A patient with her hair back in a sandy-blond ponytail spoke up. Although she was thin, she looked athletic, like a long-distance runner.
“That’s easy,” she said. “I equal good looks with my lowest weight, so if someone says, ‘Hey, you’re looking great today,’ in my mind, I think, You think I look good now? You should have seen me a month ago! You should have seen me five pounds ago. That’s when I really looked good.”
“But what if you know that the person saw you a month ago? What if I say, ‘Hey, you’re looking so much better now that you’re at a healthier weight’?”
The girl shrugged, and her long plait of hair twitched like a horsetail flicking away flies. “That just . . . doesn’t make sense,” she said. She said this reluctantly but firmly, the way a polite Christian might react to a description of the birth of Buddha. “Even if you say that,” she went on, “you can’t make me believe it. I’ll think, Yeah, but he’s wrong. He doesn’t remember. I looked better a month ago. Look, I know I look better when I’ve been running my miles.”
She fell silent, and we fell silent, staring at one another across the gulf of our differences.
It’s hopeless, I thought. There’s no way across. They can’t get to us, and we can’t get to them.
“What I can’t handle is all the lies,” a father said. “I understand the not eating, but the constant lying—it hurts, and it makes me angry. My daughter should know that she can tell me anything by now. I’d give my life to help her. Then she lies to me over and over, stupid lies, lies I’m bound to find out are lies, like whether or not she finished her yogurt.”
There was a pause. Then the oldest patient spoke.
“Just please remember,” she said, “that we don’t want the lies to hurt. It’s not personal. But it’s so hard to explain how this disease makes you feel. Let’s say that I go out with my friends to a movie. I want to enjoy myself, relax, and forget life for a while. Most of all, I want to forget about my anorexia that badgers me all day long. But then my friends buy popcorn, and they try to get me to eat it.
“But if I eat five pieces of that popcorn, I won’t even see the movie. I won’t be able to think about anything else except how my self-control broke down. I’ll be locked in a battle with my eating disorder voice for hours: ‘Look at you, you pig, you can’t stop shoveling food in your face!’ I may not sleep that night. I may have to run five miles to shut that voice up.
“But I can’t tell my friends that,” she concluded. “There’s no way they would understand. So I just say, ‘I already ate before I came.’”
We family members sat silent for a minute. I thought, That is one of the saddest, most honest statements I’ve ever heard.
“You’ve been answering our questions,” the father said next. “Is there anything you’d like to ask us?”
The patients stirred and glanced at one another. This wasn’t something they’d prepared for. Clearly, it wasn’t a part of past Family Days.
“I do have a question,” one of them admitted in a small voice. “Is there ever a point when you can’t take it anymore? When you just say, ‘That’s it!’ and you stop loving us?”
And with a guilty flush, I remembered my anger: That’s it !
“No,” the veteran mother said firmly. “We never stop loving. Never.”
She was right. I felt it in my heart. She spoke for all of us.
After the hour was up, we filed back into the main room, and the patients joined their family members again. One girl sat across her father’s lap, with an arm around him and an arm around her mother. She looked about thirteen, but Elena had already told me that she was in her twenties.
Her parents were wonderful people—relaxed, easygoing people. They looked like a pair of old flower children. Elena had told me that they’d driven across the country to rescue her from this latest health crisis. They had boxed up all her belongings and brought her and her things safely home.
Now, the three of them were relishing this moment as a family. They were all three smiling, quietly joking, glad to be together.
This is how I choose to remember this patient. She’s dead now. She lost her fight with anorexia. I know that her parents grieve for her every day. But I also know, as the veteran mother said, that they will never stop loving. And I honor that love.
For the last item on the program, Elena had volunteered to be the subject of an IFS psychodrama. The psychologist explained to us that in this psychodrama, the various voices inside Elena’s head would do their talking out loud so that we could all hear them. These aren’t like the voices of schizophrenia, she explained: we all have different parts of ourselves that join our interior monologue. Maybe we could recognize the idea of a critical voice, the voice that comments on the things we do. Or some of us might have a scared voice, or even a happy voice.
I thought of my timid, fluttering Edward Gorey mother, trailing her handkerchief past flowered wallpaper and potted ferns: What do we do? I couldn’t help wondering if anyone else in the room had a Victorian voice.
The psychologist went on to tell us that because eating disorders are so isolating, most outsiders don’t have any idea how abusive and upsetting an eating disorder patient’s interior monologue can be. Elena had worked with her therapist and friends so that the different girls could portray her inner voices. That way, we could get an idea what our patients were going through.
We all scooted our chairs into a circle again, and Elena sat barefoot in the middle of the group. She looked completely calm, but I could feel myself pushing into the back of my chair, as if I were in a car that was going too fast. Flutters of worry plucked at me, and that Victorian mother inside me woke up:
Oh, no! Oh, no!
Was I ready for this? Did I really want to hear this?
Elena looked beautiful, with her long brown hair down on her shoulders and her dark eyelashes demurely brushing her cheeks. This was her territory, physical as well as mental, and she was as relaxed as I was nervous.
Then, one by one, her voices came in to confront her.
First was the Critical Voice. The Critical Voice stood behind her and talked down at her, ignoring us completely.
“You little shit! You little whore! What makes you think anyone cares about you? You’re not worth anybody’s time! You failed at your job, you dropped out of school, your friends don’t remember you, you’re fat and ugly. You’ve screwed up your whole life, you stupid bitch!”
I couldn’t believe it! My beautiful, sensitive child—was that what she had to live with every day?
Then came the Caring Voice. This wasn’t directed at Elena, though. It had its back to Elena and faced the rest of the world.
“Please let me help you,” it begged, holding out a hand to us. “I know what it’s like to suffer. I’ll listen. I want to help.”
And I thought about Elena’s endless compassion—compassion for everyone except herself.
Meanwhile, the Critical Voice continued its furious tirade:
“You little shit! You little whore!”
The Sad Voice joined them, so quiet that it could hardly be heard. It sat huddled in a ball by Elena’s feet.
“I hurt so much,” it moaned to itself. “I can’t make the pain stop. I’ve lost so much. There’s no point in going on.”
That was the rape, I thought, almost in tears. I remembered my bright, bouncy, bubbly, happy little girl. I had dropped her off at boarding school . . .
And I had never seen her again.
Meanwhile, “I’ll listen,” the Caring Voice promised us gently.
“You’ve screwed up your whole life, you stupid bitch!”
Finally, the Eating Disorder Voice came in. It crouched protectively behind Elena’s chair and spoke into her ear.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get you through this,” it said. “You’re not alone as long as I’m here. I’ve always been there for you. You don’t need anyone else. I’m the one with the answers. We’ll handle this ourselves, the way we’
ve always done.”
Isolation, I thought. Perfection. That’s the way she’s always done it. My poor, poor wounded daughter.
“You little shit!”
“I’ve lost so much.”
“I know what it’s like to suffer.”
“You’ve screwed up your whole life, you stupid bitch!”
The voices became a shrill cacophony as each person said the lines over and over, an audible representation of the dangerous forces inside Elena’s head. I turned away from the sight of my girl, my baby, sitting so composed in the middle of that horror. No wonder she cut, with all that pain boiling up inside her! How could anybody live a normal life with that?
Then the Eating Disorder Voice stood up, and she was the psychologist again. She thanked Elena, who smiled graciously as the group applauded, and she thanked us for coming to Family Day.
The program was over. We were free to leave.
Elena and I drove home in silence. My head hummed and whirled with all the new information I’d learned. I thought of my earlier decision: I’m done! She’s a closed book. I thought of how I had thrown up my hands and told myself that no one could understand my daughter.
But that was the coward’s way out. Understanding was possible.
It had to be possible—because it was necessary.
But how? I had tried, hadn’t I? I’d tried, and I’d failed. Elena and I didn’t talk anymore. We’d lost the energy to talk.
How could we bridge the gulf between us?
Understanding. My brain knows only one way to get to understanding. When I have a question I can’t answer, I write a story. I watch my characters, and I learn from what they do. Over the years, my characters have taught me many things I’d never even begun to guess before working with them.
And Elena has the mind of a writer, too.
Since the Summer from Hell, Elena had wanted to write a memoir about her anorexia. She’d asked me every few months if I would help her. Each time, I had told her no, that this was her story to tell, not mine.
But was that really what was behind my no?
Wasn’t I really just pushing all this away? Wasn’t I just refusing to get involved? My telling her to write the story herself was a way of saying (to myself, at least): This isn’t my problem. This is somebody else’s problem. And I have problems of my own.
Now, as I drove, I turned my mind to look at my characters, one by one. Paul, my werewolf woodcarver, pale and sick with his deadly contagion, afraid for those around him. Kate, plucky and serious, determined to figure out a way to vanquish goblins. Poor little Izzy, the ghost without eyes who had been my wayward daughter Valerie. Martin, whose adventures had gotten tangled up in my own unhappy life.
As I’d written about them, I’d learned things that no one else around them knew. I’d discovered things—all kinds of things—that even they didn’t know. I loved all my characters, even in their weakest moments. Even the villains had a chance to tell me their side of the story.
Had I been denying my own family this same closeness?
Elena and I reached the orphanage, and I parked the car in the horseshoe-shaped driveway. It was going to be a busy night here. There was only one spot left. In silence, Elena and I walked past grandparents talking on their cell phones, past a father pacing the hall with his fretful baby, past a trio of children running by with dollar bills in their hands to feed into the vending machine.
I unlocked our door. Elena walked in and dropped her backpack by her bed. “I’m glad that’s over!” she muttered, stretching.
I was still standing by the door.
I should say it, I thought. But it was going to be hard—I could see that already. It would be harder than anything I’d ever tried. Maybe I couldn’t do it. Maybe I didn’t have enough of the gift.
And what would be the cost if I failed?
But then again, what was the other option? Keeping my head in the sand? Protecting myself? Leaving my own daughter to carry her burden of stress and pain while I played with my imaginary friends?
“Elena,” I said, and there was something in my tone that made her stop and look at me. Probably I sounded like I was about to deliver one of those “mom” pronouncements that make children want to roll their eyes. Yes, that must be it because I could see Elena’s face falling into her polite, distant mask.
And I thought, I do not see how this is going to work.
“Elena,” I said, “you’ve asked me to help you write a book about your eating disorder. If you still want me to help you, I will.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Elena lit up with real excitement for the first time in months. “Let’s start right now!” she said. “Get your laptop.” And she came over to sit on my bed.
I picked up my laptop and sat down facing her.
“Okay,” she said. “Ask me anything. I’ll tell you anything you need to know.”
I couldn’t help but feel touched at her faith in me. She really thought I could do this! So I opened up the laptop, and I thought about my daughter as if she weren’t my daughter—as if she were one of my characters instead.
What did I need to know?
Everything.
“Okay, let’s start with something that’s really hard for me to get,” I said. “Tell me about purging. What’s it like? Have you done it often? When was the last time you purged?”
“The last time I purged was over a month ago,” Elena said. “I can’t purge at Clove House, but when we were at home, I purged almost every meal.”
What? Almost every meal? Oh my God!
That was the mother in me. I could feel the panic and hurt clawing my chest. I could feel that helpless Victorian mother, wringing her hands and whimpering out her protests: All those pizzas I ordered for you? The cake I made that you used to love? Why? Why do you do this to me? Why do you hate me so much?
But the writer in me couldn’t help but feel fascinated. And it was the writer who spoke.
“Almost every meal? Weren’t you afraid we would hear you? The house was full of people. We must have been right in the next room.”
“There’s no way you’d hear me,” Elena said. “I’m one of the best purgers I know because I learned from the best, Mona in boarding school. You could stand right next to my restroom stall, and you still wouldn’t hear me. You’d swear I was talking to you the whole time.”
Purging right next to me in a restroom stall? Carrying on a conversation and vomiting? My stomach twisted, but I fought down my feelings of disgust.
Notice the cool poise, the writer in me pointed out. My character is speaking with real confidence. This is a skill she’s mastered, and she’s proud of that skill. It makes up part of her hidden world.
“So, I’m trying to wrap my head around the experience,” I said. “It’s really hard for me to see the appeal. It’s nasty! Whenever I throw up, I feel horrible and shaky, and my throat burns from the acid.”
“Yes, but that’s because you’re sick. It’s not like that when you purge. It feels great, actually. Any pain you’re in, purging will make it disappear.”
I wanted to shove this idea away with both hands and then stomp on it. But instead, I forced myself to be fair.
“It’s true,” I said, “that when I’ve gotten migraines, I’ve thrown up sometimes, and that stops the migraine immediately. I don’t know why it does that.”
“Plus, there’s the whole ritual of it,” Elena said. “There’s the preparation for it: putting a towel around you, tucking your hair up. You put a little toilet paper in the bowl so no one will hear, and you get all ready.”
My mind ran through this imaginary scene. As much as I didn’t want to watch it happen, I could see the comfort my character was taking from it. She’d been raised on small rituals—the Sign of the Cross, grace before meals. And she liked them. Elena had OCD.
But then . . . I could feel my own throat tighten up. I felt water gather in my eyes.
“But you’re getting ready to gag,�
� I pointed out.
“Not really for me,” Elena said casually.
That squashed my mental image. My scene was wrong. I had to pay attention.
“When you’re new, you have to gag,” she explained. “You stick your finger down your throat, and you purge a little bit, and then you stick your finger down your throat and do it again. Some people use other things so it won’t mess up their nails. But the thing is, if you’re a pro, you don’t have to use anything, you can completely control the whole process. But when you’re starting, you kind of take it slow, and you work at it . . .”
I was silent. More and more, I let this realization sink in: My character worked very hard at this. She is a pro.
The realization began to bear fruit. I caught glimpses of my character, younger, worrying about her nails, practicing to get this right . . . And ripping off fake nails when she ruined them?
No wonder I’d seen her yanking off her French nails!
The mom in me was standing by, mourning, wringing her hands, but the writer in me was hard at work now. The writer knew that only by watching, only by paying attention, would I gain that true awareness of character. One small trait would reveal another. This couldn’t be rushed or interfered with. I’d only learned about my character Miranda’s cutting by paying attention to the look in her eyes when she noticed a scrape.
Now, Elena was ticking off techniques, informative and practical, like a seasoned guide giving a lecture to a tourist.
“. . . and some people purge by color . . .”
“By color?” I interrupted.
“Yeah, you eat things one by one, and you eat a certain-colored food first. Say, you eat a certain kind of veggie. And then, when you purge, you know when you get to that color that you’ve gotten it all out.”
Okay, I had to admit, that was clever. Gross—horribly gross! But clever.
“It sounds very scientific,” I said.
Elena laughed. “Well, we’re not stupid!”
Hope and Other Luxuries: A Mother's Life With a Daughter's Anorexia Page 46