Anorexia and bulimia were not in the popular lexicon of 1958. It was the year I turned 13. The turbulence of childhood morphed into all-out warfare as the struggles with my mother escalated. Being a housewife, a stay-at-home mom, the kitchen was her seat of operations and food was a vehicle to control behavior. Meals were prepared according to schedule. Dinner mandated our coming together as a family. My father’s arrival seemed to be the key, but he was frequently late. Stomachs growled while the hands of the clock on the mustard yellow kitchen wall crawled along at an agonizing pace. Mom hovered like an anxious bird in front of the hulking cast iron gas stove as her American Chop Suey turned into a soggy grey mass while we waited. No eating beforehand was allowed. When Dad finally made an entrance, his odd half smile and slight stagger put me on high alert. It was clear he had been drinking.
We (my younger brother, mom, dad, and me) would sit around the Formica table in our cramped little kitchen. Awkward silences punctuated my mother’s attempt to hold a conversation pretending that everything was hunky-dory. The air was thick with things unsaid. Feeling trapped, I yearned to escape. Mounds of unwanted food sat in front of me. We were not allowed to help ourselves. Our plates, even my Dads were always arranged and served by my mother. It had been this way as long as I could remember.
I’d been a slightly overweight kid. Not obese but “chubby” they called it back then. I was very self-conscious about my slightly rounded belly, and my knees were so soft and thick they appeared to be boneless. Mom used to take me shopping once a year in early September for school clothes, picking out frilly dresses with tight little cap sleeves. She insisted on coming in the cramped quarters of the dressing room with me. As she yanked the dresses over my head, they would get stuck on my fleshy upper arms. In a rising panic, breaking into a sweat, I feared I’d suffocate underneath the opaque layers of nylon while she berated me for having to go to the “Chubbette” Department (I kid you not – this is what passed for clever marketing in the 1950s).
“You embarrass me,” she whispered. Devastated, I sullenly acquiesced while hating the clothes purchased with her money, their layers of crinolines and powder puffy ruffled skirts exacerbated my desire to rid myself of the body I could not hide.
Back home, at the kitchen table, the piles of food kept coming. I wasn’t allowed to leave until I cleaned my plate. In one starkly outlined moment, in front of an insurmountable Everest sized mound of now cold mashed potatoes and peas-I snapped. That’s it. The Furies erupted from the deepest recess of my primordial self. Silently I decided I’m taking control over what goes in my mouth. I refused to eat.
As I sat staring blankly out the kitchen window, the early evening sky turned dark while the food on my plate congealed. Everyone left the room while I sat at the table, ramrod straight, hands folded in my lap as if in prayer. The dishes were cleared. Finally, mom gave up, went into the living room, and turned on the TV. I slid off my chair and went to bed.
One terrifying evening at the dinner table, not knowing where to go with her frustration, mother goaded my father. “Erik, DO something about that girl!!” Dad seemed reluctant, almost confused, as he rose from his chair. His six-foot frame blocked the glare of the ceiling light, casting me in his shadow. I dared not look up into his face. He stood by my side, hesitated for a moment, and appeared unsure how to proceed. I waited in wary silence briefly contemplating my fate knowing flight was not an option. He slowly raised his leg, putting his knee on my lap, either to hold me down or to gain leverage. With his left hand braced on the back of the chair, he slowly forced a whole, red ripe tomato in my mouth with his bare right hand. My teeth clamped shut, gritted against this onslaught. The juice and seeds ran slowly down my chin and neck in thin, red streams, on down the front of my shirt. My lips flattened from the pressure of his palm across my gums. I held my head up, firm, unflinching. I’d rather die than give in. There was a lot of shouting going on around me. I didn’t hear it. I’d entered the ZONE. It was a place I’d learned to retreat to, avoiding fear. The rest of that evening remains thankfully buried in the folds of my memory.
Not surprisingly, I started losing weight. I developed other strategies to appease them. I discovered I could eat whatever my mother gave me and then sneak into the bathroom and vomit. Soon I began to gorge when no one was home. Mother never allowed us to have ice cream or cookies between meals. I would eat a whole gallon of ice cream when she was out and then I’d stick my finger down my throat to throw it all up. She questioned me about the disappearance of all this food. I’d lie, say my friends came over and ate it while she wondered what was going on as I continued to lose weight. Eventually, my period stopped. Mom took me to a pediatrician to find out what was wrong. The pediatrician prescribed hormones, little pink pills in a plastic wheel that I had to take every day for 28 days and then my period would come back. And so, it did. With the little magic pills. My weight continued to drop. I was so pleased with my new look. I could wear tight pants and throw away the girdle my mother made me wear to control my “jiggle”. I felt liberated. I hit a low weight of 87 pounds. My Dad would count the protruding bones of my spine that had become visible. I was 5’4” tall.
Ironically, my body became a source of pride and pleasure. I discovered that those little pink pills in the plastic wheel provided a path to sexual freedom that I embraced early on. I learned good food could be enjoyed and sex was a powerful tool that I wielded throughout my life. Sex served me and provided a feeling of trust in the power of my body and connection to the body of others in a world where power and control is illusory at best. I went on to have a successful career as an artist, an arts administrator and a journalist writing about art. I have a daughter and two adult granddaughters. While my daughter went through a difficult period as a teenager where she seemed to survive largely by eating grapes, it was short lived. Our relationship has survived and matured into a deeply loving and satisfying bond, along with a healthy self-image which she has passed on to her own daughters.
It is unraveling the enigma of my mother that has plagued me for much of my conscious life. She was born in 1922, an only child in a loving family, in a house on 198th street in Queens, NY, the same house I was born in 23 years later. She was doted on by both her mother and father and the kitchen in her mother’s house was a place of warmth and hospitality where the rich aromas of holiday feasts still linger in my bank of childhood memories. I adored my mother’s mother. She was earthy and relaxed and represented all the sensual pleasure that her daughter seemed incapable of feeling.
My mother’s face remains expressionless in my memory, a being whose two greatest loves were smoking (at least a pack a day since the age of 16) and driving. At one point, years after the death of my father when she was ensconced in an assisted living facility, she told me, “I live to smoke.” Perhaps it was while smoking and driving that she was able to escape the weight of her physicality, something she tried to do in her own life and tried to control in mine. She was never fat, but she obsessed over her weight. She’d had rheumatic fever as a child, a condition that threw her metabolism out of whack and caused some weight gain before puberty. Her name was Gladys, and I remember her saying that during this time in her life she was ridiculed and called “Glad-Ass”, or sometimes “Happy-Bottom”, nick-names that caused her some degree of shame.
Have I mentioned my mother was obsessed with giving me enemas as a child? If I close my eyes, I recall lying in the bottom of a dry, white porcelain bathtub. The air is cold. Perhaps it is winter. I’m naked. I’m young enough and small enough that when stretched out my feet don’t even touch the drain. My mother is kneeling beside the tub holding a liver-colored rubbery bag filled with warm soapy water. I’m sick with anticipation and anxiety. This is not the first time. Mother instructs me to turn on my side facing the wall. I dutifully respond, eyes tightly shut as though that will steel me against the anticipated onslaught. She sticks the stiff tube inside me that’s attached to the bag of soapy warm water. There is no discussion. The only tie between us is the sound of water swishing as she slowly squeezes until the last drop flows out of the bag, down the tube. She tells me to hold it in – do not let go – do not let the shit come out in the tub – hold it back as long as possible – and only when I thought I was going to explode was I allowed to dive for the toilet and let it gush out – the shit and the soap – the stink and the perfumy bubbles, filling the bowl beneath me. These episodes left me exhausted.
I’ve come to believe that there was some connection in my mother’s mind to the act of cleansing from the inside-out that caused her to inflict those enemas on me and to use another means to cleanse herself. When I first discovered the boxes of Ex-lax, a chocolatey flavored laxative, stacked in the corner of the cabinet in my parent’s bathroom I didn’t realize that my mother consumed them regularly, perhaps resorting to this as a form of weight control. Despite her life-long battle with her own body, she managed to live to 94, which, in retrospect, seems miraculous to me. As I enter my 8th decade, I endlessly ponder the meaning of my mother’s life in the aftermath of her death and how I am a conduit in ways that only my daughter and her daughters will know.