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

by Clare B. Dunkle

  “But Mrs. Dunkle, Elena’s quite thin,” the counselor pointed out. “Stress is one thing, but she’s less than ninety percent of the expected weight for her height.”

  Guilt flashed through me. Had I noticed this?

  Yes, I’d known that Elena was thinner than the other girls in her class. But members of my family tend to run thin until old age, even though we eat everything in sight. I’ve always baked with butter, and I’ve always baked a lot, but I was still wearing a favorite high school skirt when I reached forty. And Joe, too, was practically a spaghetti noodle until he was in his thirties. He couldn’t put weight on back in high school no matter how much he ate.

  So it hadn’t surprised me that Elena was staying thin. She seemed to be running true to type. But was she? Or was this something more serious?

  “Elena has been slightly underweight ever since she hit adolescence,” I said. “But her weight doesn’t vary by much. It’s not as if she does anything extreme. You know, I was worried about her, too, for a while—she seemed so nervous. But we took her to a child psychiatrist a couple of years ago, and he and his staff tested her extensively.”

  “What did you find out?” asked the counselor.

  “Oh, that everything was fine,” I answered. “There was nothing that teenage moods couldn’t explain.”

  “Well, maybe you could encourage her to bring snacks with her to school,” suggested the counselor. “If she’s not eating well at home, maybe she can eat more here. She could stop by my office to have a snack. It’s usually pretty quiet.”

  “Yes, I’d imagine that things are calmer there than they are at home,” I said.

  This may have been the understatement of the year.

  That afternoon, when Elena got home from the bus stop, I tried to see her with fresh eyes. She was that same quick, nervous girl she’d always been. Maybe she was a little thinner this year, but her eyes were sparkling, and she still had a curvy figure.

  “The school counselor called today,” I said. “She’s worried about how well you’re eating.”

  “I have been pretty stressed,” Elena admitted.

  “What would you like to eat tonight?” I asked. “We’ll eat whatever you want.”

  She brightened. “Could we order a supreme pizza? There’s this pizza at the food court that I really love.”

  “No problem,” I said. And we ordered supreme pizzas pretty often after that.

  As the semester progressed, Elena stopped by the counselor’s office frequently to talk and blow off steam, and whenever she did, the counselor checked her weight. Elena was consistently running about ten pounds below median weight for her age, but at least the numbers were stable, and they didn’t fall into an unhealthy range. And Elena continued to do well in school and in her volunteering at the hospital, too. No longer did she wail that she hated her life. She was having real fun with her new friends. She was the most engaged she’d been in years.

  But the stress in the house wasn’t getting better. In fact, it was getting worse.

  I threw the front door open one morning as Valerie came walking up the sidewalk to the house.

  “Valerie! I was up half the night!” I said. “Where were you? I checked your room at two in the morning, and you were gone!”

  “Oh, sorry, Momma! Rick was having a tough time, so he came by and picked me up and we sat in his truck and talked. He’s been afraid ever since he was in the psych ward with me that they’re gonna kick him out of the Air Force. Seriously, Momma, we were just down the street, just talking.”

  “But I called and called!”

  “Sorry about that, I didn’t have my phone with me. It’s somewhere in my room.”

  I followed her down the stairs into the gloom of the basement. At one time, this had been a separate apartment, but the landlord had rented it to us along with the rest of the house. He had been apologetic about the scratched-up walls and battered and stained blue carpet. “I’ll fix it up for you,” he had promised.

  But I had known Valerie would have these rooms. “No, please—it’s perfect,” I had told him.

  Now, great drifts of Valerie’s belongings covered up that stained carpet: crumpled stacks of sheet music, a broken coffee table, a metal coil of loose guitar strings, broken tubes of mascara.

  “But I didn’t hear it ring,” I said. “If your phone was in here, why didn’t I hear it ring?” That was better than saying what I wanted to say, which was Why did you let me go through that, dialing your number over and over and hoping each time that I’d finally hear your voice?

  “It’s on vibrate,” Valerie said, scanning the rubble as she strode into the room. Her hiking boot landed on a music CD, and it gave an unmusical snap. “Oh, hell!” She stopped in the middle of the drifts of trash, gave one last look, and shrugged. “Anyhoo, it’s around here someplace.”

  “But, Valerie, you can’t keep doing this to me!” I said. “I can’t keep losing sleep like that, I was so worried, I almost called the police! The other night, you promised me—you promised me! Besides, you were grounded.”

  “Oh, that’s right!” Valerie said in a tone of discovery. “Still, it wasn’t like I went anywhere fun. I was only down at the corner, Momma, really. We just talked because Rick’s having a hard time—all we did was talk.”

  And the thing is, I believed her. I believed that Valerie didn’t mean to cause me trouble and heartache. It was as if she had developed some strange superpower, some knack for creating chaos wherever she went.

  She’s backsliding, I thought. She’s losing the progress she made in England. We need to find a way to help her hold on to the ground she gained there.

  So I came up with the idea to send Valerie back to England for follow-up visits with her therapist. It was expensive, but if it helped her hold on to the progress she’d made with him, it would be worth it.

  Valerie loved the idea, and the first couple of visits seemed to help. But then the sessions with her therapist seemed to get overshadowed by the partying she did with her psych-hospital friends. She came home from one visit sporting an eyebrow piercing. And when she wound up missing a flight due to a lost weekend in London, we called the experiment off.

  That meant Valerie was back to regular sessions at the military hospital again. But those doctors moved in and out to support the soldiers downrange. Valerie had gone there six or seven times, and I didn’t think she’d seen the same doctor twice.

  We’re starting all over, every time, I agonized. Every two weeks, a new guy starts from zero. Maybe a German professional could help us. It’s a shame Dr. Eichbaum is so far away.

  So I found Valerie a German psychologist. “How did it go?” I asked her afterward.

  “Fantastic!” she said. “He told me there’s nothing wrong with me smoking cigarettes.”

  “What? You’ve got to be kidding me!”

  “No lie, Mom. He says smoking is only bad for some people. Since our family doesn’t have any cancer or lung stuff in it, he says you can tell it wouldn’t be a problem for me. It makes sense if you think about it. You know Grandma smoked forever.”

  “No, it does not make sense!”

  I thought she must have misunderstood him, so I asked the psychologist myself. He was a little man with round pink cheeks and a bullet head and a habit of bouncing forward onto his toes as he talked, like an ex-gymnast. He smoked cherry-flavored pipe tobacco, a habit I might have found endearing if it weren’t for the grave lecture he gave me on how to tell if smoking was right for your body type.

  I declined to schedule another appointment.

  That night, I once again lay in bed and worried. Valerie had lost her job on base that day, and Joe was so furious about it that he practically steamed. He saw her self-destructive behavior as a willful refusal to grow up, but I was sure it was something else.

  She’s sick, I thought. She needs regular care. She’s not going to get better if we can’t find her the right professionals. Just the three of us, trying to guide her�
�really, just yelling at her—we can’t make her well.

  Valerie needed careful, thoughtful, sensitive professional care from a psychiatrist and a therapist who could truly get to know her, just as they had done in England. It seemed like such a simple thing, the obvious first step. But I couldn’t manage to find it for her here.

  She could get it back in Texas, though.

  I lay in bed and pondered this idea. It wasn’t my first choice, but it had a lot to offer. Valerie could go to college back in our home city, and with our contacts in the area, we could find her great care. She still had friends in the area, too. We had a support network there. She just wouldn’t have us. We wouldn’t move home for another year and a half.

  She needs a doctor more than she needs her family, though, I told myself. All we do these days is fight, and that’s just giving her a reason to backslide. Valerie seems to thrive on alienating her father and sister. We’re all spinning our wheels.

  The book I had written about Martin and his computerized dog had just sold for a very good price. The whole family rallied around to take me out to dinner to celebrate. It was a chain restaurant on base: bright Mexican tiles and big American portions. In honor of my celebration, Valerie was looking less rumpled, and we were actually not fighting for once.

  I glanced at Joe across the appetizers: You bring it up.

  No, you bring it up, his eyes told me.

  “Valerie, do you think you might want to try college back home now?” I asked. “You could start in January.”

  “I thought we were stuck here for another year and a half,” she pointed out. “Dad’s contract and all that.”

  “I’m talking about you going home first. Dorm life.”

  We discussed it as a family over our entrées while we ate my celebration meal. Perhaps it was the fact that we were out in public where no one could shout, but we actually had a reasonable conversation. Somewhat to my surprise, Valerie liked the idea. She liked it very much.

  “I think it’s time for me to grow up,” she told us.

  Over the next few weeks, Valerie began to make more of an effort in the college courses she was taking on base. This seemed to be a promising sign. She talked often about the move to Texas, and I found a great psychiatrist for her only a few miles from the dorms. Dr. Harris came highly recommended, and when I spoke to him on the phone, I felt better at once. He specialized in treating college students, and his mild, interested manner reminded me of Dr. Eichbaum. I thought he would be a good match to Valerie’s laid-back temperament.

  But as the weeks went by, Elena opposed the idea more and more strongly.

  “She’s tricking you, Mom,” she said. “She doesn’t want to grow up or get better or anything. She just wants to get away from us where she can fall apart without us bugging her about it. This is going to be a disaster!”

  I sighed. Why was Elena always so ready to see the worst in her sister?

  “I don’t think it’ll be a disaster,” I said. “Remember, Valerie will have a very good support network there. And you know things aren’t working out for her here. She needs the kind of professional help she can’t get.”

  “She won’t get it there either, Mom. She won’t go.”

  “Don’t you think you’re being a little extreme? Valerie did excellent work with her doctors last summer. She’s never missed an appointment.”

  “Yeah, and she did excellent partying with her psycho friends, too.”

  “Well, sending her to England alone was probably more temptation than most young adults could handle. Look, your sister is finally doing what we’ve been asking her to do now for a year: she’s finally working toward a life goal. I have to show her that I trust her and respect her desire to improve.”

  “She hasn’t improved, Mom,” Elena said. “She’s excited for all the wrong reasons. She just wants to get away from you, so she can go crazy without you calling her on it all the time.”

  “So, what you’re saying is that she needs a psychiatrist,” I said. “Again: This is the only way to get her one.”

  “It won’t help. She won’t go. This is going to be a disaster.”

  Typical Elena! I thought with a sigh.

  Christmas came, and we flew back for our once-every-two-years trip to the States to visit our relatives. Then Valerie and I stayed behind in Texas for a week, getting her settled into her classes and dorm room. We shopped for practical organizers and nice dorm furnishings, and she and I had a great time.

  It was fun to be with Valerie without her father and sister around. She relaxed and became sunny and happy again. And she really seemed to be committed to this. She even stopped smoking.

  “Dr. Harris is nice,” she told me after their first appointment. “He reminds me of my therapist in England.”

  This seemed like a particularly good sign.

  At the end of the week, I flew back to Germany, almost buoyant with hope. A new year was starting. The old, dark year was gone. This was going to be a better year—better for all of us.

  But it wasn’t.

  Almost from the moment my plane landed in Germany, I began to get bad news.

  “I didn’t go to class today, Momma. It’s the crowds.”

  “You’re—what? You’re afraid of crowds?”

  “They all stare at me!”

  “But, Valerie, you used to say you couldn’t care less! Did you tell Dr. Harris? What does he say?”

  “He gave me new pills.”

  “But what did he say?”

  “He said take them.”

  I hung on to hope wherever I could. Unlike Elena’s gloomy predictions, Valerie was going to all her psychiatric appointments. And Dr. Harris was wonderful. He was seeing Valerie every week, and he had arranged for her to see a therapist twice a week: a psychologist who specialized in adolescent disorders.

  “Valerie is a little chaotic right now,” he told me when I called, but his tone seemed reassuring. “We just need to help her find her balance.”

  Comforted, I hung up the phone.

  But the next night, another frantic phone call would come through: “I can’t face the cafeteria. I’m living on microwave popcorn.”

  And the night after that, another one: “I hate the history professor. She glares at me when I come to class. I don’t like to go to class anymore.”

  And another one: “I slept through my exam.”

  It was all very hard for me to comprehend. I, too, had had my ups and downs in college, but I had graduated in three years. Joe had had his ups and downs and lost weekends, too, but he had survived the pressure-cooker classes to get his engineering degree. Melting down was something one did at home—not when working on one’s chosen future.

  Still, it was time to face facts. Regular psychiatrist or not, this experiment just wasn’t working—

  This very expensive experiment.

  “Valerie,” I said late one night, “I think you’d better withdraw from class and come home.” I always seemed to talk to her late at night because that was afternoon back in the States.

  “No way!” she answered. “I’m not doing that.”

  “Well then, you’ll have to find a way to make this work. Talk to Dr. Harris. You can’t just not go to class.”

  “No, you’re right, Momma. I can do this. I’ll get it together. It’s not like I’m not handling it, either—I have As in my other two classes.”

  “Good for you! You need to build on that success then.”

  And I hung up the phone and went to bed to stare at the ceiling, overwrought and jittery with stress.

  I got no writing done anymore. I barely managed to push myself through my days, too tired to stay awake but too upset to go to sleep. I felt like a puppet, never knowing when I would be jerked up or down.

  Then, a week or two later, a call came through from a number I didn’t recognize. The voice on the phone was crisp and businesslike.

  “This is Valerie’s therapist.”

  And I could hear Valerie in
the background, sobbing.

  “Valerie has to go back into residential care for six months at least,” the therapist told me. “She needs structure; she can’t handle life on her own at this point. I’ve spoken to your insurance company, but they won’t cover it.”

  “Okay . . . ,” I said, faint from breathlessness. “Okay . . .”

  Six months! Six months of care?

  Valerie took the phone. She was weeping with shame and fury. “She’s lying! Momma, I’m fine! I’ve got this!”

  I knew which one of the two I believed.

  “Honey,” I said. “Honey, it’ll be okay . . .”

  “I won’t do it!” she said. “I won’t go back into treatment.”

  “But . . . But you loved treatment. You know you did.”

  Six months? Tens of thousands of dollars!

  “This is bullshit, Momma! You don’t need to pay for me to sit around and have tea on the lawn. I trusted this woman! I shouldn’t have talked to her. She promised not to tell!”

  Valerie’s therapist took the phone again.

  “Confidentiality is important,” she said. “But I believe Valerie is a danger to herself.”

  A danger to herself? Sleeping through class was one thing, but—danger?

  Stress crawled up and down my body like prickly-footed centipedes, tightening my shoulders and raising the hair on my arms, and I felt like that puppet again—punched, jerked around, completely helpless . . .

  A danger to herself! A danger!

  But Valerie refused to go into treatment. And because she was over eighteen, there was nothing I could do.

  When I told Joe, he was pale from stress and grim with disappointment. “If she won’t do what the doctor recommends, then she can come back here,” he said. “She needs structure? Great! We can provide structure.” And he drew up a daunting list of rules.

  That was the end of the argument.

  “Good-bye, Momma,” Valerie said on the phone. “I’m not letting anybody run my life. I’m leaving Texas. I don’t need this shit. I’ve got friends.”

  “Friends? What friends do you have outside of Texas?”