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

by Clare B. Dunkle

  I kept beating the chocolate. I held on to my poker face.

  Okay, I thought. This is weird . . .

  Because back then, my husband didn’t just stop by to chat. Every second of his day had a purpose. He got upset if we were five minutes late to a party. He went to work even if he was almost delirious with fever. He had rearranged his cubicle so that his coworkers would stop saying good morning to him. “Do they think I have time for that kind of thing?” he had fumed.

  And yet, there he was, this type A workaholic, sitting at the kitchen table, watching me frost a cake and asking about celebrity crushes.

  It was the beginning of something wonderful.

  Thrilled at the change he felt, Joe started telling me over the next few weeks what life with anxiety had been like. It had been shameful and isolating. The more he’d tried to control it, the worse it had become— because how can you clamp down on a feeling?

  “I was always either angry, about to get angry, or coming down from being angry,” he said. “The happiest part of my day was my commute to work.”

  But Zoloft had changed that almost overnight. It was like a puzzle piece that exactly fit whatever was missing in his brain. Years later, I heard him tell a relative, “I spent two days worrying that I was going to lose my personality. And I’ve spent the rest of my life afraid I’ll get it back.”

  So now, as Valerie waved the prescription at me from across the psychiatric waiting room, I couldn’t help but feel relieved.

  Maybe it will fill a chemical need for her, just as it did for her father, I thought. Maybe it will ease the stress she’s feeling.

  I called up the recruiter when we got home and let him know that things weren’t looking good for Valerie’s Air Force career. But the recruiter got on the phone with Valerie and told her not to worry. Burns or no burns, Zoloft or no Zoloft, he knew just which doctor would sign the paperwork to get her into the service.

  “Sure,” Valerie said cheerfully. And then she hung up the phone and went off to play her guitar. But she was looking less and less like a successful recruit to me. People gasped and stopped talking when she walked by.

  “I hate it,” Elena told me after Valerie left. “I hate the way people stare at her now. Did you see how she’s scribbled words all over her other pair of jeans? I walked by her room last night, and she was working on them with a pair of scissors. ‘I’m customizing them,’ she said.”

  Elena had started volunteering several afternoons a week at our local military hospital, welcoming the wounded soldiers and working in the emergency room as well. Her supervisors loved her. She was a natural, they said. She loved the work, and her sense of compassion began to revive.

  But now that Elena had a life again, she also had something to protect.

  “The people at the hospital think I’m an only child,” she confided to me. “They don’t even know I have a sister.”

  My heart sank. It did that a lot these days. I could actually feel it sink. I could feel the weight of that heart pull down my shoulders and bring my chin slumping toward the floor.

  My girls are amazing, I said to myself. They will be better people than I am.

  But that wasn’t the message that came from my heavy heart. It whispered that something here was very wrong.

  I went upstairs to find Valerie sitting on the living room couch, strumming her guitar and singing softly. Valerie had a lovely voice, husky but clear. When I looked at her, I could still see my own beautiful daughter, even under her thick black eye shadow and ripped clothes and angry scabs. But when I sat down nearby with a stack of Elena’s correspondence school papers to grade, and I was feeling Valerie’s presence rather than looking, I had the sense that my own child sitting in the room with me was almost a ghost.

  Valerie had emptied out. Her lovely voice had lost its color. Something had eaten the life out of her, a shadow that clung to her and crippled her. It was rising to the surface through her sliced clothes and punctured skin.

  “I dreamed I burned myself until I was ashes all over,” she told me a few weeks later, and I felt the hair prickle up on my arms.

  “Did you tell the psychiatrist that?” I asked.

  “Yep,” she said. “That’s why he upped my Zoloft this time. That stuff doesn’t do shit.”

  In fact, in some weird way, Zoloft seemed to have taken the brakes off. Now, Valerie was even more careless in her dress and language. She had even less interest in the future.

  That night, she burned a smiley face into her shoulder.

  Dear Lord, what can I do? I begged. Where is this going to end?

  Thank God for Elena, my completely normal girl. Her matter-of-fact bitterness began to feel like a comfort to me. Seeing how hard it was for me to get Valerie out the door to her appointments, she started helping me do the work of “minding” her.

  “Valerie!” she yelled one morning. “You’ve got an hour before you need to leave!”

  “Stay out of my business!” came Valerie’s response from the depths of her room. She didn’t raise her voice to me, but she felt no such need to coddle her father or sister.

  “It is my business!” Elena answered. “I’m going, too. Wear something halfway normal this time so people don’t stare at you.”

  “I don’t give a shit if people stare at me! They can do whatever the hell they want!”

  “Valerie! Language!” That was me, adding my ineffective two cents to the fray.

  “I feel like we have to keep track of everything!” Elena told me angrily. “Valerie just coasts along because she knows we’ll get her where she needs to be. She’s the one joining the Air Force, but we’re the ones doing all the work. I’m sixteen, and I feel like I’m thirty-five!”

  “I know,” I said, and I meant it. I had never felt so old in my life. My nights of restful sleep were nothing but a memory.

  A tension-filled hour later, all three of us were in the car and on our way to the hospital. Elena was volunteering in the emergency room that day, and Valerie had another psychiatric appointment. As Valerie crossed the waiting room after this one, she was waving another prescription form.

  “He told me I could take this whole bottle of pills,” she gloated, “and it wouldn’t even kill me!”

  Well, isn’t he a genius! I thought.

  That was the day before the Fourth of July weekend. A colleague of Joe’s had invited the whole family to a get-together. The next morning dawned sunny and breezy. All our friends were going to be there. Even Elena wanted to go.

  But Valerie said she’d rather stay home.

  I waffled, and Elena waffled. What kind of trouble would our black sheep get herself into?

  “No, go on! I’ll be fine,” Valerie told us. “Jeez, Lanie, quit fussing! It’s not like I’m twelve. I’ll take a nap and listen to my new music.” And when I still hesitated in the doorway, she said in a kinder tone, “Go have fun, Momma. You deserve it.”

  So we went.

  At first, Elena and I met in corners every half hour or so to call home and assess. But as the beautiful day glided along, our worry ebbed away. Elena watched over the little children. I sat in a lawn chair in the shade and drank a glass of wine. Joe played raucous games of foosball with his colleagues. And by the time the sun was going down and we were toasting marshmallows with our friends, we actually felt peaceful and happy.

  It’s when you let down your guard that the ax falls.

  The phone rang while we were on the way home. Valerie sounded hysterical. It took several heart-stopping seconds before I could make out the words.

  She had swallowed the bottle of pills.

  I don’t know what I said or did. I can’t remember getting home. But I can still see Joe’s tense white face staring out over the steering wheel and hear Elena’s voice from the backseat, sharp with stress. Most of all, I can hear Valerie’s ragged sobs: “Tell them, Momma! I wasn’t trying to kill myself! Remember? He said I could take the whole bottle!”

  By the time we got t
hrough the hospital paperwork and could join our daughter in the ER room, Valerie was already asleep. The doctor had made her drink a mixture of charcoal, and it had stained her mouth and her teeth black. She lay tucked between turquoise hospital sheets, with her long toffee-colored hair fanned out around her. Under the artificial lights, with her pale face and black lips, she looked like something right out of a dream.

  Like a beautiful monster.

  Like a nightmare princess.

  Like a postapocalyptic zombie Sleeping Beauty.

  Elena sat between Joe and me, and she didn’t say a word. I felt sure Elena was seeing familiar faces. She had worked so hard at the hospital to build her reputation of dependability and order, and she had given the impression that she was an only child. Now, Valerie’s chaos had rolled right in like a tidal wave to embarrass Elena in her home away from home.

  The three of us sat by Valerie’s bedside in the ER all night long, watching the jerky sine waves of the heart and breathing monitors. Elena played with her phone. Joe barely spoke. I called the Air Force recruiter’s answering machine and told him once and for all that Valerie wouldn’t be joining the service.

  Around three in the morning, a psychiatrist came in and roused Valerie enough to sign the intake forms. Our semiconscious daughter got wheeled away to the psychiatric ward, and Joe and Elena and I stumbled outside into the first pink flush of dawn.

  “Yesterday, I felt like I was thirty-five,” Elena said dully. “Today, I feel like I’m fifty.”

  She was sixteen—sweet sixteen. But it hadn’t been that kind of year.

  That afternoon, the three of us made the pilgrimage to the hospital again, this time to the psychiatric ward upstairs. There were heavy steel security-locked doors in front of us. Was this real? Was this a dream?

  Did a child of mine really need this?

  Then there was the long bare white hallway beyond, highly polished, absolutely clean. A little further, and Valerie stood with a group of other patients, all alike in their mint-colored hospital scrubs. Her long honey-brown hair was the closest thing to color and life in that sterile place.

  Valerie saw us: one quick glimpse of her big dark eyes and pale oval face turned toward us, blurred slightly, like a reflection in water. Valerie saw us. And then she turned away.

  “We’re her family!” Elena snarled a few minutes later as we walked back out the double doors. “We’re her family! She didn’t even want us there!”

  Dr. Petras, the child psychiatrist, had been called in to consult, even though Valerie was over eighteen. He was a young doctor with dark sympathetic eyes and a little Edgar Allan Poe mustache.

  “Your daughter has borderline personality disorder,” he told us. “I’d like to send her to a psychiatric institution in England if one of you can make the trip with her.”

  Joe nodded and glanced at me.

  “Of course,” I said. “I can go.”

  “But, for this borderline disorder,” Joe said, “what’s the prognosis? What’s happening to her?”

  “To be honest,” Dr. Petras said, “it’s not all that good. After a decade or so, some of the patients seem to age out of it.”

  A decade! Valerie? Our practical, levelheaded girl, the same young woman who had earned good grades in high school—in a foreign language? But there was no time to grieve. I had plane tickets to buy.

  The ax had fallen—the new normal.

  Valerie and I traveled together to the psychiatric institution in England. It looked like a country manor, and Valerie loved it at once. Celebrities were known to stop their globe-trotting and come here in order to rest up from their cocaine addictions. It was the kind of place that served its patients afternoon tea.

  The next morning, I flew home by myself. I felt as if I were walking in my sleep. There is no blueprint for where I am in my life anymore, I thought. There is no blueprint for what my family has become.

  Valerie stayed at the psychiatric institution for two months. Her psychiatrist there called me regularly to update me on her progress. He had that perfect educated Oxford accent that absolutely inspires trust. I felt better just listening to him, even when he didn’t have good news.

  “We’re having some difficulty stabilizing her,” he said. “She hasn’t responded as well as we’d hoped to the new medication.”

  “Is there a special medication for borderline personality disorder?” I asked.

  “Who told you she has borderline personality disorder?”

  “The psychiatrist who saw her here, after the overdose,” I said. “He told us that’s what she had.”

  The British psychiatrist was silent for a moment. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said at last. “No, I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “Oh. What do you think my daughter has, then?”

  “Depression.”

  And his perfect accent made the word sound almost jolly.

  He was certainly right that they were having trouble stabilizing Valerie. I got a call from a staff member a few days later to inform me that Valerie had been cutting herself. She’d cut herself quite badly, in fact. Would I authorize them to take her to a hospital for stitches?

  It was the full heat of summer, and all the windows were open. Like most German houses, ours had no air-conditioning. But when I heard this, I felt clammy and chill. I found the nearest chair and sank into it.

  “How?” I managed into the phone.

  “She’s been using razors, ma’am,” the staff member told me.

  “But why—for God’s sake! Why are you letting her have razors?”

  “We don’t like the patients to feel constrained, ma’am. We have better outcomes when they feel that we trust them.”

  “Yes, but . . . I mean . . . trust?” My mind boggled for a few seconds. “Look—can I talk to my daughter?”

  Valerie must have been right next to the phone. “Hey, Momma,” she said in her cheerful way. She sounded like she always used to—like my wise, practical girl.

  “So, what’s this about these razors?” I asked, as if she were the sane one here and it was the orderly who was crazy.

  “Yeah, sorry about that, Momma. I was kinda bored. I got a teeny bit carried away.”

  “But, Valerie . . .”

  I trailed off. What to say? How to reach her?

  “So, it’s not helping?” I finally said. “It’s not helping, you being there?”

  “I dunno.” Valerie’s voice still sounded cheerful. “That depends on what you call help. Anyway, it’s kind of funny: the staff is freaking out. My therapist says they’re afraid I’m going to kill myself.”

  I froze.

  I felt as if some giant predator was hunting me, moving closer and closer. I could feel it, this huge invisible hunter. It was snuffling, turning this way and that . . .

  I couldn’t breathe. I had to hold my breath.

  “I’m not gonna say I haven’t thought about it,” Valerie went on in that same breezy tone. “Sometimes, it really sounds like a good idea. But I’ve told the staff that option’s off the table. I said, ‘I would never do that to my mother.’”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t speak for the lump in my throat.

  “So anyway, I’ll talk to you later, Momma. Love you! Bye.”

  I hung up the phone.

  And I cried.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Mrs. Dunkle, this is the school counselor calling. I’m worried about your daughter, Elena. She’s a little underweight. Is she eating well at home?”

  I pondered the question.

  “No, I’m afraid she isn’t,” I said. “In fact, to be honest, I don’t think any of us is eating well right now.”

  It was October, three months after Valerie’s overdose. Elena was finally attending the high school on base. She had let me enroll her there as a junior when the new school year came along. And she loved it. Already, she had made good friends.

  No, it wasn’t the school that was the problem.

  It was
Valerie.

  Valerie had come home at the end of August, and we had seen improvements in her outlook: she had voluntarily enrolled herself in university courses on base and was making As. She had also found a job on base. I was driving her there every morning and picking her up every evening. It was great to see her getting out of the house and staying busy.

  But when Valerie was at the house, she kept to her basement room and avoided us.

  This galled Elena. Once upon a time, Valerie had been her guide, the one she had looked to for guidance and help. Now, the gulf between them couldn’t be bridged.

  “We’re her family!” Elena said to me day after day, her voice savage with anger. “All she does is go on about her loser mental friends!” But at the same time, Elena didn’t seem to be entirely comfortable being Valerie’s family.

  “Do you have to look like that?” she yelled at Valerie as we drove home from the base. “Do you have to wear clothes that look like they’ve been in the trash? Did you see the way they all stared?”

  Valerie snorted. “Like I give a rat’s ass if they stare.”

  “I care!” shouted Elena. “I hate going anywhere with you. I don’t even want people to know you’re my sister!”

  “I’m sorry Miss Neat Freak can’t deign to acknowledge my presence,” Valerie said. “Did I ask to be your sister?”

  “Can we please just calm down?” I heard myself saying yet again, as I had heard myself say a hundred times before. And then, as the voices got louder, “Stop it! Stop it! Just—please! Just shut up!”

  That night, again, I lay awake and promised myself—really swore to myself—that tomorrow, I would keep my cool and help my family stay balanced and cheerful. But by the end of the next day, all four of us were standing outside Valerie’s bedroom door, and all four of us were shouting.

  No wonder the school counselor was worried about Elena’s weight.

  “Elena’s always been a picky, nervous eater,” I told the counselor now. “She’s such a perfectionist that even back in grade school, stress and nerves could choke off her appetite. She always had trouble eating breakfast if a big test was coming up, so I’m not surprised, with all the stress in the house, that she’s having trouble now.”