school. Elena had told me how he had counseled her friend Anita, who had had trouble eating due to stress. Finally, he had ordered Anita to be removed from the school, and he had sent her to an eating disorder treatment center.

  The next time Joe and I went to the boarding school, we visited Dr. Eichbaum. His office waiting room was full of parents and patients, and he impressed us with his open, interested manner.

  “It may be bullying,” I told him.

  “Except that she seems to be popular with her classmates,” Joe put in. “And we thought it might be trouble with the housemothers, but we’ve talked to them, and they say everything’s fine.”

  “I’ll talk to the housemothers,” Dr. Eichbaum said. “I know them well. There may be something they can tell me in confidence. And we’ll bring Elena to the office here, away from the school environment. We’ll run a full set of tests. It takes several hours, but you won’t be charged my rate for it; I have my assistants do quite a bit of it.”

  “No, that’s all right,” Joe said. “Do whatever you need to. We don’t mind the charges.”

  A week later, the phone rang. It was Dr. Eichbaum, calling with the results.

  “We had your daughter here in the office for about three hours,” he said. “I enjoyed meeting her very much. Elena is very ambitious.” He chuckled. “And very dramatic! But then again, what teenage girl isn’t?”

  “And did you find out what the problem is?”

  “Oh, there isn’t really a problem here, Mrs. Dunkle,” he said in a friendly tone. “This is just adolescence. Elena’s fourteen now.”

  “Yes, I can understand that,” I said. “I don’t expect her to be an angel. We have an older daughter, you know, and when Valerie hit the teenage years, we saw some irritability there, too. But this seems different.”

  Dr. Eichbaum’s voice radiated confidence and authority. “As intensely as Elena lives her experiences,” he said, “I would expect her adolescent mood changes to be more intense as well. Don’t be concerned, Mrs. Dunkle. Your daughter is completely normal. You have nothing to worry about.”

  Nothing to worry about. I let myself feel the relief of hearing him say that in his friendly voice. Your daughter is completely normal.

  But if I hoped my relief would help me find a better way to deal with Elena, that hope turned into disappointment.

  As the weeks passed, Elena’s moods didn’t improve, and Valerie wasn’t doing much better either anymore. Each time they came home, they filled the house with fights and bitterness. And Elena’s letters had already quit telling me stories. Now they quit coming altogether.

  I still sent my stories to my girls, a chapter a week. But that became a new source of pain. Holt had bought four manuscripts from me now. I was a real professional author. But, far from being pleased at my new success, Valerie and Elena seemed to find it particularly galling. It was as if, in their unhappiness, they hated to see me feeling happy.

  “I thought you wrote those stories for us, Mom,” Valerie told me in a scathing tone.

  “Well, of course I did, you know that. They’re dedicated to you. They have your names in them . . .”

  “Oh, sure. Big deal!”

  I lay awake and puzzled over these grim changes and ugly comments. But I didn’t talk them over with Joe anymore. A new commander had showed up. So horrible was that man that he became a legend at our base. Joe was now lucky if his workday stopped after a mere twelve hours. Some days, it went on longer than that.

  But this new work schedule didn’t seem to be something Joe regretted when the girls were at home. I could feel him withdrawing from them, hiding away in naps and computer time.

  What was happening to us? What had gone wrong?

  Intense experiences . . . adolescent moods. Your daughter is completely normal.

  It must just be the school year, I decided. The girls were in high school now, in a foreign language, and for some reason, this year was just harder. They were getting burned-out. It would get better when they had their summer break. They could rest and recharge. They could re-center.

  But when the summer break came, it brought us no relief. Valerie and Elena scarcely interacted. They were restless but had no energy. They found nothing interesting to do. Their rooms were little islands of boredom, and if they spoke, it was to fight.

  One morning, I sat at the computer in the office and tried to write. Just last year, I had sat in this same spot and listened to happy voices laugh and sing together. “Write lots!” those voices had begged me . . .

  Could that memory really be just one year old?

  As if in answer to my gloomy thoughts, an argument broke out, rising in volume until I could make out the words.

  “I told you! I told you not to mess with my stuff!”

  “Bitch!”

  “Hey!” I called. “Wat
ch your language!”

  I heard Elena stalk away and slam the door of her room.

  I got up and went to the door that was still open. Valerie lay on her bed, reading a Stephen King novel. Sie, read the German title. Distracted, my imagination proposed different images to match it—the word could mean it, her, them, or y’all.

  I shook off the linguistic puzzle and focused on what mattered.

  “You need to not fight with your sister!” I said.

  Valerie turned a page. “You heard her, Mom. She was fighting with me.”

  “I know that. But you need to think before you go answering and calling her names. She’s your sister. She’s the only sister you’ll ever have!” I thought about how empty my life had been, with my own sister dead. “She’s family. You’re so lucky to have her!”

  Valerie set down her book and held it open with one hand. “Come on, Mom,” she said with devastating practicality. “It’s not like Elena and I have a single thing in common. I don’t like her, and she doesn’t like me.”

  “But you look after each other!” I insisted. “Different or not, that’s what sisters do. You’re friends at school, right? You told me once that you and Elena had the same friends.”

  Valerie appeared to weigh her words. I had the sense that she was the older one here.

  “No, we’re not friends,” she finally said. “Elena doesn’t speak to me at school. And because she doesn’t do it, her friends don’t do it, either. None of them ever speaks to me.”

  “What? That isn’t right . . .”

  I thought about visits home in the past, when I’d heard my two girls merrily gossiping about their friends. It had been a long time since I’d heard talk like that.

  But—not talking at all?

  “That can’t be right!” I said. “Not ever?”

  Elena used words like ever and never. But Valerie wasn’t my dramatic girl. Valerie didn’t exaggerate the truth.

  “We’re not friends, Mom,” she concluded. “I don’t care if we’re sisters or not.” And she lifted the book and went back to reading.