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As I stepped inside the ranch for the first time as a patient, I imagined Mom greeting me, telling me it had all been a bad dream and that she was here, and everything was going to be okay.
But she was long gone, and I would have to face being there alone.
CHAPTER8
“IN HIGH SCHOOL,” I tell Eddie on the phone while driving, “after Mom died, I went to a residential treatment center for eating disorders in Hidden Hills. After I got there, I realized my mom had done her first clinical internship there—she’d shown me a picture of her standing in front of the place. The strange thing was that at first, there were no openings for me at the place, but suddenly, overnight, a bed became available.”
“So you think if she’s still alive, she might’ve had something to do with getting you in?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “After I was admitted there, I asked some employees if they had known her. A few had and told me they were sorry for my loss, but nobody mentioned her helping me get in. I figured my dad must’ve known about the place because she had worked there and contacted them to see if he could leverage her connection to help me get in.”
“That makes sense,” Eddie says.
“But now I’m wondering if maybe shehadbeen involved with my admission. The place still exists, so I’m going there now. I want to see if any people from back then still work there. Maybe one of them knows something.”
“If you can wait until tomorrow, I’ll take you,” he says. He’s with Sarah, who’s home from school now.
“I don’t want to put you out any more. You helped me enough this morning,” I say.
“Helping you doesn’t put me out,” he says.
“I also can’t wait,” I admit.
“I understand,” he says. “Just wish I could be there with you.”
“Hi, Beans!” I hear Sarah shout in the background.
“Tell her I say hi and give her a hug from me,” I say.
“I will,” he says.
When we hang up, I think about how, up until now, the only thing that’s helped quell my fears about whether I’ll measure up as a mother to Sarah is that I had a wonderful mom who loved me. It’s the same reason that made me believe I would be a good mother a decade ago when I was married to my first husband, Jay.
I was always terrified of becoming a mom because I knew what it meant to lose mine. The fear of tragedy striking again and potentially leaving a young child motherless loomed large.
The thing about bad things happening to you when you’re young is—unlike people who are afforded decades of life before tragedy strikes—you learn early on that you’re not immune. You understand that bad things don’t just happen to other people, they can happen to you, and they can happen anytime.
Despite the burden of this knowledge, the one thing that helped propel me to take the leap to become a mom was knowing what an amazing one I had had. Her example made me believe that I could rise to what the role demanded and also helped drown out the noise of the ticking clock measuring however long I might have with a child.
But once I became pregnant and the hormones kicked in, I felt nauseous, and eating was difficult. I started losingweight, which triggered ED, which I thought I’d put behind me over a decade prior.
Not everyone who restricts food develops an eating disorder—the cause is genetic, the same way that not everyone who drinks alcohol will develop alcoholism. For those biologically vulnerable like myself, experiencing any energy deficit, whatever the root cause is—like when I was pregnant, nauseous, and struggling to eat—presents a relapse risk. And I relapsed.
How was I possibly going to parent a child when both of my own parents were gone? The fear and loneliness made it easy to fall back into restricting—to avoid feeling the magnitude of my losses.
When Jay first noticed I wasn’t eating much, he chalked it up to the nausea and first trimester hormones, but at a certain point, it registered that I was restricting again. Being a psychologist himself (we had met in our graduate school psychology program) and knowing my teenage history of anorexia, he insisted I meet with a psychiatrist and a therapist. He wasn’t just concerned about me—he was also worried about my pregnancy, and he had every right to be.
By the time I got the help I needed, it was too late—I’d miscarried at seven weeks. Our marriage didn’t survive. There was a lot of finger-pointing, and the situation made Jay have second thoughts about being with me long-term. Like me, he assumed I had long tucked ED away, but we both learned the hard way that ED is a formidable, slippery foe, and one should never count him out.
Eddie knows I was married before, but I haven’t told him the specifics of what happened in my first marriage. I’ve been nervous about how he might react, scared he might not want to be with me anymore. Who’d want a woman who’d miscarried due to an eating disorder to be in charge of raising their young daughter?
That’s the real reason I’ve always kept just enough distance between us, so I wouldn’t have to tell him the truth. But things are coming to a head. Although he’s been patient, I’m not sure how much longer he’s willing to wait.
I don’t want to lose either of them, but I also know Eddie needs to have all the facts about me to decide whether he still wants to be with me. Continuing to withhold the full truth from him isn’t fair to either him or Sarah. He wants her to have a mother, and if I’m not that person, I don’t want to close doors for him to find someone else.
My recovery group has been supportive, helping me summon the courage to have the big talk with him. The thing I’ve always returned to, which is the very thing that I’d planned to tell him, is that although ED resurfaced during my pregnancy, I’ve recommitted to my recovery, and he can count on me to be a wonderful mom to Sarah because I had the best mom imaginable.
But now, I can’t help but wonder if maybe I never really knew my mother. I’ve spent so much of my life imagining who I am through the lens of who I thought she was. If she isn’t that person, where does that leave me?
