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

by Clare B. Dunkle

  I know how brave my daughter is. She’s brave every single day. I’m glad I can do this for her. I know it will help.

  The vet’s office is in a low brown building next to a small, dusty asphalt parking lot. Six lanes of heavy traffic crawl by it every morning. It’s such a modest establishment that most of the commuters probably don’t even notice it. Nevertheless, this place looms large in the history of the tabby beside me. Even the smell of it alarms him.

  But he rubs his face against the tips of my fingers and relaxes. Lucky for him, he’s got me.

  Tor’s carrier is heavier than I expect it to be. I hold it away from my legs so he won’t have to bang into me at every step. Then there’s the job of getting the office door open. I keep up a cheerful stream of talk as I navigate these obstacles.

  The smart, sassy receptionist greets me with a solemn face, and for a second, the pain in my chest stops me cold. But I give myself a shake and smile at her. We’re only here for shots, I tell myself. Be happy. We’re only here for shots.

  How many times have I buried my feelings for the sake of those around me? For animals and children, so they wouldn’t be frightened. For a grumpy family, so they could let go of a bad mood. For two hysterical teenagers, so their world could stay safe and stable while they learned how to handle their emotions. For the strangers I’ve met who didn’t need to know that I was having a rough day.

  Explore your feelings—how does a mother do that exactly? What we feel, the whole family feels. A mother’s private bad mood can almost instantly turn into a screaming fight between two preschoolers. It can turn into raised voices, slammed doors, and miserable evenings.

  So I don’t explore my feelings. I force them down. I smile.

  Just shots, that’s all, I remind myself. Just shots.

  “Room 2,” says the receptionist, and I take the carrier into a small, square room about ten feet by ten feet. It smells strongly of pine-scented disinfectant, but that’s better than any of the other strong smells it could have. It has no windows. Frightened animals try to launch themselves out of windows. It’s loaded with hard surfaces: stainless steel, linoleum, painted cinderblock.

  Persian rugs wouldn’t last very long at the vet.

  “Hey, Tor, want to go exploring?” I ask as I hoist the carrier up onto the narrow table. Tor strolls out and stretches as I rub his skinny shoulder blades. His purr starts up again and fills the quiet space.

  “You’ll be good for the doctor when you get your shots, won’t you?” I tell him. “You know you have to be good.” Because that’s what we’re here for, I insist with stubborn optimism. Animals read body language. Be calm. Feel the calm.

  The door slides open, and the receptionist leans around it.

  “Do you want to check out now?” she says in a low voice. “So you don’t have to . . . after?”

  A wave of emotion breaks over me, but I hold firm. I don’t just keep the smile on my face. I keep the optimism in every single muscle.

  “Later,” I tell her.

  Because later, it won’t matter how I feel. But right now, I’m busy with a living, breathing, adoring tabby cat. Nothing else matters but him.

  This long stripy kitty is the smartest cat I’ve ever owned. Joe accidentally taught him to roll over at mealtimes; he gave the command jokingly, but before two weeks were up, Tor could roll over faster than the dog did. From then on, Tor learned every trick the dog knew, from sitting up and begging to lying down on command. He knew he was clever, and he enjoyed that advantage. While our ragged little terrier, Genny, was struggling to master a trick, Tor would do it over and over just to show her up.

  “Well, old boy,” I tell him, “you’re quite the cat.”

  Tor pads over to rub against me, and his purr gets even louder, a hum of contentment in the quiet room.

  Tor’s purr lasts all the way to the very end. He bears the vet no ill will. He likes the tech. Gently, peacefully, he slides into a furry heap on the examining table. His purr sputters once. And then it’s gone.

  My cheerful resolve breaks down at the very same instant. I surprise myself by wailing out loud. Sobs rack me so viciously that I struggle for breath while the vet presses a Kleenex into my hand.

  It’s all right. I’m with friends. I can let myself grieve for the loss of this small, faithful companion, this unique little life that has left the world forever.

  There will never be another Tor.

  Out in the car, I wail again and beat on the steering wheel with my hands. I let myself feel the pain Tor deserves—this intelligent, accepting, trusting creature whose companionship I banished. I keen and sob over the difficult years we had together and the way it had to end.

  I could tell myself that Tor’s life was painful. Yes, it was. I could give myself false comfort with the platitude that the poor, fragile, chronically ailing beast is finished now with medicines and surgeries. But the truth is different. The truth is that my love for my sometimes-fragile cat crossed my love for my sometimes-fragile daughter. And a mother’s love crushes everything in its path.

  I can cry, but I know: I would do more than this. To spare my daughter pain—to make her well—I would do so much more than this.

  Because, at the end of the day, life with an anorexic isn’t about triggers and causes. It isn’t about reasons and right or wrong or blame. It isn’t about success (although I pray for that) or failure (although it haunts my dreams). Strange as it sounds, it isn’t even about life or death.

  Love: That’s what life with an anorexic is about.

  I love my daughter absolutely as much as I am capable of loving. Each time I feel my strength giving out, I love a little more. There is nothing love can give that I wouldn’t give for her health and happiness. There is nowhere my daughter could go that love won’t lead me after her.

  Love.

  That’s all.

  It’s the only thing that matters.

  That’s what I’ve learned as Elena’s mother.

  CHAPTER ONE

  One day, when Elena was seven or eight, she beckoned urgently for me to bend down so she could whisper in my ear. “I’ve found love,” she told me solemnly.

  I looked around in surprise. We were sitting in a Burger King. It wasn’t my idea of the best place for life-changing emotions.

  “Really?” I asked. “Where’s love?”

  “At the next table,” she breathed.

  I glanced over to find two very young, awkward teenagers sitting at the table beside us. They were sharing an order of fries in silence.

  “Oh, really?” I murmured back. “How do you know it’s love?”

  My little daughter looked very grave, as if she were in a cathedral instead of a place equipped with deep-fat fryers.

  “Because she looks at him when he isn’t looking, and he looks at her when she isn’t looking. And when they both look at the same time, they look away.”

  Elena is one-quarter Italian, a legacy from Joe’s mother, and that Italian is all on the top. She’s dark-haired, dark-eyed, passionate, and excitable, given to strong loves and equally strong dislikes. When we visited Rome, I kept losing track of her. My dark, thin, nervous girl melted right into the crowds of dark, thin, nervous Romans.

  When Elena sits perfectly still, she’s pretty, with a lean, attractive face and an adorable figure. But, unless she’s sick or sleepy, Elena doesn’t sit still. Her eyes light up and snap and sparkle, her hands wave in the air, and her expressive face changes like a kaleidoscope. Surprise—joy—annoyance—laughter—incredulity—sly wit—these expressions and many more flicker across her face in a matter of minutes.

  And when that happens, Elena isn’t just pretty anymore. She’s beautiful. She’s unforgettable.

  I’m reserved. I put together arguments the way I put together logic puzzles: if A means B, then C means you’re a jerk. In temperament, I’m more like Elena’s older sister, Valerie, whose most damning comment, uttered in a deceptively casual tone, is “Hey, do whatever you wa
nt, it doesn’t matter to me.”

  To say that both sisters have brown hair and eyes is to make them sound the same, but to my eye, they don’t look at all alike. Valerie’s toffee-colored hair glows with warm highlights, and her eyes are the large, gentle eyes of a deer. Easygoing and cheerful, Valerie thrives only among friends and family. Without that sense of home around her, she quietly wilts.

  Valerie was a calm baby, content to smile at her adoring father and me and occasionally laugh—when she wasn’t blissfully asleep, that is. She talked extremely early and walked extremely late, and even then, only if she had a hand to hold. Walking wasn’t exploration to little Valerie. It was a chance for the family to do something together.

  Then, twenty months after Valerie came along to bless us with her sunshine, Elena ripped into the family like a tiny tornado, indignant from the very first moment of life over the ignominies of babyhood. And from that day to this, Elena has had the gift of the Italians: to love, hate, laugh, cry, work, and play with all her heart, and often within the same five minutes.

  But if Elena inherited her fierce nature from her hot-tempered father, she inherited something very precious from me. I’m a storyteller. It’s my central characteristic. It’s how I see the world. Beethoven’s brain worked in melody and harmony. Mine works in stories, little and big. All day long, my imagination shows me pictures and snippets of film no one else has ever seen.

  When I was a little girl, the grown-ups around me often talked about the end of the world, when all the nuclear missiles would fly at once. Sitting quietly in a corner of the room, I could see the whole thing: the searing explosions, the rubble, the carnage, the hideous mutations, the breakdown of society, the looting and rioting . . .

  I didn’t sleep that well when I was a little girl.

  Elena was just the same. From the time she was old enough to speak, I discovered that her imagination, too, was both a blessing and a curse. No matter how I tried to shield her, she got macabre ideas into her brain. A few Halloween masks in the grocery store or a casual joke from an acquaintance would be enough to set her vivid imagination churning with frightening images.

  When Elena was very small, those half-understood hints about complicated subjects often took her into a fantasy world. Following my little daughter into her story-worlds back then could feel downright eerie.

  “The man in the next car is a gangster,” she would announce ominously from her booster seat.

  “Oh, yeah?” I would say. “How do you know?”

  “Because he’s a murderer,” she would state with absolute conviction. “He killed his wife, and he’s running away from the police.”

  Where does she get this stuff ? I would think. She’s in preschool, for God’s sake! The scariest thing she’s allowed to watch is Mister Rogers! But there it was: I’m pretty sure that, a few centuries ago, my four-year-old daughter would have gotten people burned as witches.

  And God help us when Elena’s grade school sat down to watch videos. The unimaginative staff there had no idea what kind of terror an old movie like A Christmas Carol could unleash in a sensitive six-year-old. I had to sit by Elena’s bedside to save her from the ghosts, and she cried herself to sleep for several nights. Monsters in stories were more real to her than the trees outside her window. We routinely found her in bed in the morning with Valerie.

  But at the same time, Elena’s vivid imagination brought her in touch with the feelings of others and inspired in her a boundless curiosity. And even in early childhood, she began to detect true stories, beautiful stories, in the commonplace world around her.

  I would like to be a rose, she wrote on a school worksheet when she was six. I would like to be a rose. It would be fun. I would hope a person would water and care for me and never pull me out of the earth. I would try not to get into a person’s way, but I did! I loved to get pruned. I loved it in the soil, it felt good. I did not like it when the kids pulled off my leaves, but I lived with it. I loved being a plant. I loved to watch the kids swing. I loved the soil. I loved the earthworms. Then I died a sad death. The end.

  Elena was the kind of child who saw a human soul in everything. She had conversations with ladybugs. She rescued injured bees. She once drew eyes and whiskers on a sweet potato that looked like a seal. Then she couldn’t bear to let me cook it.

  One spring afternoon when Elena was seven or eight, she and Valerie sat down at the kitchen table to sort through their Easter baskets. After a few minutes of digging through the crinkly green plastic grass, Elena mournfully announced, “I’m out of candy.”

  Valerie, my prudent, practical girl, who asked for things like coats and desks for her birthday, had had the foresight to ration her treats. Now she took pity on her impulsive sibling. “Here,” she said, and she handed Elena a marshmallow-filled candy egg with a hard sugar shell. It was about an inch long, sealed in clear plastic, and it was bright blue.

  Elena was delighted.

  “Come here, little candy!” she ordered, marching it up her arm toward her mouth. “No, no!” in a high squeal, and the candy turned around and darted back down to the table.

  This continued for several minutes. The candy ran away and hid behind the salt shaker and the napkin holder; it leapt into Elena’s sweater pocket. Finally, in desperation, it begged for its life. As I remember, it was very eloquent.

  Valerie watched this little romp with increasing irritation. “Are you going to eat that or not?”

  “I can’t,” Elena admitted. “It would hurt its feelings.” And the candy nestled trustingly in her hand.

  “Well, then give it back! I’ll eat it.”

  “Nooo!” screeched the candy, bolting to the safety of Elena’s shoulder, where it huddled, shaking.

  “Don’t worry,” Elena crooned, petting it. “I’ll save you! I’ll keep you away from the evil giant!”

  And Valerie appealed to a higher power:

  “MOM!”

  But what could I do? Solomon couldn’t have settled that one. It was the collision of two different world views.

  As playmates, the girls weren’t well matched. In fact, they couldn’t have been more different. Elena was the queen of the split-second decision. Valerie liked to ponder and weigh and debate. In group play, Elena was quick to take offense and raise her voice, but if Valerie got her feelings hurt, she usually left without making a fuss and went home to have a quiet cry. On the other hand, it was Valerie who remembered these slights and acted on them for months. Neighborhood children wondered sadly why she wouldn’t play with them anymore, long after they had forgotten about swiping a toy from her or refusing to help her tidy up after a game.

  When Valerie was in fifth grade, she became interested in chess. Its complexity impressed her, and its unbending rules appealed to her practical nature. She got to be quite good at it—she could certainly beat me. But I didn’t have much time to play, so Valerie decided to teach Elena the game.

  Chess became the source of endless conflict.

  It wasn’t that Elena couldn’t learn it. She did that pretty quickly. It was just that the chess pieces couldn’t be chess pieces to her. They had shapes and titles and social status. They lived in their own little world.

  Before long, every single chess piece had a name—including two pawns who were named Boogity Boogity and Shoo. Each piece came complete with a lengthy backstory. It had its own hopes, fears, likes, and dislikes.

  So, when Valerie and Elena sat down to play, the game went something like this: First, Valerie would move. Then Elena’s pieces would all huddle together and discuss.

  “Did you see that? It’s happening again! They’re creeping up on us!”

  “You’re lucky! You’re big and strong. We’re half your size, and you’ve stuck us out here in front!” This was a common complaint from the pawns, who seemed to have their own union.

  “Don’t worry, my little ones. Nothing bad will happen to you. Butter Fat will save us.” Butter Fat was one of the knights.

 
Thusly appointed, Butter Fat would sally into the fray, and Valerie would move another piece.

  “It’s the queen! The evil queen! Queen Tiger Lily is coming! She’ll turn us into statues for her garden!”

  “Elena! Would you just shut up and move?”

  Another couple of exchanges, and Elena would lose her knight.

  “Aaaauuugh! The evil queen killed Butter Fat! She carried him away with her magic spells!”

  “You have to protect us! We nominate you. You have to face her in single combat!”

  “No, no! Don’t make me go out there! Don’t make me go out there alooooone!”

  And Valerie would lose her patience.

  “MOM!”

  In spite of the difficulties of the refereeing process, watching my girls play together was one of the greatest joys of my life. Hearing their careless voices laughing or chattering healed a part of my soul that had been damaged long before they were born.

  If I were to sum up my own childhood in one word, it would be lonely.

  I was the last of three children born to a busy engineer and an absentminded English professor. My parents had both been perfectly happy to call their family complete with the two boys they already had. My brothers were close to one another in age but substantially older than I was, so for most of my growing-up years, I was barely an annoying blip on their radar.

  My father commuted two hours a day in addition to his work time, and his own projects out in the garage involved activities like sawing and welding—not safe undertakings for someone watching a toddler. This threw me back on my mother’s company, and she took a novel approach to the problem. Rather than do what some mothers do—set aside her career and life goals in order to look after this last small child—my mother did exactly the opposite. She taught me how to sit quietly and amuse myself with some small toys, and then she took me with her everywhere she went.

  I went to appointments, meetings, and events. I went to faculty parties and long evenings with my mother’s friends. I went to the enormous university library, where I sat next to the copy machine and colored while she copied endless pages, and into her office, where I played carefully with a sheet of carbon paper while she typed out exams and met with students. I went to movies far beyond my understanding. I sat through 2001: A Space Odyssey when I was three. At four, I was attending my mother’s summer-school Milton course, sitting in a desk at the back of the room and taking it all in.