Hungry (3 page)

Faced with a disease of uncertain origin and wildly conflicting experts, I flew into information-gathering like a frantic bird, collecting sticks and leaves to patch the nest. Quick, let’s try this treatment or that doctor. When your child is sick, that’s all that matters. You feel paralyzed at times, you can’t face another day, but you keep going. My job just made the going a little trickier.

People who meet me as a food writer invariably say, “But you’re skinny!” It may be my greatest accomplishment (“She ate a ton and never got fat”). But even at my thinnest postcollege depressive self, a knife blade in skinny jeans, I never lost track of the two or three pounds that would have flattened an imaginary bulge in my stomach.

As a food writer and middle-aged woman, I have rounded up a bit. (When I started reviewing restaurants, it was: “But you’re
so
skinny!” Mostly I don’t hear “so” anymore.) I exercise a lot, and I kick myself for all the mental energy I put into my weight and body parts I’d like to trade in, when I could be caring about something important. How did my body issues and my job as a food writer contribute to my daughter’s anorexia? Lisa and I retreat to our own corners on this one. She sees a lot to blame on me, my job, our family’s food obsession. And you know, so do I. But I wonder how much can be attributed to my career choice, my personality, or just being Mom.
Hungry
is not about piling on the blame. There’s a lot more at work. Like mothers and daughters everywhere, when Lisa and I build up muscles of self-righteous anger and hurt, it’s hard to break through. Our book is about the hungers that put us back in the ring.

My daughter stands under five foot three and weighs ninety-three pounds. I can barely see the top of her head in the back of the patrol car as it sweeps by me, standing at the emergency room entrance on this otherwise gorgeous, blue-sky Saturday afternoon in August 2007. An armed policewoman gets out of the car and I can’t watch anymore. I retreat into the Soviet-style hospital compound to wait for Lisa, hoping the handcuffs will be off when I get to see her.

Lisa and I had walked out of Stanford Hospital’s double-wheelchair-wide doors less than forty-eight hours earlier, after six nightmarish weeks in treatment for anorexia and depression. We hadn’t known it was even possible to stay six weeks in a hospital. It was way too long and while she wasn’t getting better, she was deemed stable enough. On Thursday we packed Lisa’s stuff into paper grocery bags. She hugged the cherubic resident doctor and a couple of the nicer nurses, and got one mile of fresh air as we drove to the new center of our hopes, a cozy, community-based halfway house where she would live for at least the next six weeks. They would have to be better weeks.

Eventually, yes, they would be, but that morning Lisa called 911. She told the dispatcher she had eaten liquid soap and said she felt dead. Two Palo Alto Police Department cruisers, a fire truck, and an ambulance raced to the group home, a place I’ll call La Casa, a Tudor-style thirties-era house on a quiet residential street, and took my stunned daughter away in handcuffs. Metal handcuffs. This is police procedure for anyone who’s “a danger to him- or herself.”

When the officers had appeared at the door, Lisa was stunned. She told them she didn’t really mean it. They were calm but stern. Once a suicidal-sounding call is made, there is no going back.

The director of the halfway house called me. He was on his way to the hospital to fill out the necessary forms, and he would talk to me there. He, too, sounded calm. This wasn’t all new to him. When he got the call about Lisa’s 911, he was buying vegetables at the farmers’ market, where normal people went on Saturdays. Ned was out of town or he would have been at the farmers’ market, too.

I put down the phone, wishing I hadn’t picked it up, that the call had been a prank or I’d dreamed it. Two days free of the hospital, and that was that. What next? But this was no time to explore my feelings. I threw some fruit, bread, and cheese into a sack. All I could think was, We’ll have to eat at some point. I wouldn’t leave Lisa even for a few minutes to get a sandwich.

 

lisa:
“I need you to just breathe,” the policewoman called back to me. But I did not want to breathe, I did not want to see, I did not want to believe I was sitting in the back of a police car, handcuffed and heading back to the Stanford Hospital emergency room.

I had spent two nights at La Casa. I trembled uncontrollably and couldn’t think, but mostly it had gone okay. When I checked in, everyone was just getting back from the offsite day program. We had dinner, watched TV, and went to bed. But the second night, a Friday, most people got to go out after dinner. Being a new resident, I had to stay home to be monitored.

Another resident, Jeff, was in the house as well. The two of us stayed downstairs, he in the dining room while I sat semipetrified on the couch in the living room. The real world scared me and presented itself full of activity, color, lights, and people after being isolated in a lock-down ward for six weeks. I was now in a new place, around new people, and I was still very sick and feared rejection from my new peers. Ron, on duty as the night staff, read a book in the office and waited for residents to come home and take their nighttime medications.

I watched as Jeff got some ice cream and then came into the living room and asked me if I wanted some. It was very sweet ice cream: vanilla with birthday cake flavoring. I ate it at the dining room table, and pretty quickly freaked out about how much I’d eaten, so I went up to the bathroom and tried to calm myself down by washing my face but I couldn’t hold back. I stuck two fingers down my throat and made myself throw up, as I had done so many times before. I was used to the taste of vomit, but I also had a soapy taste in my mouth. I realized I must have swallowed some facewash that had remained on my fingers. This freaked me out and I hardly slept at all that night.

In the morning, after breakfast, I felt like my body wasn’t mine. Maybe it was all the meds I was taking, but my surroundings became hard to detect. I went upstairs and grabbed my cell phone to call 911. This is what I remember:

“I think I just killed myself.”

“Where are you? What happened?”

“I’m at La Casa. I swallowed facewash and OD’d on Prozac.” I didn’t have access to Prozac or any other medications, and the facewash had been the night before. I just wanted them to come and, as I envisioned, rescue me because I knew something was medically wrong or very off with me and I simply did not feel safe.

Then they were there, and then there were handcuffs. I said, “No, I didn’t mean it. I’ll be okay. Just let me stay here.”

We were supposed to go to the beach on Saturday.

 

sheila:
I was planning to take Lisa to the beach on Saturday. After six weeks of recycled ventilation in a concrete hospital built in 1959, she could use some ocean atmosphere. Psychiatry patients who were stable enough were allowed to sit outside on the deck or shuffle down to the patio for half an hour, but Lisa rarely earned that privilege. She hardly even looked out the window. Most of the time when we arrived, her room’s curtain was closed, and she hadn’t noticed or cared. She was very depressed, and shaky on an antipsychotic medication, but she was capable of sitting in the car for the one-hour drive to the coast. I calculated the possible restroom stops in case of beach traffic.

We were supposed to have an entirely different spring, summer, and fall. This felt like the
Lifetime
movie version of somebody else’s life. Lisa needed two more classes to graduate from the University of California, Santa Cruz, but she was able to walk with her class in June 2007. By now she would have been enjoying the summer; working at O’Neill, an upscale surfer-style clothing shop; and starting to think seriously about her future. She’d still have a couple of classes to finish up in the fall to get her degree in American Studies. She’d considered careers in teaching and in counseling, but needed time away from school before applying to graduate programs. It was a miracle she was even close to graduating with her class. Considering how horrible her freshman year had been—at least one quarter lost to bulimia—Ned and I were thrilled. And we’d been primed not to expect a four-year bachelor’s degree at the University of California. Lisa’s brother, Jake, spent seven years in and out of UC Berkeley.

I’m trying to make the case that Lisa wasn’t under the parental gun when she fell to pieces and lost more than three seasons of her life at age twenty-three. Public school tuition helped us dither. I know parents who carried through on threats of “Four years and you’re out!” with regard to college. Was it our permissive parenting that put Lisa on the road to extremely serious eating disorders in the first place? Lisa could have used stricter expectations, for sure. Maybe she felt lost. But I don’t know that stricter parents have fewer anorexic kids. Was the attraction to anorexia that it was a way to set limits that we should have been setting? It was also a powerful way to get attention and to manipulate.

During Lisa’s last year in college, she was working too many hours at the store, with a full academic load. But she kept saying that she liked to keep busy. She didn’t like to have time on her hands. What was that about?

As a young child, Lisa liked to tell us, “I love you to pieces that will never break again!” Now we were even analyzing Lisa’s version of Humpty Dumpty. If there had been a fall and something had broken, how could we not have noticed?

Our family had medical history, depression on my side and weight on Ned’s. Not just weight. Craziness about weight. Ned’s sister started taking diet pills when she was ten and has been on diets ever since. Ned got a little portly and then lost it, but his sister’s torture stayed with him. He feared for any child of his, especially a daughter.

Genetics, then, gave Lisa two strikes, but something else must have happened. As with many diseases, the rule you often hear about eating disorders is “Genetics loads the gun, and experience/ cultural pressure/trauma pull the trigger.” Depression and weight/ body image issues are as common as colds in America, yet most of us don’t become anorexic. We all navigate relentless media and social pressures to squeeze our imperfect selves into a very narrow band of acceptable appearance and accomplishment. Everyone is exposed, but some are more vulnerable, especially teenagers and young adults struggling to figure out who they are. What comes through clearly, though: Be thin.

And yet, good luck, dear, because you’re going to be around food all day, everywhere. Even in a bad economy, Americans have a turbulent relationship with food, more love/hate than appreciative. Rarely are we neutral about eating. Every food and food product is good or bad for our health and spiritual well-being, and the planet’s. Give each food an A or an F, rarely a C. While food items shunned one day can be resurrected by new findings or, more likely, suddenly found to be harmful, we feel more comfortable assigning them to one extreme or the other. We aren’t the only society to endow food with religious properties, but since the Puritans, it seems, we’ve never been able to relax about eating. Food is sinful or celestial.

Lisa got caught up in the sin, living in the original hotbed of food worship, the San Francisco Bay Area, with two foodie parents. We obsess. And I’m a food writer. This came as a shock to my family because I used to be the One Who Didn’t Eat.

Two frantic grandmothers flutter around one new mom and a child who won’t eat. In the 1950s, I am the one in the highchair, batting away all incoming spoons. In the eighties, it is my first child, Jacob. His maternal grandmother has to think, “Just desserts for Sheila” on one hand and “Not this again” on the other.

Maybe the early pickiness helped form me as a food critic, but eating just wasn’t that appealing. I stayed small and came late to just about every physical milestone. In photos of birthday parties I am the shrimp among prawns. Would I ever really need a bra? At last, I got my period at fifteen and then grew another two inches in college, to the average American woman’s five-foot-four. All that family angst about my eating and growing had been for nothing. I was normal.

Still, when baby Jacob zipped his lips against cereal and bananas and everything most children love, or spit them out, no memory or rational thought could stop me from flying straight into red alert. Children eat, sleep, and grow. That’s their job description. Jacob was a slacker in all departments.

Just like me. In our family, we were the children who didn’t eat.

My mother respected the grandmothers, for their child-rearing experience and for their leadership of the family. Mom was not quite twenty-one years old, having dropped out of UCLA after her freshman year to marry a buoyant twenty-four-year-old war veteran who ran the family jewelry business with his brother and uncle. Mom didn’t have a lot of confidence that I would survive without my grandmothers’ forced feedings. “Very often it was both of them, trying to get you to eat,” Mom says. “They were afraid you were going to starve to death.”

Medical professionals in the fifties pitched into the kitchen wars by telling Mom to stop nursing and put me on the bottle. I wasn’t getting enough milk. “I was not an eater, either,” Mom says. “My mother put me through the same thing.” We seem to be a line of slow learners.

I was the shortest or next-to-shortest in every class, always in the first row. Each December in our elementary school’s unfortunate production of scenes from
The Nutcracker
, Cookie Fukutome and I could not be missed in the “Waltz of the Flowers,” despite being the class’s clumsiest ballerinas. Being short we were up-front, dancing dangerously close to the edge of the stage.

My sister, nearly three years younger, overtook me early on. She was the one who did eat. In many aspects, Nancy and I divided up the first child/second child duties as if we’d studied Psychology 101. She bounded into rooms, singing and chattering to announce herself. At my most outgoing, it could be said that I was timid rather than shy. I could smile but not speak when introduced to adults. We did a lot of carpooling, and occasionally a father, it was always a father, forgot my stop because I was so quiet. I sank into the enormous backseat, too mortified to tell him I was alive.