by Miriam Horn
The community of CFS sufferers and health activists has provided Alison a new vocabulary to describe her life. And though she resented her doctors’ dismissal of her chronic fatigue as a matter for psychotherapy, she herself sees her physical malaise as an illness of the spirit, a perception reinforced by her New Age beliefs. She describes her constellation of illnesses as most common in people who “put other people’s needs first and run around whipped” all the time. “It would kill me to think I’d looked out for myself and others had suffered. But I wonder whether, if I’d been able to say to my husband, ‘No, we can’t take care of your parents in our house’ or insisted we bring in a visiting nurse sooner, it might have been easier to protect Elizabeth’s health, and my own.”
Alison’s confusion is an honorable one. To love generously, limitlessly, is one of the highest virtues, but so too is the capacity to recognize when the spending of oneself has gone too far. Alison realized that she had begun to collude in her own exploitation, in the snuffing out of her own passions and voice.
“It’s funny,” says Alison. “All along it was my father and brother, not my mother and sister, who said to me, ‘Get out and do things; take control of your life.’ It’s clear they feel that kind of control over their own lives. They were never burdened with the sense of automatic responsibility for caring for others. My brother is an involved father, but when he comes home from saving lives all day in the emergency room, fussy babies don’t seem so worthy a demand on his energies. He’d tell me to ‘get free,’ but I couldn’t. I believed that to be good meant not to change.”
Alison has lately resumed painting and recently illustrated a children’s book. At the same time, she is seeking new ways to serve. She would like to work in a hospice attending the dying. “My spiritual experiences have made me unafraid of dying. And if a dying person told me they saw angels or loved ones waiting, I would not pooh-pooh those experiences. Long before the angels fad, I felt the presence of invisible good guys, especially at birth and at death.” She would also like to paint murals in hospital pediatric wards, of meadows and flowers.
Feminism helped Alison, she believes, in her erratic wrestling with the proper balance between selfless love and self-preservation. She had more freedom than her mother, and her daughters are freer still, because “feminism changed the world.” “Most of my classmates at the Inauguration party were in power suits and I suspect most had résumés in their pocketbooks. I’ve never owned a power suit; my idea was not to be more like men, more ambitious and less cozy. Helping other people was my humble career choice. But the thing is, I had choices. All along, I was making the choices, even if they were pretty darn traditional. I find ridiculous the idea that our generation made life harder for our daughters. Oh gee, we have to apologize because they can do more than our mothers did? Thanks to the women who came before us and women like Hillary, my daughters have the freedom to make up their lives as they go along without feeling like odd ducks. How nice to feel you can write your own script.”
The women of Hillary’s class fought their mothers and became their mothers; their daughters’ inheritance is no less complicated. Like Alison, Ann Sherwood Sentilles, ’69, poured her energies into raising her children, felt herself disappearing in that effort, and then watched a daughter fade. Ann’s daughter, however, chose a more active self-erasure: Sarah learned to starve.
Though Ann would ultimately choose to stay home, her aspirations had not at first centered on maternity. She discovered early a passion for newspaper writing, starting her own paper in sixth grade and then becoming editor of her high school paper and the Wellesley News. She earned a master’s at Columbia Journalism School and became the first woman on-air reporter in Columbus, Ohio. In a miniskirt, her straight blond hair hanging to her waist, Ann reported on school integration and civil rights. “When they hired my replacement, I heard them reject one woman because her legs weren’t as good as mine. I wasn’t conscious that it was a bad thing; it seemed kind of flattering at the time.”
Ann had returned to Ohio from Wellesley when her boyfriend, Irwin, began Yale Law School and failed to give her a ring. “My dad told me, ‘Come home. That boy’s not interested in marrying you.’ Then I landed my TV job, and Irwin caught the next flight and proposed. He was everything I wanted: smart, responsible, honest, my soulmate. I loved him completely, and I still do.
“I also loved my television work, but I gave it up in a second to marry him the next year, which, I’m glad to say, my daughters struggle to understand. I did feel a vague foreboding. As a kid, I’d sometimes gone to work with my dad and watched him do surgery; I remember being struck by that intensity versus the chaos and laissez-faire of my mother’s household and knowing I didn’t want to spend my life waiting at home. It just didn’t occur to me that stopping temporarily would be that detrimental to my career.”
Ann joined Irwin in New Haven and took a “deadly-dull” job in a bank, which she quit when the first of her four children was born. She continued to work part-time at community newspapers in Brooklyn and New Jersey, assuming she would return to television when the time was right. “I naively believed that I would be able go back whenever I chose. Of course I couldn’t, especially not as a woman. Women had to work harder than men; in Columbus, I’d worked twelve hours every day. We had to be more available to prove we belonged. There was a mantle you carried being the first woman who did whatever it was you were doing, and many of my classmates were the first woman in their law firm to make partner, the first woman in that business, the highest-ranking woman in the bank. Unfortunately I think we saw it as a burden—we saw it as an opportunity, but also as a burden—instead of being able to delight in ‘Hey, we’re here and look what we’re doing’ and enjoying it. Because if you stepped off that path, it was nearly impossible to get back on.”
Ann did knock on network doors, and one summer she worked as a writer for CBS. “But they treated me like I wasn’t hungry enough. In a way, I wasn’t. I was distracted by being in love and married and a young mother. On the days I worked, I was exhausted when I got home. I didn’t want to walk in at six with nothing left to give my kids. I had chosen to be their mother and also discovered the great pleasure in that.”
In 1980, Irwin, a corporate lawyer, was transferred to Dallas. Moving to a new city with a six-year-old, a three-year-old, and an infant, Ann felt terribly alone. “I had no help, no support, and I had a husband who was in a new job and that was taking all his emotional energy and his physical energy, too,” she told Frontline. “I didn’t do anything right about it. I did a lot of crying and raging and screaming and I’m not proud of that time in my life. It was not good for my marriage. It was not good for my children. I mean, I began to wonder if my children would ever be happy, because they never saw me happy. I realized I’d made a deal that nobody else was party to, that I had given up several things that were important to me—my independence, my career—and in exchange I expected Irwin to be there for me whenever I needed him for whatever I needed. He didn’t make that deal.”
In Texas, a fourth baby was born. “My sisters both work full time, but one has two late-in-life kids and, I think, gets more satisfaction from her work than from mothering, and the other has one child and a stay-at-home husband. I agonized for years that I couldn’t do it all. I did spend good time doing what I could do, but I always thought I should be doing something more. That made it hard to enjoy what I was doing. It wasn’t going to be perfect. It could have been okay, but that’s a lesson I hadn’t yet learned.”
Ann now regrets her lack of attention to what was happening. “It was years before I realized how much I’d given up. I would probably give it up again, but I wish I’d been more aware of what I was doing at the time. If I’d felt, ‘Okay, you’re making these choices and you’re going to have to live with the consequences,’ there might not have been so much frustration in everything I did. Instead, it came out as anger at my husband: ‘You don’t take me out; you don’t bring me flo
wers; why didn’t you come home from work earlier?’ I don’t regret my marriage or children; they are more rewarding and fun and stimulating than any job I’ve had. I’d just like to say I planned it this way. Instead, I sort of fumbled in and thought, Shit. Here I am.”
Her Wellesley classmates became for Ann a measure of all she hadn’t done. For years, their notes to the alumnae magazine tormented her. “I’d feel, God, I haven’t done anything.” More than once she defended her own choices to them. In 1977, as class secretary, she wrote: “The Word is that ‘we’ don’t like Births and Engagements and Marriages at the front of the column, that as liberated, educated women we should be able to do better and generate more academic or accomplishment oriented news. I beg your indulgence and intellectual tolerance and suggest that all professions, homemaking and motherhood included, be equally important parts of our notes.” In 1985 she wrote that “a job and money only take you so far,” describing her “greater satisfaction from worthwhile activities in the community.” Her insecurity kept her from every reunion until the twentieth. “I let my classmates be my peers,” she told Frontline. “If I’m going to feel judged, they’re my jury. And I think, Well, they must wonder what I do all day. I read other people’s judgments and they’re really my own. You spend a day running car pool and say, ‘Hillary doesn’t do this,’ and I think, What’s my life? Do I measure against Hillary?” Irwin suffered at Ann’s distress. “I think Hillary’s been really hard for somebody like Ann, because she points up the big question: Has what she’s done in fact been meaningful? I think it’s been incredibly meaningful. The problem is that you don’t get a lot of people reinforcing your judgment.”
Ann’s two eldest have now left home. Her second daughter, Emily, a graduate of Brown, “is very much a feminist and doesn’t want to get pushed around”; she has worked with the NOW Legal Defense Fund and plans to continue activism on behalf of women’s rights. Ann’s eldest, Sarah, is a Yale graduate who spent a year teaching in an inner-city school and is now going to Harvard Divinity School, with plans for an urban ministry. She is also a recovered anorexic, whose collapse in high school was revelatory for Ann. “Even now, when I hear people say ‘You must be so proud of Sarah. She’s such a perfect child,’ it gives me the chills. She was perfect. She got fabulous grades, was captain of every team, editor of the newspaper, always had friends and a boyfriend, delighted adults. She did everything to please everybody.
“But somewhere after tenth grade, her perfect image and reality began to separate for her. She didn’t feel like she was what she was pretending to be, but she also didn’t feel she had any options, because we had so rewarded her for her brilliant performance. She was afraid if she didn’t perform, we wouldn’t be there. It was a crushing blow to me that I had failed her so badly.”
A pediatrician raised the first alarm, after treating Sarah for stomachache and fatigue. Then friends called and said they were worried that Sarah talked about being fat all the time and wasn’t eating. After the call, Ann went to talk to Sarah and found her curled up on the floor of her room in the fetal position, crying. “I really hadn’t noticed—or maybe I had, but didn’t see it till someone wrapped it up for me. She had gotten obsessive about food. She declared herself a vegetarian and wouldn’t eat red meat, but I just grilled lots of extra chicken and persuaded myself it was all fine.
“Sarah was scared. She admitted being afraid she was fat, though swears she was not bulimic. I have nightmarish recollections of her getting up from the table after every meal and going to the bathroom. She says I don’t believe her, and I say, ‘It’s not you I don’t believe but the disease.’ It didn’t matter what the diagnosis was; it was the manifestation of her emotional troubles, which she went to work on. There were twelve very ugly months in this household where Sarah learned to be angry. I had to walk around reminding myself, ‘It’s okay for a girl to be angry.’ ”
Many of the teenage daughters of the women of ’69 fit the classic profile of those with eating disorders: White, well educated, and affluent, with high-achieving parents and high expectations, they have both the perfectionist impulses and the vertiginous sense of possibility that typically underlie anorexia and bulimia. They have never known the ideal of female beauty preferred for most of history—an ideal of fleshiness, with its associations of fecundity and wealth—but have seen fashion consistently favor narrow hips and slender limbs. Inheriting a world both more fluid and seemingly more perilous than their parents’, they have tried to substitute self-control for their lack of control over the world. Though her kids are sophisticated and well traveled, says Ann, “they seem to need small secure places, which I didn’t, even though as a kid I’d barely gotten off the farm. They’re more intimidated, fearful of being far away from home. Sarah is an extremely mature woman intellectually, but immature emotionally. She hated the transition between home and college, then got distressed at what had to change when she graduated.” A girl in a family like Ann’s has an additional susceptibility: Seeing her principal model of adult femininity chafing against limits, frustrated and angry, a girl may consciously or unconsciously starve herself to refuse womanhood, to war against the mother she doesn’t wish to become.
Like Alison Swain in her confrontation with her daughter’s chronic fatigue, through her daughter Sarah’s anorexia, Ann was presented with a new frame in which to view her own life. “I realized I use food as a form of expression,” says Ann. “Dinner was weighted with huge significance, which made it a natural place for Sarah to rebel and exert some control. One of the things I did to justify myself as a mother was to make sure I put a lovely meal on. That was my contribution for the day, so I took it quite personally when she didn’t want to eat the meals I’d worked so hard on. I never said to her, ‘I gave up everything to be your mother and you’re starving yourself,’ but I came close enough.
“The whole family had to undergo enormous change. I was very controlling and judgmental of Sarah’s friends. I’d done an overzealous job of shutting out drinking, because of alcoholism in both my and my husband’s families. I’d been rigid in my discussions with her about sex. We overemphasized achievement as a measure of her worth. ‘Look at that, Sarah, a hundred on your test,’ we’d say, instead of, ‘Sarah, tell me about your new friend; tell me who you are and not just what you can do.’ My husband and I had come by our concern with success naturally—we’d performed and gotten everything from parental strokes to big paychecks. It took much counseling before I realized my job wasn’t to make Sarah be what I wanted her to be but to make her aware she has choices and support her in becoming who she is. My parents had a crystal-clear idea of who I was supposed to be. My father is still hostile that I don’t vote Republican. He says, ‘I did everything for you. How can you do that?’ I say, ‘There really wasn’t a quid pro quo.’
“Irwin was supportive, but I don’t think he got it with Sarah. He felt that I could handle it if I’d just stop crying and do what the counselor said. He still hasn’t disengaged from the dance. He pressed Sarah to apply for a Rhodes. It meant more to him than it should, and in the past Sarah would have felt tremendous pressure to please her daddy. He still wants his perfect daughter. I have to let her be imperfect with me. Sarah has recovered, and I feel safe she won’t ever starve herself again. But, like alcoholism, it’s something she’s going to live with the rest of her life.
“Irwin is very much a product of the sixties, caught on the cusp himself. He might have liked to do public service law, but we could not have put our kids through school on that income. Dallas is ostentatious; you can live and die by what you spend. We try not to be part of that, but you still press your jeans. It’s a reality Hillary has had to contend with. Bill wasn’t making money, and if you want to be a player, you have to have money. So Irwin supported my career and always said the right things, but he was too busy to act on them. He just handed over his pay and left me to run the household. He didn’t take for granted that the domestic chores got done, but he did
n’t do them. He’d scrape the plate but leave it in the sink instead of the dishwasher. Not anything to draw battle lines over, though his daughters have been less tolerant than I am. They refuse to go to his club, because it discriminates against women and minorities; he says he doesn’t participate in discriminatory acts himself and needs a place to play.”
Interviewed on Frontline, Irwin looks the heavy. “I thought we had talked about what we were doing,” he says, “but I probably didn’t listen as much as I should have to where Ann was. Raising kids takes a lot of time, and that’s always been a priority for us. Ann is the one who has executed that priority.” From off camera comes a question: “Do you think that’s what she wanted, to stay home with the kids?” Irwin squirms. “That’s a hard question.”
Ann does not blame her husband for her frustration. “When I was so unhappy after our move to Dallas, I felt that because I’d given up so much, it was Irwin’s responsibility to make me happy. I finally realized I wasn’t taking responsibility for my own choices. I had avoided that responsibility by subsuming myself to everybody else’s needs.