Growing Up With An Anorexic Mother (Part II)

As I grew older, my mother became a great embarrassment to me. When we occasionally ate out together, there would invariably be a conflict during the meal. My father would become impatient with my mother's turning down dish after dish offered to her by harried waitresses.

Anorexics have a distorted body image. To them, their skeletal appearance seems normal, and people of normal weight seem fat. During the last 10 years of her life, my mother's weight averaged 68 pounds, yet she had no idea how bad she looked.

I was 16 and swimming at a high school meet that she attended. She was 48 years old and looked 90. Her bleached blonde hair was brittle and dry. Her dark skin had aged rapidly due to overexposure to the sun. Nearly every bone in her face was visible, and her eyes were sunk back deeply into their sockets.

The pool deck was very warm, and yet mom was bundled in heavy clothes. She always looked like a bag lady, laden with clothes and bundles. She approached me, and I had to introduce her to two teammates of mine. I was so embarrassed that I thought of introducing her as my grandmother, but I took a deep breath and introduced her as my mother.

Mom circa 1976: she was
still in her mid-forties.

I have never been anorexic nor hospitalized for psychiatric illness. Through my mother's anorexia, however, I have lost a great deal. Obviously, I have lost my mother. The real loss, however, is my never even having had an opportunity to know her.

I never knew my mother to weigh more than 72 pounds. I never knew my mother. You cannot love someone you don't know. You cannot lose what you never had. Her true personality never emerged. The only person I ever knew was a tyrannical person in pain.

The next paragraph was cut from the original version. I'm reinserting it here for clarity. -MSE

My mother was intelligent like Jolson was an entertainer. On one occasion, she just looked at me and said I had low self-esteem. She was right, and she hadn't seen me for months. And despite her condition, she was capable of running and swimming for miles at a clip.

Yet all that intelligence, physical endurance and insight wasn't enough save her. And it is lost to the world forever.

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