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

by Clare B. Dunkle

  I took another look, and a shiver caught me by surprise. That rail-thin Alice in Wonderland child—a woman in her twenties? It didn’t seem possible!

  In the morning, I climbed the stairs to Clove House again, feeling as nervous as I had on Day One. I’d been in only three therapy sessions in my entire life, and never in anybody else’s. Except for the one disagreement with the social worker, I had enjoyed my sessions thoroughly. How could it not be fun to talk about yourself to an attentive audience?

  But this time, things were different. This wasn’t my session, it was Elena’s, and I had never had a group session before. What would it be like? Would it be quiet and helpful? Or would it explode into some sort of horrible Jerry Springer episode, with nasty statements and sordid accusations?

  Meanwhile, my imagination played me helpful scenes of counseling sessions from the movies: “Do you want to tell your sister how angry that made you feel?”

  Was that really the kind of thing therapists said?

  The receptionist directed me to Emily’s office. She wasn’t there yet, but Elena was sitting on the couch.

  “Hey,” she said as I sat down beside her. “I was thinking we might go to the mall. My clothes don’t fit right anymore, and I’m not allowed to wear things that are tight. Do you think we could do some shopping?”

  “I’d love to!” I said, and I meant it. The thought of Elena buying new and reasonable sizes put me over the moon. I didn’t need to run any numbers in my head. This was exactly what money was for.

  “Good!” Elena said. “So, maybe you could mention it to Emily. She’s more likely to go for it if it’s your idea.”

  “Really? But—I barely even know Emily. Why wouldn’t she listen to you?”

  I didn’t get the chance to find out. At that moment, Emily walked into the room and closed the door.

  And Elena became someone else entirely.

  “So,” the therapist began. “So . . .”

  I gave Emily a puzzled smile. Elena didn’t. She was staring at the closed door as if she were melting holes in it with her gaze. My daughter had become a concentrated ball of hate.

  The moment stretched and stretched until the silence started screaming. I didn’t want to break that silence. This was an ugly game of tug-of-war, and it had nothing to do with me.

  Finally, Emily broke it herself.

  “So,” she began again. “Elena, would you like to talk to your mother about some of the progress you’ve made?”

  “Nope,” Elena said—the briefest of monosyllables, pushed out with the quickest, smallest breath of air.

  “Well, then,” Emily said, “how about if I do it?”

  And Elena gave the briefest, most noncommittal shrug.

  So Emily began to tell me about the work she and Elena had done together. She told me how Elena had brought her a favorite pair of jeans because they were her “measuring jeans”: she had had a habit of putting them on to see how well they fit. When Elena had reached a certain weight, she and Emily had held a celebration and thrown the jeans away together. “Because you don’t need them now, do you?” Emily said, giving her an encouraging look.

  Elena just glared by way of answer.

  I couldn’t take it anymore. Combat is a very stressful spectator sport.

  “That reminds me of something,” I said quickly. “Elena talked about wanting to go clothes shopping while I’m here. She doesn’t want to keep wearing the clothes that aren’t a healthy size.”

  “That’s a great idea!” Emily said. “Why don’t you two go this morning? I’ll write you a pass right now.”

  The instant we were out of the office, Elena became herself again. “You know, we go on an outing a week,” she said as we walked to the car. “We went to the botanical gardens last time. And we’ve been to the zoo. One day, we went and got our nails done.”

  “So, why were you like that in there?” I asked.

  “Like what?” she said. But her expression had become careful.

  “Why were you mean like that to Emily?”

  Elena curled her lip. “She deserves it!” And then she changed the subject.

  In the car, Elena plugged her cell phone into the stereo. “Listen to this, Mom,” she said. “It’s my new favorite song.”

  I smiled to myself. How many times had I heard her say that?

  Elena and her friends had had a number of outings to the mall, so she already knew where the best deals were. She led me into one of the clothes stores. “Not here, Mom,” she said as I slowed down to look at a blouse on a mannequin. “They always put the pricy stuff out front. Just don’t even look at it. You’ve got to walk straight through to the sale racks.”

  I had a lot of fun shopping with Elena that day. It was nice to see her buying clothes that weren’t tight. She made some excellent choices, and thanks to her attention to the sale racks, we paid excellent prices, too.

  “It’s time for a snack,” she told me after a couple of hours. “Let’s go to the food court.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What are you in the mood for?”

  Elena ignored the question.

  At the food court, she studied the menus like a student cramming for an exam. She decided on two scoops of ice cream.

  “Will you order them for me?” she said. “I have a hard time asking for food.”

  “Well . . . What kind do you want?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It has to matter,” I said. “There’s ice cream you like, and there’s ice cream you don’t like.”

  “Okay. Pick some ice cream I like,” she said, sitting down at a plastic table.

  I chose two scoops of vanilla in a bowl because that’s what she used to like when she was a little girl. “I hope that’s what you wanted,” I told her as I set down the bowl.

  Elena stared at me in amazement, as if I had suddenly begun to speak French. Then, silent, grim, and focused, she ate her way through the scoops of ice cream. Everything about her body language spoke of the effort it was costing her. She might as well have been forcing down scoops of shortening.

  I found myself choking on my own ice cream. I had known that Elena didn’t eat much, but I had thought of that as a question of willpower. It had never occurred to me that eating, for Elena, might be just as difficult as not eating would be for me.

  The next afternoon, Emily gave us a free pass again, and Elena and I escaped from Clove House like schoolchildren on a field trip. It was a sunny, sparkly day, and as we headed back to the mall, we passed an art fair in a public park. I stopped the car, and we spent a happy couple of hours looking around.

  “Isn’t this city great?” Elena said. “I like it better than Texas. I wouldn’t mind living here.”

  “Better trees for sure,” I said, looking up at the majestic trees shading the art fair tents. “Not like our shrimpy little post oaks.”

  “Maybe I could go to nursing school here,” Elena said, and her face lit up with hope and longing. “There are several good nursing schools in this city. I’ve been asking around.”

  I hadn’t heard Elena talk about nursing school in months.

  Emily gave Elena a pass almost every day, and the two of us spent the whole time shopping. Then, in the evenings, we sat cross-legged on our hotel beds and told each other stories. Now that Elena had spent months in a treatment center, many of those stories were excruciating.

  “One of my friends here got gang-raped on her way to school,” she said. “She couldn’t tell her parents. Each time she goes to Clove House, she gets better for a while, but when she goes home, she has to go to the same high school again, and the guys who raped her come up to her and laugh at her in the hall.”

  At the thought of that, my hands automatically balled into fists. There are times when a belief in hell can be a comfort.

  “She needs to not have to go back to that school,” I said. “She needs to tell her parents what’s wrong.”

  “She can’t. It would freak them out.”
/>   “It freaked us out, but you told us anyway.”

  “You aren’t like them, Mom. Trust me on that.”

  Then Elena told me about a woman there who’d had parents who had joined a cult. The cult members would put on masks, and they would rape and torture the little girl. It went on for years, until the state took her away.

  “My friend Stella told me that one of the little kids came in wearing a costume,” Elena said. “He was so excited to show everybody what he was going to be for this movie premier that he wore his costume to Clove House. And that woman from the cult, she saw him, and she had a PTSD flashback. She couldn’t stop screaming. They had to call an ambulance to take her away.”

  I thought about that: the little boy, happy and excited, trying on a new persona for the day. What had he been? Something monstrous, so he could be less afraid of the monsters in his world? Something strong and powerful, like a superhero? And then: the grown woman takes one look at him and starts screaming at the top of her lungs. She’s locked in her hideous memories and can’t get out.

  What a horrible experience for them both!

  “Another friend of mine was in a very serious car crash, and that’s what started her eating disorder. Her family was badly injured, permanently injured, and she can’t handle the guilt.”

  “Why? Was she driving?”

  “No, she was too little to drive. But she was the one who had wanted to go out for ice cream.”

  “Oh, my God! That poor girl!”

  Elena fell silent. She was staring out the window at the deepening twilight. I loved those big windows, too, with their view of miles of trees and outlines of city. But this time, I stared at Elena instead.

  She was looking so much better, with rounded cheeks and shining eyes. With normal weight on, she looked so much more mature. She had always had a cute figure, but I used to laugh and say that she had the hips of a twelve-year-old boy.

  Clove House had done medical testing. Elena’s eating disorder had stunted her bones. She would never have the height or the full woman’s figure she should have had. It hurt my heart to know that, to know this had happened on my watch. But we had trusted Dr. Eichbaum. We had trusted his diagnosis: ambitious, dramatic—but nothing to worry about.

  So much to look back on. So much to regret. And maybe Elena was thinking the same thing.

  “I’ve been working on my memoir,” she began.

  “Good for you!”

  “We have lots of time to write in our journals,” she said, “so I’ve been trying to write things down. But I can’t. I just can’t do it.”

  Immediately, I slipped into writing-workshop mode. “Maybe you’re overthinking it,” I said. “You don’t have to hunt for big words or perfect explanations. It can be as simple as the stories you’ve told me tonight: just think how you would say them to me, and write them down like that.”

  Elena broke in on this well-worn advice. “No,” she said. “It isn’t that I can’t write it. I just can’t do it.”

  She turned back from the view of the window and glanced my way, and for a fraction of a second, the pain she was in shone out through her eyes. It seared its way into my soul.

  Raped at thirteen, a goofy, silly girl, unable to defend herself or shed the shame. Locked up and bullied in one hospital after another, until her trust in authority figures was broken. Stressed out, pushed along through high school and college, forced to pretend that she was in complete control, that she had this, that she could get past it. Betrayed by her bosses at the university after all her hard work, belittled for the very condition she couldn’t control—for the one part of her ambitious existence that she had carved out to belong to her, that was nobody’s business but hers. And then, the baby, her own little butterfly baby, with its own light, perfect heartbeat . . .

  Yes, I could understand why she couldn’t do it.

  “Well . . . Maybe it’s just not time yet for your memoir,” I said awkwardly. “It’s something that can wait until you’re ready.”

  Elena looked back at the view outside. Her brows were furrowed. She was chewing on her lip.

  “I just wish,” she said, “that you could help me.”

  And that pain seared through me again.

  “I—I just think that it isn’t my book,” I said. “It’s not what I’m good at, not at all, it’s the way you think, it’s what you do well. I’m right here, though. I’ll read what you write. I can help you write it . . .”

  Elena’s expression didn’t change. “Sure,” she said, and she let the matter drop.

  A few more days of stories and shopping brought us to the last full day of my visit. In the morning, I would take Elena back to Clove House, and I would start the long drive home. Elena had had no self-harming issues at the hotel with me, so Clove House was taking her back into their halfway house.

  At the hotel that night, Elena sat on her bed and watched me pack.

  “I want to go home with you,” she said. “I want to see Valerie and hold my niece. I want to get to know Clint. I want to be part of Gemma’s life.”

  And her eyes filled with tears.

  Worry flooded through me. Yes, Elena was making real progress here—I could see that now. But I could also see how fragile that progress was.

  “But you’ve got to get better first,” I reminded her. “Remember, you came here to get better.”

  “I’m doing day treatment now. I can do that back home. Remember the director at Sandalwood that I talked to last year, the one who said I have anorexia? Sandalwood runs a day program just like the one I’m in here.”

  “But we don’t know if they’ll take you.”

  “Sure, they’ll take me.”

  “We don’t know if they’re on our insurance program. I don’t know if I could get you covered there.”

  “You can call them tomorrow and ask. But Dr. Greene already told me that our insurance company wants me back in Texas.”

  This was true. Lynn, the patient advocate, had recently told me the same thing.

  But at the same time, those worries wouldn’t stop fluttering around me. I hated myself for sounding so negative. Maybe the old, angry Elena had been right: I always seemed to have something bad to say.

  “It’s just that you’re doing such important work here,” I said, “and that work is very hard for you. At home, you’d have lots of distractions. You need to make sure nothing interferes with your recovery.”

  “I’m not doing anything here that I can’t do somewhere else,” she said. “Anyway, it’s my decision.”

  It was true that I wanted Elena to be able to make her own decisions. She was an adult, and she needed to be able to feel like one. She had been the one who had decided to come to Clove House, and ultimately, that had been important in helping her push through some very painful times.

  “But are you making that decision for the right reasons?” I asked.

  “Yes, I am,” she said. “I should be near family, and there’s an eating disorder center near family, in our own city. It’ll work just as well as this one.”

  The plan actually made a lot of sense. It would make the insurance company happy, and they had certainly bent over backward to make us happy. It would save us the cost of Elena’s stay each night at the halfway house. And if family therapy really was important, well, we could certainly do that at home.

  But still . . .

  Was it my good sense talking? Or was it just my own anxiety? Was I becoming one of those faint, fearful mothers who hovered and fretted and never had anything nice to say? My imagination obligingly pictured an Edward Gorey mother for me, moping through endless passages of crosshatched stone, trailing a long handkerchief from one limp hand.

  Maybe I didn’t look like that, but it’s how I sounded.

  “We don’t know anything about Sandalwood,” I pointed out. “You may hate it.”

  “I hate Clove House. So what? That doesn’t mean I can’t get what I need there.”

  She certainly hates Emil
y, I thought. Poor Emily! But she’s right, they’ve still done good work together.

  In the morning, I dragged my suitcases to the car, and we drove through gray drizzle to Clove House. Elena went to talk to her care team about leaving while I stayed in the waiting room and made calls.

  It surprised me how quickly everyone jumped on board with the plan. Sandalwood back in Texas had an opening. They booked an introductory appointment for the following Monday. Lynn at the insurance company thought it was a fantastic idea.

  “You’ll need a waiver, of course,” she said. “Sandalwood isn’t a preferred provider, but we don’t have a preferred provider in the area that supplies that particular service. We’ll have to arrange a single-case agreement with them. I’ll start working on it right away.”

  Dr. Greene called me into her office within minutes and gave me an envelope full of paperwork to take with me.

  And as Elena came walking out with her arms full of therapy art, was that relief I saw in Emily’s eyes?

  “Good-bye, Elena,” Emily said. “I’m glad I got to work with you. Good luck!”

  “Meh,” Elena said, turning away.

  In the parking lot outside, Elena was jubilant as she waved up at Clove House’s windows. All the patients were standing there to watch her leave. Enthusiastically, they waved back.

  We drove out onto the rainy highway, and Elena put her playlist on. “Oh, here it is, Mom,” she said. “Listen to this. It’s my favorite song.”

  “What happened to the other one?” I teased. “I thought that one was your favorite.”

  “This is better,” Elena said. “That’s my old favorite song. This is my new favorite song.”

  That made me laugh out loud, and I pushed aside the unwelcome image of the Edward Gorey mother.

  We’ve gotten past the bad times, I thought. Things are getting better now. And I imagined the Dunkle slumber party with the addition of Elena’s quick wit and ready laughter.

  I can’t wait, I thought. The whole family will be under one roof again. How many families get that kind of second chance? How many mothers have that kind of luck? Except, there’s no such thing as luck.