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

by Clare B. Dunkle

  “It wasn’t personal,” Elena repeated in the same neutral voice. “They said the same thing to all the patients.”

  We arrived at the Starbucks window. I paid in silence and reached for Elena’s coffee. It took all I had to keep from hurling it across the parking lot. The way I was feeling, it wasn’t the best thing for me to have a sloshy projectile in my hand.

  “Those bastards!” I said as I made my right turn back onto the street. “Those arrogant, preening, self-satisfied bastards! Blame it all on the mother, right? Lord knows she deserves it!”

  “Mom,” Elena said. “It doesn’t matter. I didn’t believe them.”

  Really?

  While the mother in me continued to rave, my writer’s mind examined this new piece of information. It studied the patterns. It tested the facts.

  Elena’s shift in attitude. Her distant expression. The bitter tone in her voice. It was all right there, as early as the very next day, on the car ride to Texas:

  Chill out, Mom! Dad, Mom doesn’t trust me!

  “Of course you believed them!” I snapped. “What teenager in pain wouldn’t? You’re out of your mind with grief and anger, your sister’s run away, you’re locked up against your will . . . and then a doctor cozies up to you and says, ‘Here, let me set you straight. Simple answer: your mother did it!”

  “I told them they were wrong.”

  The writer’s mind studied that: the conviction in my character’s voice, the look of pained memory.

  “Yes, you did,” I agreed. “You defended your family, but that doesn’t mean their crackpot nonsense didn’t poison your mind.”

  And my imagination played out scenes of Dr. Moore and the other therapists, so smooth, so sure of themselves, tormenting that sick, desperate young woman with their trumped-up pseudoscientific theories . . .

  The suffering! The suffering they had caused!

  “They knew nothing about your family, those people!” I said. “Dr. Petras didn’t ask us a single question, not one. I was tried, judged, and executed before I even stepped into his office. Before he even laid eyes on me!”

  “Yeah, well,” Elena said. “Dr. Petras had his own problems.”

  But I couldn’t stop to hear this. I was still locked in a hell of my own.

  “As if you and your sister weren’t the most important people in my world! As if I wasn’t by your bedside every night, reading to you. Reading to you—you used to read to me more than I read to you! Every book you picked up, you told me all about it. Every class you took, every friend you made, you came home and said, ‘Guess what!’ Did those doctors want to hear about that? Did they ask about the hours I set aside to hear about your day, to talk over what was going on in your life? And I didn’t do it because it was some kind of duty, either. I wanted to be an audience! I love being a part of your life! I—I—there I was, worried out of my mind over you—and they all thought I was the enemy!”

  “Not all of them,” Elena said. “If it makes you feel any better, a lot of medical doctors think everything a psychiatrist says is bullshit.”

  But it didn’t make me feel better. I wasn’t listening.

  “The riding lessons,” I went on, “when you were little. I drove you half an hour each way and stayed there the whole time. You’re the ones who asked for them. I didn’t pressure you! I wanted you to learn what interested you! The folklorico dance lessons you begged me for—I’m the one who made them happen. And how many parents listen to every new song their child wants to play for them? How many times have you and your sister said, ‘Hey, Mom, listen to this’? And I did. I do! I’m glad to! I want you to be able to talk to me! I want—I want to be a positive part of your life!”

  Elena’s voice was stoic: “You’re a great mom.”

  Unfortunately for us both, I was listening this time. And this, of course, was the wrong thing to say.

  I hadn’t been a great mom. I had tried—God knows, I had tried. I had gone into this with the intention to be extraordinary. And I had been a good mom, I felt sure of that—a good mom. But a great mom . . .

  Or had I?

  Had I been a good mom—really?

  My imagination obligingly found memories for me, dozens and dozens of them. Little snappy comments. Impatience. Frustration. Exhaustion. No time . . .

  And my girls, my two little girls, with looks of disappointment, of dismay . . .

  They were so precious, those little children! They were like flowers. Like stars! Those two little girls had deserved the best!

  So maybe it was true. Maybe I had been a bad mom. The stakes had been so high! I had tried, yes—I had tried. But there, that bright, bouncy, goofy, happy little girl had gotten raped—gotten raped on my watch.

  I sank to the bottom of a pool of misery and regret.

  “Maybe if we hadn’t moved to Germany,” I mourned.

  “Screw that!” Elena said. “I love Germany.”

  But I didn’t care. I abandoned myself to that inky-black ocean of remorse.

  “Maybe if you hadn’t gone to boarding school.”

  Elena gazed out the window in silence.

  “Mom, this is stupid,” she said after a minute. “You know it’s not your fault. Nobody believes that anymore, not even the psychiatrists who used to tell people that. The theory got discredited. Remember what Dr. Leben told me? Teenage anorexia comes from outside the family.”

  I surfaced again, boiling mad. No, not just boiling mad—almost hysterical. The suffering—the suffering they had caused!

  “Do those bastards have any idea of the torment they put us through? Any idea of the damage they did in peoples’ lives? There they are, coming in to treat a desperately sick child, sick with a disease that already isolates people—and what do they do? They teach that child to hate and fear the only allies who won’t give up, the only people who would give anything to make things better!”

  A school zone showed up. My leg muscles cramped with the effort to keep the car under the speed limit. I could feel each individual muscle in my jaw tightening down into my neck, into my chest, my shoulders, arms, hands.

  “How many anorexics are dead today because they were taught not to trust their parents? How many anorexics didn’t survive long enough to hear, ‘Oh, sorry, we were wrong. Oops! That theory is discredited’?”

  “They didn’t know better,” Elena said. “They were doing the best they could.”

  I pulled into the Clove House parking lot and stopped with a jerk.

  “You know who does the best they can?” I snapped. “Witch doctors, that’s who! Psychology is supposed to be a science! Really, you’re going to tell me that that was the best they could do—pin one more problem on the mother? It was irresponsible and . . . and chauvinistic! And ignorant! And damaging!”

  “Mom, calm down.”

  “. . . and devastating! Devastating! In the sense of laying to waste! Like an army! Like locusts! Like a plague! Like ebola! Like—”

  “Mom! You need to calm down.” Elena said this loudly and slowly, like the nurse she hoped to be.

  I paused for breath. I was panting, hyperventilating. Okay, she was right. I did need to calm down.

  Elena climbed out of the car with her Starbucks cup in one hand and her backpack in the other.

  “Love you,” she said firmly, looking back through the window at me.

  “Love you, too,” I mumbled back.

  On the drive home, I tried to calm down. I tried to concentrate on the sunshine. I tried to be in the moment. Elena’s right, I told myself. It’s all in the past. But the more I thought about it, the more distraught I became.

  That poor child! She was all alone in that grim treatment center, that place replete with hostility and hideous rules . . .

  And then, those bastards—those smug, arrogant bastards!—they made sure she’d always be alone.

  I pulled into the horseshoe drive and forced myself to park carefully. I made myself walk at a calm pace down the hallways to my room. I made mysel
f look into the offices and notice the smiling photos on desks.

  But that’s not what I was seeing inside.

  My imagination was showing me a gray-faced eighteen-year-old: my traumatized daughter, trying to push herself by brute force and ambition through her senior year, alone—all alone, even in the house with her family around her.

  They had taken a child with trust issues, and they had taught her not to trust. They had taken a child with anxiety, and they had taught her to fear. And during that senior year, I had seen it in her eyes: the suspicion, the scorn, and the loathing for us both—

  —because, after what Elena thought I had done to her, she hated herself for being stupid enough to love me.

  My throat closed up. I was grinding my teeth. My hands itched and twitched with the desire to smash themselves into walls.

  You need to calm down!

  But I didn’t.

  I unlocked my door, threw myself on my bed, and cried. I twisted and punched my pillow and sobbed and moaned. I howled for Elena, for all the poor patients like her, for all the poor mothers and fathers like me who had reached out to hug their beloved children—and found themselves hugging a cold-eyed stranger.

  The gall of it! The sheer, breathtaking, monstrous inhumanity of it! To stand in front of a roomful of children you didn’t even know and say, Your family did it. Your parents made you ill. Your mother is killing you.

  How many children died from the heartbreak and isolation? How many children did they kill?

  Those damn murderers!

  MURDERERS!

  Finally, I couldn’t cry anymore. I had no more tears. My hands were shaking, and my head was pounding. Elena was right. I needed to calm down.

  So I stood up and remade my bed. I washed my face. I pulled up the blinds, and I let in the morning sunlight.

  Then I opened up my laptop.

  And I wrote it all down.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  A couple of weeks later, Brenda called Elena and me into her office for a special meeting. She said, “It’s time to step down from all- day therapy.”

  I realized when she said this that when I had pictured this moment, I’d seen it as something like a graduation. Elena would shake hands all around and maybe make a speech. Then she would walk out into the world as a newly minted recovering anorexic.

  But what the moment actually felt like was coming to the end of one of those moving sidewalks. It dove into the floor, and we found ourselves stumbling away.

  “I don’t feel any improvement!” Elena protested. “I still fall asleep all the time. What am I supposed to do?”

  “You’ll need to find an apartment nearby,” Brenda told her. “Don’t worry, it isn’t as if all treatment stops. Three or four times a week, you’ll come in for a couple of hours to meet with your therapist and nutritionist and do group therapy with the other patients. You’ll practice going to grocery stores and preparing meals together.”

  “But I’m not ready!” Elena insisted. “Maybe if I had another few weeks to get ready, now that I know this is coming . . .”

  “No, I’m afraid the insurance company won’t okay any more time,” Brenda said. “And we agree with them. You’re at a healthy weight, and you’ve been in intensive therapy for six months now.”

  The ride was over. It was time to walk.

  I left the session and went home to make lists: a series of comforting, nicely prioritized to-do items to pile up like sandbags against the anxiety I was feeling. I ran the numbers and made sample budgets, and Joe and I spent hours on the phone, discussing them.

  Numbers were safe. They represented safe things like poverty and bankruptcy. I knew this. In college, I had survived on very little. Air conditioning is only a nice-to-have item, and so is phone service. A bouillon cube, nestled in a pan of rice, makes the body think it’s eating chicken . . .

  As long as I spent my time on numbers, I didn’t have to think about what really mattered, which was that Elena was nothing more than a zombie these days. When she sat down to watch a video, within seconds, she was asleep. She had begged me to buy her a computer game, but almost as soon as it would start, she would fall asleep. She didn’t even try to read anymore. If she opened a book, she was asleep. I took her to see a movie she’d been excited about for months, and she nodded off within minutes.

  Elena could barely stay awake long enough to take a shower. How could she stay awake long enough to embark on a normal life?

  I marshalled my carefully prepared notes that evening, and I sat down with Elena on her bed. “So, I called the nursing schools nearby,” I said. “Here’s what Dad and I think we can manage. If you can get by with the furniture you brought back from Germany . . .”

  A long sigh interrupted me. Elena was nodding off.

  I prodded her awake again.

  “Here are a few nice apartment buildings in the area,” I went on as I pulled up photos on the laptop. “Now, this one is particularly good because it has protected parking and a night guard. It’s set up especially for single women.”

  I waited for a comment, but there wasn’t one. Elena’s eyes were blinking—focusing and unfocusing.

  “Anyway, I think you ought to give this place a call,” I said, trying my best to sound positive and optimistic.

  “Can’t you call them for me?” Elena begged. “I’m so sleepy! Besides, I don’t know what to say.” And she curled up like a shrimp right there, with the laptop sliding off her lap. Within a second or two, she was unconscious.

  I fought back panic. This was so unlike Elena! Why was Clove House doing this to her? The drugged sleepiness was depressing her as much as the eating disorder ever had. If it left no room for self-destruction, it left no room for joy or initiative, either.

  Elena was right: how was she supposed to function like this?

  I didn’t have answers. I had none of the right answers. But what could I do? All I could do was keep going.

  “Sure,” I told her sleeping form. “I can give them a call.”

  The next afternoon, Brenda gave Elena a pass so she could look at a couple of the apartments I’d called. I drove her around, and we walked through them together.

  The places looked perfect to me. They looked really cute. I remembered my excitement and enthusiasm over my first college apartment, how I’d decorated it with two-dollar art posters and served my friends cups of tea . . .

  But Elena wasn’t excited, and she wasn’t enthusiastic. She didn’t even seem to be looking around. She was waiting by the door before I could even finish asking the building manager my questions.

  “This isn’t going to work,” she told me flatly.

  “But—why?” I spluttered. “It’s perfect! Your furniture will work great in there, you can walk to nursing school—they even have one spot left in the protected garage! I know you’re worried about snow and ice, but . . . but . . .”

  But Elena didn’t actually look worried about anything. She didn’t look as though she felt anything at all. When was the last time she had discussed an apartment and nursing school with me?

  Back when I had come to Clove House the first time.

  Now, Elena was beyond worries, wakefulness, anything. She sat like a lump in the passenger seat, eyes closed, head sagging against the window.

  She muttered, “Maybe I should just do treatment at home.”

  What?

  “But, Elena, think! You’re doing good work here . . .”

  I waited for her to argue with me, but she didn’t bother. “This is bullshit, Mom,” she murmured finally.

  That Edward Gorey mother in me was beside herself, fluttering her handkerchief and wringing her hands. But the writer in me was calm and straightforward. My character is telling the truth, it noted. This is bullshit. No one can live an independent adult life in this kind of condition.

  So I called Brenda, and Brenda called us in for another special meeting in her office. “Elena, leaving or staying in treatment at Clove House has to be your
decision,” she said. “You have to figure out what you’re going to do.”

  Okay, I thought. That’s good. I can see that it’s good. It’s important to force Elena to interact with her future. Because, as far as I could tell these days, Elena wasn’t interacting with anything.

  I looked at my daughter. In spite of the weight gain, she didn’t look better to me this time. The hollows in her cheeks had filled out, but her whole body looked yellow and puffy, and her eyes looked old and sick. Even now, during one of the most important moments of her life, she was blinking away fatigue.

  “Well . . . ,” Elena said. “I think maybe it’s best if I go home with Mom and do my outpatient treatment with Dr. Leben at Sandalwood.”

  There, I thought. We have a decision. Elena has interacted with her future. And once again, I began to make lists in my head: extend the insurance override to cover costs at Sandalwood, call Dr. Leben to see if she has an opening . . .

  But Brenda didn’t speak. She just stared sternly at Elena.

  The moment stretched on and on.

  “Well . . . ,” Elena muttered, “maybe I should go ahead and stay here . . .”

  “Good!” Brenda said. “It’s settled then. I’ll give you another pass so your mother can take you to visit the local colleges.”

  Was it Elena’s and my recent conversations about Drew Center that made me feel so upset at this? Yes, I could see that Elena’s decisions were suspect, but this was pure manipulation. If she needed to stay there so badly, why tell her it should be her choice?

  “She’s so drugged!” I said to Brenda, almost beside myself with frustration. “She hasn’t participated in any of this. She can’t stay awake long enough!”

  “Mrs. Dunkle, we’ve talked about this,” Brenda said. “It’s important that Elena get relief from her self-harming urges.”

  “Yes, but she has no urges of any sort! She has no interest in life!” And I thought of my bright, nervous daughter, of her rapid speech, the quicksilver emotions dancing across her face: Guess what!