Our Day

I wake unsettled at 7ish and have a brief moment, every morning, of forgetting. Blankness. An almost out-of-the-womb like state. As if anything might happen and nothing has ever happened. And then like a sick swirling in my mind, this pleasant fog lifts - or more honestly, it is yanked away from me - and I am back to the truth. She has anorexia. She struggles, I struggle. Like some sort of sick symbiosis.

I lay a moment, catching my breath - taken from me by the realisation all over again that nothing is normal or easy or careless - and as I lay there, I wonder. How is she? Is she awake? Is she ok? Is she dreading her day? Should I go to her? Will she have killed herself in the night? Will her body have failed? I know in my sane mind that this last is not a realistic fear any more - she eats, she survives. Pathetic, bird-like portions - eaten with hatred and fear - each mouthful like toxic cardboard, ruining her life and her control and corrupting her soul. But she eats. Food as medicine, food as medicine.

I get up. I stumble to the bathroom and half-blindly begin my day. Dogs fed and watered, tea made (for me only these days - a fact that hurts EVERY SINGLE TIME I put the kettle on - she used to love her tea so much. I want to make her cups of tea. My eyes prickle with wanting that simple loving gesture back.) I return to my room and wait. The creak of her door comes like music and there she is - sleepy and tousled and all beautiful and a bit haggard and so achingly familiar and precious. I fight the urge - as I do every day - to leap across to her and squash her tight against me and thank her for still existing. I greet her with small words of welcome and love so as not to intimidate or alarm her. She either gets into bed with me to watch a DVD and come awake properly or she goes back to her own bed and the comfort of cartoons - so undemanding and familiar and a ghost of her previous little-girl life. I know she longs for her childhood - misses the demands she faced within it - such easy, silly, trivial demands - surmountable and innocent by comparison.

At 8.45 every day - not a moment later (the OCD-ness of anorexia strikes me time and again) - she makes her breakfast: that dreaded meal. And so begins another day of feeding her - food as medicine. I wonder will she cheat and put less milk on her Weetabix, when she already permits herself such a meagre quantity? Will I be able to stop myself peering covertly into her bowl? The same worries every day. Less calories equals trauma on the scales and me checking for signs of tiredness and for bones jutting almost-imperceptibly more. She sits beside me in bed as we watch something banal and we pretend everything is normal and this is what everybody does - eats breakfast with the safety of their mother shoulder-t0-shoulder in bed with them. I'm not sure if it's me that needs that safe feeling or her. Both, I think. We're both afraid and only just daring to raise our heads above the parapet.

She spoons and chews and chews (on Weetabix...) and swallows and repeats til it's almost gone. But she always leaves some and I haven't the heart to say "You've left 2 teaspoonfuls in there!" It would be pathetic. It would cause a frown and a fight and the day would be off to a horrid start. So I let it go and I mourn the grams those last spoonfuls would have added to her body. I want to say impatient, mean things - slap her hard and ask her what the hell she thinks she's doing leaving behind those precious drops of energy. But I don't. Not ever. And I despise myself for that. I yearn for the black courage to do that. Not the slap but the words.

She used to cry during and after eating her breakfast - talk in circles to me and with me about how it made her feel and how she hated herself and how weak she was. Now she sits there in silent, grim determination - waging war against the anorexia. And I want in some strange way to have that communication back - that desperate openness - panicky in her desire to verbally vomit out the terrible emotions and rid herself of them. But silence and monosyllabic responses are better than such pain, surely?

So - we now have an hour before the next food. Shower. Dress. make up and hair straighteners if there is anyone visiting or we plan to go somewhere. Empty, pale face and unpampered hair if not. I walk the dogs and do the housework and bob about on pins slightly, waiting for her to come downstairs and begin her day proper.

We watch telly and talk a bit and then before she has had time to even begin to relax or give her mind time to think like a normal person, it's time for her mid morning snack - a hateful, coy, dishonest, ugly word that has come to represent greed and fullness and indulgence. Meals she can understand and tolerate but snacks is a step too far. She knows all about regulating her blood sugar and habituating to regular eating, but still.

We have about an hour or so to live like wild things before lunch. This might mean going to sit in the gardens of the Rookery and throwing nuts to the squirrels or popping to the shops in the car or going for a drive to escape the four walls. Wild indeed. But it feels enough and it affords us a glimpse of humanity and a brief spell of being a part of things that are not us and illness and worry and that feeling of living each small moment under a microscope. But we can't stay out too long because the misery that is lunch beckons. The same meal every day - no deviation from time or quantity or method of cooking or seat to sit and eat it in or programme on the telly to distract her mind and drown out the chomping of her jaws and the swallowing of her throat and the hand to mouth over and over again. It takes her at the very least an hour to eat this meal. And I sit with her and type or read or watch the TV or potter in the kitchen, tidying up and willing her to eat without sadness or fear.

Round and round in her mouth the mulch goes and I can practically hear her counting the number of chews. She has to make it near liquid before she allows herself to gulp it down - otherwise it lands in her tender stomach like a clump of concrete. She is still so unused to having anything in there.

We may have someone over for a cup of tea or lunch - which always feels strained and weird nowadays - people actually enjoying their food and devouring it hungrily and with such gusto and pleasure. Delight at eating. It feels foreign in this house. I always want to say "See! See how people eat! You do that. Go on - YOU do it!" I keep this nugget of wisdom to myself. I have volumes of such witticisms and helpful remarks just taking up space in my head.

Afternoon snack brings a halt to puzzle books or computer games or DVD watching. I garden or pop out for 10 minutes to the bank or the supermarket or tend to the laundry or the kitchen floor - awash with cooking crumbs and glop and dog hairs and garden detritus. Always plenty to do. I stare out the window quite a lot too and shake a silent, sad, invisible fist at the Universe.

Feed the dogs and the cats and wash up and put away and give brief thought to feeding myself. Food is no longer quite the pleasure it once was for me - it's a necessity to be got out of the way so I can concentrate on her. (Except sweets and chocolate and sandwiches at night when I'm alone. Those I glory in. But that is for another entry.)

Sit and browse online and text and play computer games and chat and laugh and talk about how she feels if she needs to. Thank god for box sets of DVDs - they have saved us. And imprisoned us too. But there is safety in their confines.

Supper. Soup and half a pitta bread. Always has to be assaulted with Tabasco and reheated halfway through. Every day. She eats it so slowly. Chews her tinned soup by the teaspoon.

It all takes so long and every moment is magnified by the weirdness of it all and the strange rituals and the fear. But I am content with this. It is her getting better and it is safe in a strange way. I can keep her company and pick her up when she falls and intercept disasters and try to maintain her equilibrium. But it is a small world we inhabit.

We go upstairs after a long day down. Early and while it's light and people are still up and out living their busy, fun lives. We go to our separate rooms to re-group alone and have a small while to ourselves. I think she goes online to B-Eat.com and she watches cartoons or the banality of early-evening telly and I flop hotly on my bed, showered and half-asleep already. I don't ask what she does. She has no time of her own and I worry and hurt for her about that. But it seems that she can't bear to be too alone right now so I give her my all and have that hour to myself at the end of the day. I am only inches away - there if she needs me - and I think she likes the respite and privacy. So do I.

We later watch DVDs til we can't keep our eyes open another moment - drawing out the day and the togetherness. We used to talk and she would cry at this time - battle her demons with me there to soak it up and try to mend her. But there is no way to mend her. All I can do is just be. She will heal herself when she can - with time and days stretching shimmering-hot ahead of us. Effort and routine and love and fight and tiny moments of success.

Then sleep.
Then all over again.