The Middle Bits

 

I’ve realized I’ve been telling my story out of order; that none of the pieces seem to match up end to end. Between fearful childhood and the quaking psych ward, I had been hospitalized twice.

This story in particular, my dear lovely reader, is very hard to tell. There is so much guilt and regret in what my life became, and in who I hurt during the middle bits of getting better. I’m going to tell you anyway though, if you choose to listen, because I think it’ll be worth the hurt.

I’ve been hospitalized three times. This is the story of the second.

Bruce had the most beautiful, blue eyes; when he was sad or scared, they couldn’t hide a thing. I wished they were brown. He was well into his sixties, but still he spoke to me like an equal. I liked him, I just didn’t listen.

I started seeing Stacy around this time too. We were somewhere between Cymbalta and Prozac when she started getting really concerned. It was at this point that Bruce decided he couldn’t help me. He wanted me to return to treatment, and I said no. There was no way I’d go back to a body I hated–to a body that made me unsafe–depressed. Not that I wasn’t depressed in an emaciated body, but that didn’t matter. He told me, in the kindest way he could, to not come back. He couldn’t enable me. He couldn’t watch me die.

I stayed out of treatment for two more months, in which time I had finished a semester of college with a 4.0. I had gone contra dancing with my best friend. I had been on dates. Had a boyfriend for a bit. I had been dishonest and unkind to the two people I loved without reservation. I had lied to myself as well–but that didn’t matter as much. 

In these two months, my mother fought while I slept. My body was weak and my brain thought only in numbers. Numbers and nothing nothing nothing. I needed to walk. I needed to get warm somehow. I had to fill my stomach with water. She cooked for me. She placed it on the table in front of me. She rearranged her life. She took it all on. All of it. I knew guilt; I knew love and sacrifice. I had to stop.

She was tired, and scared, and my best friend in the world. I decided I should try treatment for a second time–briefly–to get just healthy enough to take care of myself. My mom drove me to a hospital in Connecticut for my second try at treatment. The program was called Walden Behavioral Health.

I was admitted through the ER, and my primary fear was not what lay ahead, but that I would be larger than everyone else. I was scared that I’d be the fattest one there. I cried to my mom that I wasn’t sick enough–I felt like I looked too healthy–I wasn’t small enough to need this place. I didn’t look sick.

I weighed less than I had in fifth grade. I was just barely 20.

My mom was going to stay with my uncle an hour away in Providence, Rhode Island so she could be close to me. Guilt. Numbness. Fear. I didn’t need to be there; I wasn’t sick enough; my mom was giving up her life; I didn’t want to gain weight; my mom was worried and hurting. My mom was worried and hurting. I had to stop. I had to.

My mom couldn’t see me until later that evening, so they wheeled me through a locked door, alone. “Walden” was written in large, lilting letters on the unfeelingly white walls. They wouldn’t let me walk. 

I met with a psychiatrist within fifteen minutes of arriving. I was numb and tired and told her everything. I told her about food and my body, about treatment and Stacy and Bruce. I told her that I had anxiety attacks until I was fourteen, and that I used to be afraid of stars. I told her that when I was eight, I was afraid that the sun wouldn’t come up in the morning, and that I, or someone I loved, would die and I would be at fault somehow.

“Thank you for being,” she hesitated, “honest.”

“Of course.”

“We’ll start you on Zyprexa tonight.”

It was an antipsychotic, often used with schizophrenia, but also with what I had. Stacy had put me on it for a while, but I stopped taking it without telling her. I didn’t like how antipsychotic sounded. I just wanted to be 20.

Walden had seen marginal improvements in patients on this drug. One of the side effects was weight gain.

My dietitian at Walden was named Kate. With her, I chose my meals and snacks for the day. After an hour of deliberation, I chose a granola bar and apple juice for my first snack, which I would have to eat in five minutes. 

There was one room for us during the day. We ate there, watched tv there, met for “groups” there. It was there that I sat at a table with twenty other adults, half of whom had tubes connected from their nose to a bag full of nutritional supplement. This is how they were fed if they couldn’t finish meals at the table. This is how I would be fed if I decided not to eat. No, that doesn’t feel right. If I couldn’t eat. 

The woman to my right–a tiny, adolescent-looking patient–wasn’t eating, The woman to my left was breaking her chips into dusty oblivion. A woman across the room, hooked up to a tube feeding her both supplement and water, was sipping something from a plastic cup. From head to foot, this woman was concave. She was ageless in a way that only a skeleton can be–simply without life. I ached for her. I couldn’t help her. 

I drank my apple juice first, then ate the granola bar. I thought about my mom. 

She came after dinner, which had been one half of a peanut butter and jelly that I had eaten in small, delicate bites. She looked deeply worried and tired; I had seen her this way before. I held her for the better part of a minute, and told her I was doing okay. That I was okay. That I loved her and was so grateful she she was there. I loved her more than she could ever know–how could she possibly know?

We went to a visiting room, where another young woman sat playing cards with her mother. Neither spoke. I held my mother’s hand while we talked, promising her that I was going to do this–that I had to. She let go of my hand, and parted my hair in two french braids. How did she love me still?

My mother was the only daughter of two recovered alcoholics. My grandfather died when I was ten, and my grandmother now lives alone near a river. She watches Canada from her living room. I played there as a kids; carefree and showing skin. 

My mother raised herself. She cared for her two younger brothers, did the family’s laundry, cleaned. My mother needed no one. I needed her like my own lungs.

She came to see me in that Connecticut hospital every night for a week, and every night she braided my hair. We talked about a show she was watching–Vikings. Ootrid was the name of the buff, handsome hero, and we talked about him at length. 

“His father, and his father’s father, were named Ootrid too.”

“So our Ootrid is actually Ootrid, Son of Ootrid, Son of Ootrid.”

We laughed so hard we cried. I felt like maybe I might be okay. 

Meals and snacks were excruciating. The majority of patients were older–fifties or sixties–which surprised me. They would yell at the staff for salt, pepper, mustard, ketchup, something was cold; they were frantic in these needs. They cut their food into tiny pieces, and so I started to as well. I didn’t like finishing my food before everyone else, so I started matching their glacial pace. I found myself aching, always. I couldn’t help them, what could I possibly do? Listen, maybe. But they didn’t speak.

The sadness in this place was profound. The grief. The absence of people.

The ageless woman was  named Joany. She was my mother’s age. She had been in the hallway one evening when my mother arrived, and said a small, “hello” in her direction.

My mother found her eyes, and greeted her. Pain. Numbness. 

Wordlessly, my mom embraced her. 

I was there for a week, and in that time had eaten more than I had in the past three months. I was hitting a wall–I couldn’t keep eating like this. I had to stop somehow. But my mom–.

We decided that I’d transfer from the hospital, to a residential facility in Waltham Massachusett–another branch of Walden Behavioral Health. It took two hours to get there, in which time I had plenty of time to think of all the damage I had done to my life, all the food that was sitting inside me, and the all the wreckage I’d left. My mom played music both of us knew and we discussed the sex appeal of Vikings. 

We arrived in Waltham late that night–nine or ten. The intake was brief, and I was feeling horribly present. I could feel everything, and so was drowning in an empty pain in my lower stomach. My mom had to leave. I clung to her neck. 

“I love you.”

“I love you more.”

 

Thank you, dear reader.

I love you most.