Sometimes - for little minutes - I get this soaring feeling of hope. An imprecise knowledge that your life will be returned to you (and in turn, mine to me) in all it's simple glory and all will be well. And then I remember that it took you three quarters of an hour to choose how to incorporate into your day the requisite - instructed - extra 200 calories issued in today's clinic appointment. Dillying and hesitating, delaying and vacillating - the cake and biscuit counter in Sainsbury's a sea of foulness before your poor eyes.
Such worry and fear in your bearing as you move from cakes to breads to biscuits to cakes and over and over again - picking up packet after packet and then back to the first, seemingly willing the fat content to have each time miraculously gone down and the calorie content to be the exact right number - trying to do the right thing, do as you've been told, battling against the voice and trying to get well. I know you don't want to eat at all but you told me today how frightened you are of becoming so ill again, reverting to that terrified girl who battled to starve herself successfully. So you try and you fight it and you do as you're told. But it very nearly breaks you. To pick up the slack and to give you what paltry reserves of courage I can spare for you to take, leaves me barely able to see.
We get home and I fall into my bed while the sun shines outside and children laugh in the gardens over the way. The nothingness of my room is like heaven. All I have to do is be. And yet all I can do is think of you downstairs - actually being the one doing the living through every second of all the terrible things I imagine. I think of your next meal and your pain and your struggle and your worry and your sadness. And I could punch myself with the guilt and disgust.
Point four of a kilo lost this week. All those stairs at college - corridors strode down and classrooms crossed at speed to keep up with timetables and friends. But with each step, the burning of energy and the maths of it all makes you thinner. So, the numbers do bad things and the balance must be addressed. With more food. You eat so much but of so few calories and such little fat. I despair. How to smile and gather hope and be your calm, equable Mother when according to the calculations, IT'S NOT WORKING. I just don't know. I try to sort it in my head - battle plans and strategies - but I am frozen with indecision and woe. I just want to go to bed and bury my head and melt away into oblivion. I do not know how to keep on doing this. If all this fails, it will be my fault for not being able to hide my rage and my crying and my fear. I let little bits escape, against my will: tears squeezed through swollen and stinging lids; sharp words through tight, bitten lips - lumpy and ragged inside from my restless teeth.
I am so tired, I feel I could vomit. I feel sick with the worry and the exhaustion and the middle-of-the-night wakefulness. The fear is a part of me now - grafted like a new skin over the old me. There seems to be little of me left now. I don't recognise myself anymore - not the vision in the mirror nor the voice in my head. I am on a mysterious autopilot - assigned to me by someone who has never met me before and doesn't quite know how to create the facsimile. I have no idea who I am.
I fell asleep just now and had a dream that you asked for potatoes.
I want to say more on this - about the astonishment and happiness I felt at your spontaneity.
And I want to describe how you held up the bag of charlottes to me in Sainsbury's and said "Can we have these?"
But I think I'll leave it at that: you asked for potatoes.
You said my salad smelled nice yesterday.
Food smelled nice to you. Oh god - you not only experienced it, you allowed it and you mentioned it and didn't retract it or explain it away or ask me never to mention it again or tell anyone. It was a spontaneous moment! I can feel a smile on my face just from thinking about it.
For a moment there, you forgot that food is medicine - only ever foul disgusting medicine.
Some latent, sleepy part of your brain - the part that has been put on hold all these months and is forbidden to voice an opinion - snuck past the defenses erected by that bitch inhabiting your mind. It remembered food as pleasure - as a delight to the senses - not a shameful, excessive indulgence. Fuck YOU, anorexia.
Whether you want to or not, you seem to be improving, slowly slowly slowly - evidenced by such incidents. Small things no-one would notice - except me and you.
I won't forget this. Moments like that give me a fleeting glimpse into a future filled with ordinariness.
You are wonderful.
We haven't gone blackberry picking this year. I'm pretty sure we won't. Not never - just not this year. Makes me sad and wistful - it's been a part of our Autumns since you were a baby: purple, prickled fingers and lumpy, sugary crumble. And Mabel plucking them with her front teeth to keep herself amused while we wander slowly round all the bushes on the Common, filling up Tupperware containers.
It'd just be pointless. And yet another mean reminder that you're not your usual self - that simple pleasures are now on hold - boxed away until we can revisit them. I don't know how I'll remember everything you and I will need or want to reacquaint ourselves with. Maybe a list:
- Brambling.
- Going to the cafe on the Common.
- Me making you a bite to eat.
- Me making you a cuppa. You making you a cuppa.
- Going to fast food places with your friends on the way home from school.
- Spotting things you might fancy in shops and buying them for you without mentally slapping myself.
- You having a monster peckish evening and enjoying eating every single thing you make for yourself - crackers and cereal and crisps and carrots and hummous.
- You saying - "Mmm, that smells nice".
- You saying "I'm starving" and me not wanting to cry for the time when you really were. Just typing that makes me want to cry.
- You saying "I'm not hungry" and meaning "I'm not hungry" instead of "I'm going to punish myself by withholding nourishment".
That fast became a general eating-related wish list. Not what I intended.
_______________________________________________________________________
A different list:
- College.
- Rachel and Lily and Alison here. Mixed feelings of pleasure in Lily's sweet company and irritation at the noise of that dog and the crowding and the slight disintegration of your carefully practiced and well worn routine - your safety and familiarity has taken on a tinge of chaos and you're striving valiantly to not mind, to not show that you mind, to not shout and scream and throw your blender at them for doing normal things in the kitchen and not being able to read your mind.
- Diane gone. Strange but true. And how quickly we pushed her into the box marked "Forgotten". The lid keeps slipping off a bit.
- You feeling like you're getting fatter when actually you still feel like a bony, tiny waif in my arms and your Size 4 clothes show no signs of getting snugger.
- Scared to be different in front of your friends at College. Different is weird and weird means losing the few friends you have left and that means being alone and lonely and pretending that's what you actually wanted all along.
- Wanting to be invisible and glide soundlessly and ephemerally through your existence outside of this house.
- Seeing girls you used to think were slim and lovely and envied slightly and realising you're now so much thinner than they are: pride fighting shame. Always the dichotomy.
- Crying with the fear and dread of College and coping with such a huge shift and so much that is hurtingly unfamiliar - it makes my stomach twist with worry about how you'll cope - not knowing and having to wait and see and force yourself and try try try to be normal and to be just like all those others who used to be your close-knit band of comrades. Now, you speak of them as though they were dangerous strangers who will invade the new, rigid, safe existence you have carved for yourself. As if their teenage exuberance and carelessness and recklessness might ruin you. It won't, my darling. It makes me so sad.
- Knowing you've given thought to chucking it all in and getting a job instead.
- Antidepressants. I thought this was what I wanted for you - that they'd give you a boost and the room to heal. Now the time has come and the Doctor feels you need them, I absolutely do not want you to have to take them.
- Your obsessions and compulsions getting worse and more complicated and time-consuming and annoying and making you weirder and more different - as if there was any need for more.
- Hearing you say "suicide" and wrapping it in a sentence of reassuring words and "I never have/never will/don't want". But the damn word was said and I keep hearing it echo in my head. Goddammit.
- Sleeplessness night after night. Yours as well as mine.
- I love you.
- Please get better.
- I love you so much.
