It been a month or so of change and I can hardly keep up with it.
It’s making you shift and reassess and battle new demons and it’s making me let go a little – relax my grip on your life. What has taken the place of my mothering madness is a floating directionless vacuity. I feel rudderless and unsure. At least the relentless days and nights of food and fear and obsessive control and habit after pattern after routine were familiar – known to me in all their rancid glory and hated for all their restrictive power.
You have, they tell us at the clinic, made faster, better, more remarkable progress than any anorexic they have known. I hear the astonishment every week when I tell them that you haven’t cheated, have stuck to your directed food intake, haven’t exercised, have cried and talked and healed in appropriate measure.
They expect the worst from you and every week nowadays, you continue to elicit murmured – almost disbelieving – congratulations.
Where has the hysteria gone? We have learned to live alongside anorexia – we have grown accustomed to its face. We talk together through its tricks and wrestle with its confounded menaces like old hands now. How vile that we should be almost at ease with it. No smugness! No settling for this as if it were the best we can hope for! I want more for you. A rich, full, busy life - thrilling and safe in equal measure. You deserve all the Universe has to offer. My sweet little love, my precious, most adored child. All that there is should be yours as reward for and recognition of your existence. My heart pulls with love and admiration: the sheer force of your will and the effort you have put into this. We are on the cusp of something new. We are doing this. I want to grin with relief but am too mindful of complacency. Not just yet...
Here is a list of changes for me to revel in:
1. You ate a Skittle. On the bus, on a school trip. I wonder if you factored in the calories and the sugar. I think it was one of Robbie's. I picture you reaching for it and shaking inside. One tiny bright sweet popped into your mouth. Oh, the casualness of that word. I bet there was no such thing as 'popping'. I bet there was trepidation and screwing up your courage and that desperate longing to be normal - to take a sweet and eat it as easily as anything. And it will have looked like a big nothing to anyone watching but we both cried when you told me. The miraculousness of it. You incredible girl. This is the slippery slope now. The spinning into wellness. It's got you and it's carrying you along and me with it and we're on our way.
2. You peeped round my door one day and said you'd like to try having Christmas lunch with me and Dad and Robyn. Not your food, simply eaten at the same time as us. But actual different-to-your rigidly-usual food. I tried so hard to not punch the air. I wanted you to see my delight but not my overwhelming relief. Or my tears. I actually wanted to yell with surprise and happiness. I think I managed to convey my pleasure without completely alienating you...
On the day, you supervised the preparation of the roast potatoes - making sure no magic extra oil or poisonous calories were slipped in secretly. And you served yourself alongside the rest of us and you ate it. With us all there. And you didn't take ages or do anything outwardly anorexic. You just ATE YOUR FOOD. The significance of this is really quite enormous. I'm not conveying it well here but it was everything I'd ever hoped for. Your tiny portion - carefully quantified - of Christmas lunch. Eaten. Deliberately consuming different food at your own instigation! Halleluia.
3. You announced you'd like to try having your lunchtime sandwich at college instead of me collecting you, bringing you home to eat it and then delivering you back. This means you feel brave enough to eat in front of your friends. I am so proud. I wondered if this day would come. A part of me was content with the prospect of it not. When the first day is done, I will want to pry your mind with questions and have my worries soothed by your nonchalance. I must not badger you. Must not hold you to me and weep into your hair when you tell me it was fine.
4. You offered me a cup of tea tonight which is not that unusual but it was as we were going up to bed to watch DVDs and you don't generally offer me one at that time. The minutiae of our times together are unvarying and any slight alteration makes my Mother Of An Anorexic radar go blip. I am very glad I said yes. You carried up your day's flotsam and then went back down for the tea. When I turned to take the mug from you, I saw another in your other hand. I thought "Oh. Grace is having... " and then stopped. A what? A mug of air? Grace doesn't drink unbidden anymore. She sticks to her scheduled fluid intake and never deviates. I pester her to drink. I mention how she doesn't. I slip it in alongside my other vexed whinings. And you smiled at me and said "Guess what I'm having?" and I looked and I crowed! A cup of tea. Not black tea either but with a dash of milk. My GOD. What is happening here? What has become of my unyielding, inflexible poorly girl? I couldn't stop the "Yes!" Nor the cheek-aching grin. We had a lovely cup of tea together, as normal as you like. I wanted to ask you what made you decide, how did it taste, were you scared, had you been thinking about it and planning it for ages, was it horrible, did you like it, are you amazed at your brilliance? I didn't, though. I drank my tea and kept my eyes off yours and my speculations to myself.
5. Your period started. For the first time in nine months. You were jubillant and so was I. That we could discuss the finer details of something so personal and ordinarily taboo is testament to how this has robbed us of our boundaries and modesty. Illness is no respector of privacy. Your body is creaking back into life and your innards are churning with hesitant vigour. Hooray for that damnable thing revisiting.
You were swept along by fantasies of release and freedom - as if this signified the end of your illness and a return to eating what you want, when you want. But this is just the first step and the realisation hit you cruelly. You must stick to the regime a while longer, must continue to gain weight and then stabilise and stay at a healthy weight for a considerable, unspecified length of time before you are unburdened. The agonising slowness of recovery is infuriating to you and it made you cry when they told you you'd still need your ovaries scanning to make sure you really were getting better. You had blindly expected liberty. It's so hard for you to see how far you've come. Each forward step is reached only after weeks and months of horrendous effort. When you reach the milestones, there's only ever more ahead.
We are living a life of semi-absolution. It is frightening to have it all swimming untethered and unfamiliar in front of us. I want to surrender to it.
