Eleanor Phillips’ BuzzFeed essay, “This is What My Mother’s Eating Disorder Has Taught Me,” includes simple crayon illustrations that are reminiscent of drawings my mother would make for me during her stints in treatment. Artistic pieces with no true professional talent, yet somehow they communicate sentiments better than any Matisse or Monet. At least personally, I understood them. I understand the meek strokes of a delicate artist who utilizes drawing not only as therapy but as communication. They stand as a testament to artistic therapy as a means of introspection, a concept promoted by the anorexia treatment centers which both of our mothers attended.
In the first illustration, Eleanor’s drab background focuses attention on the only dashes of color—two bright red tomatoes halves on an otherwise empty plate. Although many first notice the surface-level bright splash of color in the painting, I first notice the stark emptiness of the white plate on which these bright red halves lie. Like Eleanor, I am a statistical anomaly. Very few children have witnessed the toxic path through which an eating disorder devastates a family. My mother’s exercise anorexia began at the age of 35 and continued until she was 43, well past the prime years for the disease to strike.
For Eleanor and me, there aren’t support groups like there are for the children of cancer patients or substance abusers. They simply don’t exist, and I don’t attribute this to the stigma surrounding mental health. Although this stigma and perceived shame significantly shaped my life, the lack of these support groups is better attributed to the rarity of an eating disorder developing so late in life. If you scour the web, many resources do exist for families—most often support for parents whose adolescent girl has been diagnosed with an eating disorder. But how can you support a parent with an eating disorder when you are a child?
If you ask five different therapists, you’ll get five different answers. Because, trust me, I did get five different answers and then some. If you were to read the records of our HMO, it probably looks like a directory of all psychologists and psychiatrists in a 50-mile radius. After too many therapy appointments to count, I decided the truth was that no one really knows the answer.
So let’s begin with the kitchen and another Phillips’ drawings. In this one she features a dark room with a doorway that opens into a bright kitchen, not extraordinary by any means. Many simply see the kitchen, but I see a battleground. Every meal was a battle: between my mother and the rest of the family, between the disease and the most primal of instincts, and between the stark white background of a mostly empty plate and the dismal drab of color. It was a fight without choice, without freewill.
To many, the kitchen is a common ground, a place of laughter and memories. To me, it was our battleground full of tears, threats, broken plates and broken promises. But most of all a broken family.
I did all the wrong things when I tried to support my mother in her recovery. I thought that I could fix everything through confrontation. I tried to become the parent starting around age 10, policing my family’s actions. I felt as if it were my responsibility to monitor my mother’s diet, regulate the absurd amount of exercise, and keep track of the lies. Instead of saving her, my mother seemed to drown further in her eating disorder, as it took priority over her two children.
And, as most wars go, there was truly no winner—only two losers in the end. In the trenches of the battleground, meals generally began peacefully, but as they’d proceed, I’d grow increasingly uncomfortable with my mother starving herself in front of us and I would speak up. The first shot of the night was fired. My mother would reflexively defend herself with her arsenal of excuses: it’s been a long day at work, I am feeling ill, I’m not in the mood to have this argument tonight. Then, she might retaliate more forcibly, or my father or sister might chime in and also confront my mother, or all of them might turn against me. There weren’t ever many allies at the dinner table. Finally, came the true heat of the battle, yelling and screaming for hours. I’m still curious to this day how there was never a noise complaint made; I’m sure the whole neighborhood overheard. One night in a desperate plea for my mother’s attention, I let the bombs of our battle drop—broken plates on the ground.
Recovery often does not return the individual to you that was lost to the disease.
As my mother’s eating disorder progressed, she became a shadow of her former self. Her eyes glazed over, and she wasn’t really mentally all there. It took her longer to understand things, to remember things, even to respond to simple questions. When she was weak, I started to win these small battles. But when you’re both sitting there on the couch, tears streaming down, my father and sister locked in their rooms, you realize that no one had won, no one could win. I may have forced more food on her plate, cut the laces to her running shoes, or forced promises of change, even written contracts. Nothing ever matriculated.
Eleanor’s essay proceeds to the tree and an extended metaphor of a climb. A woman stands on the ground at its base where she must begin her climb. For any addict, a lasting recovery may only start from rock bottom. For my mother, this happened after eight years spent with brief and ineffective stints of treatment and more therapists than I can count on my fingers. After the near-fatal consequences of anorexia proved imminent, my mother found herself on the ground and nearly six feet below it.
From the ground, the view is different. All the dead branches taken out by a fall are completely evident: the damaged relationships and lost time. From that moment in April 2013, my mother began her climb up the tree meandering through the branched hallways of the psychiatric wing of Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley and later the Summit Eating Recovery Center in Sacramento.
But I did one thing right—my sister. As my mother’s emotional absenteeism grew, I filled the role she had left, taking her place at the dinner table she had abandoned. During the eating disorder, I cared for my sister while my mother spent four hours a day walking. I packed lunches. I helped with homework. Hell, I even put together a Christmas card one year.
And if it seems that I’m portraying myself as some saint, then nothing could be further from the truth.. In reality, I was much like my mother—the anxiety, the depression, the need for control, the obsessive habits. The only thing she may have me beat in is probably the number of therapists; I’ve only had four therapists and one round of outpatient psychiatric treatment.
Eleanor Phillips, author and illustrator, notes the recovery process is “not quick, or a constant, upward progression.” I’ve heard this mantra before during my mother’s discharge from outpatient treatment: recovery is not a straight line. Recovery is an equation with infinite peaks and dips. My mother experienced a dip shortly after discharge with a two week mandated treatment at a psychiatric facility, and then proceeded to rise to her current state of exceptional mental and physical health. But it is neither the peak nor the dip that matters, it is the overall trend of the line, the progression. The positive progress. Similarly, where you start is not always where you end up.
Recovery often does not return the individual to you that was lost to the disease.
I took over the role my mother had abandoned throughout her eating disorder, her treatments, and her manic episodes post treatment. My mother returned home August of 2013. I naively believed that things would return to some kind of normalcy. And they did. Briefly. Things quickly went south, and my mother suffered from either bipolar disorder or extreme psychosis; whatever it was, it wasn’t diagnosable. One manic episode resulted in an involuntary psychiatric hold after which, she made my father and me move her belongings out of the house into an apartment and filed for divorce. My mother’s parents even removed my mother’s name from their will and moved it all into my father’s name. During those months, I didn’t even see her.
Then, my father convinced my mother to return home, and she began to receive treatment. I hesitantly let her back into my life over the next year. I was worried, and in some ways still am worried that my mother will abandon me again. When she returned to the house, she buried the scale in the backyard. And, we started to bury the hatchet. The scars of my childhood will always be there. But, I learned to forgive. Not only to forgive her. But more importantly, to forgive myself.
Image by ProjectManhattan