True Life Stories:
THIRTY YEARS LATER, STILL WATCHING THE SCALE
by Joyce Maynard from the collection Going Hungry, Anchor Books, 2008
Added December 3, 2008
There was a pair of schlock artists popular in the sixties, by the name
Keane -- Walter and Margaret -- who made their name painting images of
young girls with huge eyes and skinny bodies -- the ultimate waifs.. All
through my growing up, people would make the comment that I looked like
a Keane painting, and it's true, I did. Skinny. Large eyed. Hungry. "Love
me" is the message those girls in the paintings seemed to be
saying . And I guess that's what my own waiflike countenance suggested.
Though my parents were alive and well, in certain ways it could be said,
I was up for adoption. Calling out to be protected, rescued. And maybe
it was in those early years that the lesson came to me: to be adored,
a person should be thin.
It was not a look I consciously cultivated, at first. A picky eater, I'd been under-weight from the start. When I think of them now, the words my mother used to describe me seem odd, even bizarre -- all the more so because she was the daughter of Russian immigrant Jews, and a woman for whom the Holocaust stood as a daily presence of oppression and tragedy. Still, what she said to me, when I left my plate untouched, at dinner, was, "you look a concentration camp victim," and though her comment was an overstatement, this part was true: There was little meat on my bones. I might not live on bread and water, but a bag of Fritos and a glass of water was plenty for me.
My mother -- a voluptuous beauty, lifelong dieter -- may have taken a certain pride and pleasure in that. Certainly my weight, and the issue of how to get me to eat, was a constant topic of conversation in our family. But as much as I heard about eating more, trying new foods, drinking my milk, I got another message too -- it was a good thing to be skinny. Looking that way inspired people to pay attention to me, worry about me, take care of me. I liked that, I think.
For the first fourteen
years of my life, my Walter Keane waif look came naturally and without
effort. Then (hardly an original story here) sometime around the beginning
of high school, my body began to change and fill out. I didn't have those
Little Match Girl legs any more, or the flat, almost hollow chest. And
maybe because so much had always been made of how thin I'd been, and maybe
in part because my mother had taken a certain vicarious pleasure in my
skinniness, I registered the womanliness of my body with increasing concern.
If I didn't look fragile and hungry, who would feel a need to protect
me or lavish me with tender care? If I didn't look like a child any more,
would I have to act like an adult?
In the fall of my senior year of high school, when I was seventeen years
old, my weight reached a hundred and twenty pounds. Not really heavy,
but curvy. I stopped eating and joined a gym. All that winter, and into
the spring, I continued to do my school work , but really, my keenest
and most obsessed energy went to making my flesh disappear. All those
months, I executed situps and counted calories. There weren't many to
count. By my graduation, that June, my weight had dropped to eighty eight.
And still, I thought I wasn't skinny enough.
This is the old story, of course. We know what it looks like now, and even, to a certain degree, where it comes from . (The desire to hold off on womanhood and remain, as long as possible, in the seemingly safer territory of childhood. The need to control one's life -- one aspect of it, anyway. Perfectionism. Depression, possibly. Rejection of sexuality. The longing to please a highly critical parent, perhaps. Or the urge to punish that parent. Or both.)
In my case, just about all of those stories played a part in the radical transformation my body went through, that year. Not just my body, either. Because what it takes to deny hunger that way also requires a re-wiring of the brain.
In the fall and winter of the year 1970 -- when I was seventeen years old -- I trained my mind to view self denial as a good thing. I programmed my thinking in such a way that no bite of food entering my mouth went unnoticed or unmonitored. I taught myself to associate an empty stomach with a sense of pride and accomplishment, and a full one with shame. Nights alone in my bed, I ran my hand over my stomach and ribs. If I let myself slip and ate a piece of bread, or a piece of chocolate, what followed was a wave of self hatred and disgust so great that after a while, I would no sooner have eaten bread than I would lick the floor of the subway at Times Square. (And in fact, to me, the one act was not much different than the other.) For months, I had been telling myself that food was my enemy, and hunger my friend. At some point -- I am not sure anymore when it came -- I believed those things.
At the point I stopped eating normally, I was a student at a prestigious
private school that had only just that year admitted women (they called
us that). The summer after my graduation from my private school -- a summer
in which my daily food intake consisted of a container of Dannon yogurt,
an apple, and an ice cream cone -- I maintained my low weight, though
doing so required almost total concentration and dedication to the task.
By this time, I had ceased menstruation. My breasts had virtually disappeared.
That fall, I enrolled in yet another prestigious school -- Yale University, this time. Once again, I found myself surrounded by brilliant students and professors, inspiring courses, a world class library, gym, theater, and more. And still, my biggest energy was spent on staying thin. Looking back on this now, the waste of that choice appalls me, but there you have it. I cared more about being able to trace every rib than I did, about Faulkner or Chaucer or the history of Post-War America or the play I was acting in or -- this is saddest of all -- the friends I had come to know and like, but with whom I could not share a meal in the dining hall, because if I did, I might have to consume food. Just writing those words fills me with sorrow and regret.
By this time, age 18, I had embarked on a writing career that opened all kinds of doors for me -- offered up the prospect of jobs in New York City and beyond, magazine assignments, even a book contract. Among the magazine stories I pitched that year was one about a disease called "anorexia." The magazine turned down my idea. "Too way out and unusual," the editor told me. "The kinds of stories we want are the ones that readers can identify with." And so I stuck to safer stories. While my own grew darker.
I attracted the
attention of a man, who liked it that I was skinny, and in fact, taught
me new tricks for how to stay that way. Over the course of the year that
followed, the relationship grew increasingly difficult, for all kinds
of reasons , but I suspect his policing of my body and my eating was one
of them. I had liked it, when I held control, myself. But the experience
of having another person -- even one I loved -- telling me what to eat,
and forbidding certain foods, filled me with frustration and, as I look
back on it now, probably anger, though I never acknowledged that part,
even to myself.
I took to sneaking food. I borrowed the car and went to the supermarket,
and then -- in the parking lot, with the heater on, because it was winter
-- ate three yogurts in a row, followed by a bag of popcorn or half a
pack of Fig Newtons. And though I had learned how to make myself throw
up by this time (a skill the man had taught me), I couldn't get rid of
everything I took in. I ceased to be so thin. Maybe I was a normal weight
-- hard to say, now. I know I felt gross, unlovable, and ashamed. And
when the relationship ended, and grief overwhelmed me, and no one was
there watching what I ate any more, my appetite felt inexhaustible.
I was never fat. I just wasn't skinny any more, and to my brain and my eyes, as I had trained them to perceive myself, that was bad enough.
For me, the years of self starvation had removed all memory of how to eat like a normal person. I knew only two conditions: total denial, total bingeing. I binged often enough that I remained unhappy with my body. I starved myself enough, after, that I continued to look normal, to eyes other than mine. But inside my head, it was as if a radio station remained permanently dialed to everything related to food and body issues. I monitored my weight and the feeling of my stomach -- bloated or flat -- on an hourly basis, sometimes. Wherever I went, whatever I did, I considered the calories I was burning, the foods I could eat, or couldn't.
When I was twenty three -- having lived more than five years now in a state of constant vigilance and anxiety about my weight and eating -- I fell in love again. Not right away, but after a while, I revealed my problem to the man who would become my husband. A naturally lean person, with naturally healthy eating habits and an active, highly athletic lifestyle, and a certain disinclination to explore certain emotional complexitites, perhaps, he offered up a single piece of advice in what was probably our one and only conversation on this topic, ever, during the twelve years of our marriage.
"Eat what I eat," he told me. "Do what I do. You won't have a problem."
It was a little more difficult than that. Within months of our getting
together, I was pregnant, instructed by my midwife that a thirty to forty
pound weight gain was standard and appropriate. For a woman who could
be thrown into despair by a fluctuation of more than a pound on the scale,
this was a challenge, but oddly, a relief. There was no way of looking
thin any more. It was unthinkable to starve myself, because to do that
would have starved my baby too. The brain I'd taught to send off alarms
and shut down all food consumption, any time I could feel a pinch of fat
on my belly, had to be reprogrammed now.
A person might have thought someone like me -- someone with my history of eating disorders -- would have entered into pregnancy with disgust and horror. No doubt the biggest reason I didn't do that had to do with my excitement over our baby and my lifelong anticipation of motherhood . Finally, there was something that consumed my attention, more than monitoring myself and my body. And of course, that is one fundamental gift of parenthood: how it takes you out of yourself, and teaches you (as you may never have done before) to think about another person first, to put the needs of your child above your own. I would like to think love for one's partner would do this, but in my case, it took love of my child.
For the first time in years, then, I ate. Not knowing how to do it very well, I ate too much, and the wrong things, and so, by the time I went into labor, I had gained over fifty pounds. My face -- so long pinched and sallow -- was round and full. So were my legs, my arms, my ankles. A few years before, seeing myself this way, I would have felt shock and dismay, but pregnancy had obliterated my old standards for how I should look. Where once, I lay in bed at night feeling my ribs, now I ran my hand over my belly and felt a foot kicking, and I was happy.
In February of that year, 1978, our daughter was born, weighing seven
and a half pounds. I don't know what I thought would happen after that,
because I was virtually the only one, among my friends, who'd had a baby
at this point, so I was unfamiliar with the next part. Maybe I actually
supposed that once she was delivered, the rest of the pounds would vanish.
They didn't. I don't know if what overtook me then was postpartum depression or the panic any person with eating disorders would experience, finding herself carrying an extra forty pounds suddenly. I know that the first time I stood naked in front of the mirror, after my daughter's birth, I wept. Childbirth was easy compared to dealing with my body, after.
My husband had become a parent the same day I did, of course, but bore none of the signs of pregnancy's ravages on his flat stomach, his well defined abdominal muscles. Eat what I eat, do what I do felt like a bad joke. There was an adorable large-eyed girl living at our house, alright, but that person was my daughter, and as much as I delighted in every single thing about her, I felt grief too, for the girl I had been once, who seemed no longer to exist.
When I was seventeen, and feeling a need to trim down, I cut myself down to starvation eating levels and gave hours of my day over to exercising. When I was twenty three, with a nursing baby in my arms, those things weren't possible. I covered myself in loose shirts instead. I had the thing I wanted more than anything, my daughter. But it also felt to me, at the time, as though what it had required to get her was nothing less than the loss of myself.
Much has been written and said about the condition of anorexia. The signs
are obvious. The problem, in its most severe form, is terrifying to witness,
and the stakes very clear. A person suffering from the disease (and that's
what it is, same as alcoholism is a disease) can die of it, as we now
know.
Less dramatically painful is the story that comes later -- after the weight is gained, the body no longer skeletal, or at risk of organ failure, and all the other medical crises that can arise, when a person has been starving herself over a long period of time.
In my case, the period of my life in which my weight remained dangerously low was relatively brief -- a year and a half, maybe two at most. For me, far more suffering and pain occurred later, when I re-entered the world of normal eating, or tried to. For me, it was making peace with no longer inhabiting the body of a waif that proved the hardest.
This is the other
half of the story of anorexia, then. The story of coming back. My body
was no longer in danger, if it ever was, but my mind had been changed
by the
experience. The body returns to normal weight, or maybe, as was true for
me, the body may go above the old normal. The shape fills out, to the
point where the person inhabiting it may actually look heavy. And still,
the brain of that person holds to the old set of ideas: that there is
some odd kind of virtue to be experienced, in extreme thinness, and the
corollary, that the failure to be thin, the sin of extra weight on one's
no-longer visible bones, is evidence of far greater failures -- of will,
of fortitude, of character.
Twenty nine years have passed now, since, one day after my daughter's
birth, I stepped onto my well-used bathroom scale and saw the number 158.
Even all these years later, I can still remember how it felt, over the
long painful months that followed, in which I slowly worked to regain
some semblance of my old self .
Eventually, I lost the rest of those fifty pounds. I was never again the possessor of a flat stomach, and nobody ever again compared me to a girl in a Walter Keane painting. Or a girl, period. I was a woman, clearly -- with a baby in arms, and nursing breasts, and widened hips, and stretch marks. It is evidence of my ability to embrace motherhood and womanhood, over waifdom, that I went on to bear two more babies. (Never again gaining fifty pounds in the pregnancy. The next time, and the time after that, I knew better how to take care of myself.) I am fifty-three now. Most people would describe me as normal weight. Now and then -- generally in summer, generally when I have time and energy to devote to the project -- I make myself slimmer than normal. Never skinny, however, and I'm glad to say I no longer want to be that way. Still, certain aspects of the disease that took over my life for a while there are with me still, and always will be.
When I told someone
recently that I had suffered from eating disorders as a young person,
he looked surprised. "I would never have guessed," he said.
It no longer shows on the outside. But in my brain, it's always there:
the endless vigilance, the anxiety if I feel the numbers creeping up,
or run my hand over my belly and feel too much flesh there. The old wiring
in the brain never quite gets ripped out.. In the same way that an alcoholic,
thirty years sober, still speaks of herself as "recovering,"
so do I. All evidence suggests, a woman can have a belly and be loved,
but there will always be those odd moments when the old thinking returns.
Here is the truth. All these years later, I still run my hand over my ribs at night, to make sure I can feel them. I can tell you the exact number of calories in a cashew. And then there is this: Suppose I get the flu. I feel miserable, lose my appetite and throw up for a couple of days. And from some deep place, that internal radio signal I can't tune out completely, the old Walter Keane girl in me still calls out, "Oh good, I bet I'll drop four pounds."
I no longer expect this voice will ever be silenced entirely. All I can do is take it in, and change the station.
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