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

by Clare B. Dunkle

  Susan’s brow furrowed. “Pools?”

  “You’ve never heard of a rusalka?” I countered. “That’s either a drowned girl who was wronged and killed herself, like Ophelia, or a water nymph, like the Little Mermaid. Either way, the rusalki are predatory spirits that haunt sources of water, and they drown men without pity. Deadly female water spirits show up all over Europe and Asia. I know of a mythic water demon like that from Hawaii.”

  Susan leaned forward, intent again—but probably just intent on bringing this lecture to a close. She asked, “But how does this ‘water demon’ relate to you and Elena?”

  That was a good question.

  I didn’t know.

  “It’s a pattern,” I concluded. “An age-old human pattern, like Pluto kidnapping Persephone. But this particular age-old human pattern has a special meaning for Elena. She surrounds herself with images of mermaids.”

  And she didn’t even grow up like I did, I thought, with the tragic mermaid who loses her prince. In her generation, they’ve tampered with the story to make it work out to a happy ending.

  When was it? I mused. When did my daughter first start showing me pictures of mermaids and Ophelias? She would do Internet searches and scour library books to find them. Most important was Millais’s famous Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, so delicate, surrounded by flowers. Her clothes spread wide, and mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up . . .

  Was it? Yes, it had to be. It must have been after the rape.

  Would I be sharing that with Susan?

  No.

  “So, if you sum up the patterns,” I concluded, “the mermaid/Ophelia embodies a history of sexual violence or mistreatment. She wanted a normal life, but it was a man who took that life away from her. Heartbreak drove her into the water—or back into the water. It was a step from life toward death, and the mermaid is happy to repay the favor. Think about this: the mermaid is the strong one when she meets a human man. He’s the one who needs to fear for his life. Is that why mermaids bring mistreated girls such a sense of satisfaction? Is that why they seek out water? Because mermaids have transcended a man’s mistreatment, and now they can kill?”

  Susan declined to comment. I brought up religion, she was probably thinking. I wanted indignation, vulnerability, and a reexamination in a new light of this family’s most fundamental structures. I wanted to break something open, to get something started. This has nothing to do with what I wanted.

  Well, no. Because her approach had been idiotic.

  The therapy session ended. I woke up Elena to say good-bye, and then I drove home to the orphanage. I walked quickly through the silent halls, temporarily buoyed up by the talk I’d had. It had been fun. For one hour, I had had fun.

  At the turning to my hall, I bumped into a young woman with a black ponytail. Her toddler son was rolling a tricycle down the center of the hallway. I didn’t want to interfere with his play, so I fell into step next to the woman. She gave me a wan smile and looked away.

  He’s sick, I thought with swift, instinctive recognition. He’s very sick. That’s why she has that look in her eyes.

  The first night Elena and I had spent at the orphanage, I’d thought, I’ll bet I make lots of friends here. But I hadn’t. I had discovered that I didn’t want to make friends. No one here wanted to make friends. We didn’t wish one another ill, but our children, our parents, or our spouses were here for reasons that terrified us. We didn’t want to have to ask or answer painful questions.

  So, as I walked beside the young woman, neither of us spoke. We just smiled vaguely down at the busy little boy. At the end of the hall, he turned around and rolled back the way he had come, and I unlocked my door.

  “Bye,” I said—the first word I had spoken.

  “Bye,” the woman answered, turning away.

  The minute I walked into the room, my happy mood popped like a bubble. Sad feelings and dreary memories detached themselves from the walls and rushed over to cling to me. Too many angry words and wretched silences . . .

  This room was filling up with unhappiness.

  It was too late in the day to get any work done now—or, at least, that’s what I told myself. I shook a blanket out over my neatly made bed and curled up underneath it.

  I could lecture Susan about myth and folklore to put off talking about the truth, but the fact was that I had begun to feel a deep alienation from the drab, silent person my daughter had become. She wasn’t a thing like the Elena I had known. We felt so far apart now that I didn’t know if we would ever manage to bridge the gulf between us.

  Elena and I had done it before. I had looked inside my angry, dramatic teenager and felt a spark of kinship with that young person struggling toward adulthood—yes, and respect, too, because the birth of a grown-up is as messy and painful as the original birth was. And Elena had looked inside me and felt pity for the sad, anxious worrier her mother could be.

  But this Elena wasn’t like that. I couldn’t find my way to her.

  And this Elena couldn’t find her way back to me.

  So I slept. It felt like all I could do. I had nothing more useful to contribute. I woke up long enough to answer the phone and fend off Joe’s concerned questions and Valerie’s down-to-earth comments, and I made them tell me things so they wouldn’t notice that I wasn’t telling them anything anymore.

  Day by day, Joe and Valerie had their own bad news to report. Simon was getting worse. His neck hadn’t healed right, and the new treatments weren’t helping. Dylan, my blue beauty, wasn’t eating. Clint had left to go work in Georgia, and Gemma had colic again. She was waking Valerie up hour after hour every night.

  If I were there, I could do something to help. But I was stuck where I was. And I wasn’t in a position to help anybody.

  I snuffled and sniffled with sinusitis so bad that it sent me to the emergency room twice. I took cold medicine day and night. I woke up to drive Elena in, and I came home and fell asleep, and I woke up to drive her home, and she fell asleep, and I fell asleep.

  Seven days a week, nothing varied our routine.

  But one morning, Elena called to me from the bathroom, and her voice had a new tone in it. There was a quickness there—perhaps a hint of excitement.

  “Mom, can you come here?”

  Elena, excited? Finally excited? Maybe today would be a different day—a better day.

  “What’s up?” I asked, coming over.

  Elena was standing in front of the sink with her back to me. “I can’t get it to stop,” she said.

  A swiftly flowing stream of dark-colored blood was sliding down her arm into the sink. Maybe it was the white porcelain and the stainless steel drain that made that stream of brownish blood look dirty. All I know is that I felt the ugliness of it like a physical blow.

  The blood was slipping from a deep gash on Elena’s forearm near the bend of her elbow. It was a razor cut—a deliberate cut. I grabbed a blue-checked hand towel off the top of the stack of clean towels on the shelf and clamped it over the wound.

  “Lie down,” I said. “Right here on the floor.”

  Elena lay down on the tile with her head on my lap, and I held her arm up in the air over her head. Simple first aid, learned out of boredom one summer in my lonely childhood, when I had devoted myself to the study of my brother’s Boy Scout handbook.

  A gash. An ugly, vicious cut. A deliberate mutilation. Damage, deliberate damage to the precious body I had cherished and nurtured—to the body I had guarded with my own life since before she was born!

  I should understand. I had understood my character, Miranda, when she had cut herself to find relief from her mental anguish. I had even tried to understand the lost and wounded Valerie, with her patterns of burns. But now, I felt nothing but cold, hard anger. I was done with all this. I didn’t want to understand.

  It took more than ten minutes of pressure before the wound began to close, and the whole time, there was nothing to look at but the underside of the sink. I should get that cobweb after we
get up, I thought. And then, unhappily, This hand towel is probably ruined.

  “What did you use?” I asked.

  “My razor.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I had a panic attack.”

  “Elena, I was right here!” I said. “Why didn’t you call me if you were in trouble?”

  “It was last night. You were sleeping. I didn’t want to bother you.”

  “And you thought this wasn’t going to bother me?”

  We both fell silent at that. Elena’s logic was eluding me. As usual.

  Elena herself was feeling not only excited but also upbeat. She looked happier than she had looked in days. Her high spirits disgusted me. I was done with understanding. There was nothing about this I wanted to understand.

  This, Susan, is why the whole thing feels demonic, I thought with grim fury. There’s a hideous feeding off pain here, a hideous perversion of happiness.

  Elena’s excitement only served to make me act deliberately, excessively sensible. “Here, hold this towel in place while I grab my purse,” I told her. “And take a book. We’ll probably be there a while.”

  “I’m not going to the ER,” she said.

  “What? Elena, we have to go! That cut needs six or seven stitches at least!”

  “I won’t go,” Elena repeated. “I’m not waiting at an ER for hours. I need to get to treatment.”

  My sensible demeanor was gone. I was back to yelling again. “All you do is sleep through treatment!”

  But Elena had already picked up her backpack and was walking through the door. “If you take me to the ER, I’ll refuse care,” she said over her shoulder. “When I get to treatment, Ms. Carter can tape it.”

  Steaming mad, I stalked after this awful stranger through the orphanage halls. Was Elena doing this just to upset me? For the sake of the cheerful volunteers, I kept my mouth shut until we got into the car, but once there, I couldn’t contain myself.

  “Okay, that’s not just crazy,” I said. “That’s stupid!”

  “Crazy. Stupid. Thanks, Mom,” she said.

  “Can you give me one good reason why you’re refusing to be responsible about this?”

  Elena stared out the window at the morning traffic. We were stopped at a light, with cars all around us. Traffic was heavy. Everywhere, commuters were heading to work. From outside our car, we must look like just another carpool.

  “I don’t want to have to wait,” she said finally.

  “Well, you should have thought of that before you sliced yourself up,” I said. “That’s too big not to stitch, and even so, it’ll leave a scar.”

  Elena settled back and closed her eyes.

  “I like scars,” she murmured.

  And there it was, like a slap across the face: more scars! More cuts, wounds, burns. Damage to my babies—my precious children!

  I wanted to scream. I wanted to push my fist through the car horn. I wanted to floor the accelerator until the other cars became a blur, to punch us through to a world where things made sense. Because this cut—this Elena!—made no sense. I refused to allow it to make sense.

  That’s it! I thought. I’m done with this! This person is a closed book to me. She is a riddle I have no more desire to solve. I dropped her off at treatment and went home and went to sleep. I escaped from her and her problems entirely.

  I know what the next day was. It was Saturday.

  Ordinarily, Saturday would mean nothing to Elena and me. Treatment ran seven days a week. But this Saturday was Family Day. Once a month, staff and patients rallied around to help educate their friends and relations about their condition.

  This Saturday was my first Family Day. I dropped Elena off at the door as usual, but this time, I parked the car and followed her inside.

  The receptionist waved me down the hall toward a classroom-size conference room. About twenty parents, siblings, and friends of patients were sitting in a big circle there. They were talking together in low voices, making the kinds of jokes and comments people make before a tough training class to remind themselves that they’re ready for anything.

  I didn’t have anybody to joke with, and I didn’t feel ready at all. I didn’t know anybody there, and even if Elena had been there, I wouldn’t have felt that I knew her, either. But I took heart from the general atmosphere of nervousness in the room. Others were feeling what I was feeling, too, even if they had friends or relatives to help them get through it.

  A small buffet of breakfast foods waited on a table by the door: coffee, bagels, and fruit. I reached for the coffee first and then, even though I wasn’t particularly hungry, I selected a whole-grain bagel and some slices of cantaloupe. As I headed toward a vacant chair, I noticed the generous plates of bagels and fruit balanced on other laps.

  Look at me—I’m a healthy breakfast! our plates were proclaiming to the world. This person doesn’t have food issues—no sirree!

  The psychologist in charge of Family Day was familiar to none of us. She’d been invited in from another clinic. This way, she told us, if she brought up a particular issue, we wouldn’t think, She’s talking about me! And we could speak frankly to her, too, without wondering if our comments would come back to haunt us during the next family therapy session.

  Family therapy. I spared a second of annoyance for Susan. Demonic possession—what kind of stupid topic was that?

  The psychologist launched into a lecture on the way eating disorders change the brain. These changes can actually show up on MRI scans, making the brains of some anorexics physically different from the brain of a non-anorexic. The area of the brain that’s different controls body image, and that means an anorexic truly can’t see himself or herself the way healthy people do. So it doesn’t do any good, the psychologist told us, to point out how skinny an anorexic has become. It isn’t psychological, it’s physiological: the brain itself won’t be able to process that image.

  As I scribbled notes on a little memo pad, I thought about how hard it was for me to understand my daughter. So it wasn’t just my imagination after all: Elena’s brain truly was different.

  Next, the psychologist worked through a list of dos and don’ts. One of them reinforced what Elena had told me when I first came to visit her: “Don’t mention physical appearance at all. Even a compliment can redirect the attention of an anorexic to body image, which is never a comfortable thing for anorexics to think about.”

  I remembered all the times I had complimented Elena’s appearance. Then I thought about how quick we humans are to notice the lack of a compliment and misinterpret that silence as disapproval. Then I gave a sigh.

  I thought, This is just another one of those anorexia no-win situations.

  But the friendly attitude of the other family members steadied me. Some of them had been coping with their loved one’s anorexia for over a decade, and yet they were staying positive. They were holding on to their patience and compassion, and they watched for little signs of progress.

  “It’s like a yo-yo,” one veteran said. “It’s up and down, but the lows don’t go as low, and the highs are a little bit higher each time.”

  In fact, this group of family members seemed refreshingly normal, and that secretly amazed me. I realized I had been expecting to find a shadow in their eyes, some collective sign of remorse. Then I realized what an overwhelming load of shame I’d been carrying around with me for the last four years. It had started building up when Valerie had first begun to self-harm, as if those marks on her body were cut and burned into my body, as well, because I should have—I would have!—defended that body with my life.

  Once again, my imagination showed me that image of the nasty dark stream of blood running down the sink. Meanwhile, Elena’s voice was saying serenely, I like scars.

  I gave a shudder of disgust.

  Was it me? Had she done that just to get back at me because I wouldn’t let her leave? She knew how painful I had found Valerie’s cutting and burning.

  “What do you do if your
patient wants to leave treatment?” I asked the group. “What do you do if you just want to support her in treatment, but you find that you’ve become the enforcer, the one who’s pushing her to stay?” And that becomes the reason neither one of you can get along anymore? I thought.

  A veteran mother nodded. “That’s a tough one,” she said. And a father shared his experience about his daughter’s prior hospital stay, when he and his wife had had to stand up to her repeated attempts to leave.

  Nobody could really answer my question, but they made me feel better anyway. At least I wasn’t the only one dealing with this.

  After a couple of hours, Elena and the other patients joined our group: nine or ten rail-thin young women with their arms around one another for support. Taking turns, they read us their own list of dos and don’ts. Elena had chosen to read out this one:

  “When your patient talks negatively to you, remember that sometimes it’s just the eating disorder talking. Don’t react. Give her time to re-center.” She looked up at me. “For instance, if she says she wants to do something self-destructive, like stop treatment, just let her cool off for a while. She’s just frustrated. She doesn’t mean it.”

  And the other family members shuffled in their chairs, caught my eye, and gave me a smile.

  After lunch, the psychologist split us family members into two groups and paired each group with the patients who didn’t have family among us. This way, we could ask questions freely without provoking our relative or hurting her feelings, and our group of patients could speak freely in return.

  My group held about ten family members and four patients, none of whom we knew. But, although we didn’t know them, these patients knew us very well. They sat through group therapy sessions all the time and heard one another’s history over and over.

  I could tell that the patients in our group felt sorry for us. They genuinely wanted to help. They sat at the front of the room, facing us, and for an hour, they did their best to answer our questions.

  “Why don’t you want us to give you compliments?” a friend of a patient asked. “If you’ve been recovering, don’t you want to know that the hard work is paying off? Don’t you want to hear that you’re looking healthier?”