Your new Size 4 clothes arrived today.
I wanted to scream when I saw them. They're Lilliputian clothes. They are ugly (except they're not really - they're nice clothes - fashionable and cute and sexy. Just tiny.) I hate you being a Size 4. It's wrong. I can feel my face creasing with nearly-crying when I think of that number. It had better go no bloody lower, is all I have to say. Don't you dare let it go lower. Please, precious girl. The thought frightens me so much and strips my life of ease and peace. Where has my life gone?
New clothes for when you have to face everyone when term starts in a couple of weeks. I know how worried you are about going to college. It's all so new and unknown. So much of your life has been a learning curve lately and I want this upcoming one to be a good one, a positive, exciting step. How awful for you to have to take on all that PLUS looking all newly-emaciated. ("Newly" to the crowd at school, anyway. I can barely remember your Size 10 body.) All your clothes look silly on you - even the Size 8 ones. They waft around your thighs and sag at your fleshless bottom. I hate to see it. And yet I am bombarded with the vision so much. We are together all day - you'd think it would have stopped hitting me afresh so often. And yet every time I look at you, my guts lurch and my head swims a little. Ten times a day, I bite back the words: "For god's sake - look how bloody THIN you are! Please STOP THIS!" It's tiring. My eyes are creased with new lines and circled with soft darkness. I can't find it in myself to care too much about this, though.
So, miniature shorts that accentuate your elfin legs. But they fit. At last. Oh, if only it wasn't a 4 I had to face. I'm scared. Always so scared.
I am fucking fed up with this.
I said precisely that. I even decorated it with a swift exit and wide flung door. Leaving you behind - frightened guilty angry - facing those two witches without my protection and the umbrella of my mothering. I'm sure they were kind to you. I'm pretty sure one of them will have looked on with careful, studied, practised sympathy, a tilt of her messy head and a murmured "Mmmmm". The other will have smiled uncomfortably and tried to jolly you along. The better of the two. The least hated. The warmer, more human nightmare - faced every week with resignation and fear and false stoicism.
I abandoned you for a moment - when you needed me most. All my protestations over these last few months to you - said to encourage you and embolden you: it's ok to feel, it's ok to express yourself angrilly, it's ok to be whatever you need to be - you're safe, you're ok, you've been good and polite and needing approval for far too long. It's destroying you. Let your emotions out. All that I have said. To help and heal you. All that encouragement to just be. So you did it. You were petulant and snippy to the doctor. And me? In my fury and frustration and desperation and fear, I shouted and told you you were being rude and I walked out. I despise myself for that. For many things besides that, obviously, but right now, I have the crashing realisation hit me every few minutes that I let you down. I am the most dreadful, thoughtless, lying, duplicitous, vile excuse for a mother.
So. Things are no better then. At least, that's what the scales say. How can this have happened? When you'd been weighed and you walked into the room where I waited, I couldn't tell whether it was a gain or a loss. I know by now that either of those will frighten you and make you feel despair. You GAIN weight and the anorexia berates you and kicks your fragile confidence with big boots - mean snippets of wordy punishment piercing your thoughts and blocking out rationality, sense, normality, knowledge and truth. You LOSE weight and your mind must imagine hospitals, force-feeding, loss of control, power, autonomy, freedom, meaning and sense, home and me. A backwards step means having to claw your way back with oh-so-casually added food (that dreaded "negotiation" between them and you, between them and us, between me and you - trying to be patient while you reject suggestion after suggestion only to be worn down and beaten into acceptance) and days stretching out miserably with every moment a battle until you acclimatise. Swelling belly (only in your mind; it's concave really, my tiny darling), stuffed gullet, gorged body, sickening greed and powerlessness. I know. I see it in your eyes and those ever-shrinking shoulders - tensing and turning from me.
You lost. A kilo. The most ever. I was dumbstruck. Furious. Terrified. Oh, the bleakness of all this.
I wish I could drug you. Put you into a deep sleep and pour food into you while you slumbered. However long it takes. I'd make wonderful food, pour over cook books and nutrition books and I'd create perfect food to heal you. Blend it into liquid and tube-feed you. So then I could be a proper mother. I'd be making you better. It'd all be down to me and you wouldn't have to deal with the agony that is getting over this. This horrible ugly struggle. Your little body would grow and your bones would melt back into your flesh and your corners would round out and your figure would come back and you'd be soft and healthy and normal and you wouldn't have had to battle and sacrifice. I'd awaken you when the time was right and you'd say "Have I been asleep? What time is it? I'm hungry". And I'd have to run to the loo to cry with joy and relief. And I'd tell you rehearsed lies - "Everything's fine. You're fine. Here's a lovely supper for you, darling - your favourite." And you'd wolf it down and smile and we'd go out somewhere lovely and you'd be all bouncy and silly and lighthearted and I'd have to keep swallowing hard to stop from howling. And I'd magically hand you your life back. All mended and wonderful and a little bit boring.
Where is your freedom? Where are your choices? Where is your blossoming adulthood and the exciting trepidation it should be greeted with? I HATE this. You're my baby again and I would rather you emigrated to Australia and lived a happy life away from me and I only ever saw you over a webcam than this. Can you believe that? That I can say that and mean it with my whole anguished heart? I do. I would sacrifice anything to rid us of this. I would kill him. I want to kill him so much. I dream of stabbing him or kidnapping him and putting him in a cage and torturing him for years. I fantasise wildly of ways to ruin him. Destroy him and all who love him. I dream of castrating him and stuffing it down his throat and taping his mouth shut and laughing while he dies in front of me. Of impaling him on a spike and watching the blood run out of him. I'm impotently enraged that I can't do this for you and for me and for every other girl who ever encounters him. Wicked, wicked man. I bet his life is ok. I wish ours was.
I am so sad. My eyes ache with crying every day. My heart breaks and mends and breaks and mends. I'm so tired. I wish I had a god. Such terrible loneliness.
A YEAR TODAY. My whole self is hurting. You didn't tell me until this afternoon. I wonder if you expected me to just know. I'm so miserably sorry I didn't. I feel utterly wretched for you. Such a bleak anniversary - one that will cloud your days, your eyes, your heart for ever more.
I wish my love was enough. I am trying so hard to love you better. I'll never give up.
