I have cried so hard this morning. With something I can't name. I think it's a mixture of fear and relief. My eyes ache now like they used to in May and June and July.
You weigh 42.8 kilos - the most since the getting better began. I looked at the readout on the scales at the clinic yesterday and felt a small jolt of happiness. But I've seen the changes in you over the last couple of weeks and I know you're getting better - I don't cling so desperately to the numbers on the scales any more - don't look to them for reassurance and hope or for confirmation of my hateful fears. So I didn't feel my stomach flipping or that swaying feeling of deliverance.
It was almost as if I expected it. Your eating is stable. Your rage is contained. Your madness is managed. So you follow the expected course of recovery as you have done every step of the way. But now I feel limp with - I don't know what. I want to call it relief but it feels too empty and dark for that. It's as if all these months, a huge part of me has been on hold.
And now I am disintegrating - because I can. It won't kill you. It won't take something essential from you: you are healing yourself slowly and don't need my hawkeyed love and support now. I can fall apart. I can sink into my disintegration and the fallout won't be catastrophic. My hands are off the wheel now and we're not going to crash. I worry I might though - all on my own. I look in the mirror and realise I have stopped caring about what I look like - the lines and dark circles and the grey hairs that have grown with such alacrity this half a year are just there now - forever. They are unremarkable to me and that in itself is indicative of how deep I am in the this hollow place. I'm all a bit fragmented and loose in my soul and don't know how to put myself back together. Sighing and crying won't do it.
I feel so sorry for us. So sad and wretched that we had to go through this. It breaks my heart for us. I want my mother to hold me and comfort me and help me and tell me it's ok. But she has never done that for me - has never seemed able to reach out to me like that and nurture me. I've always managed without her. But right now I could so do with her telling me how wonderful and strong and brave I have been - that I have helped Grace and that I have been a good mother. She doesn't seem to have the wherewithal for that. But I am all Mothered out and need one for myself. I feel sad for me. I am so weary. Tired to my bones and as if my heart has been shattered. I want to leave this all behind now.
But I'm too scared to succumb. You might need me again. So today's self-indulgence will have to be just that - for today. A small peeping out of the real, broken me.
Is this my life now?
