So back at uni today, after heaving myself out of bed to brave the m25 at 6am, I made it to campus at 8:45am, tired, cold and not in the mood to be messed about. In honesty I suppose the crap at home isn't helping.
My mum and I are not seeing eye to eye at the moment, 'you've lot weight haven't you?' She asks in an aggressive hostile tone. I haven't. I wish I had,I am annoyed and pissed off by her accusation, for a variety of reasons.
1) I do not appreciate her tone, it is rude, accusatory and confrontational, she manages to keep her mouth shut for a few weeks before she starts spurting her toxic poison. She uses this as a starting point to launch herself like an Inter galactic missile, she is about as subtle as a gun and the game she plays is both predictable and transparent to me. I tell her I haven't lost weight. This enables her to spur her second point 'well your not the same weight as when you left treatment are you?' This is phrased as a question but unveiled as a statement. I tell her it's none of her business, I have seen the local services and they have said the same as always. My mother hates this, being shut out, unknowing of my weight, out of the loop, she wants to control me but I just want to control myself. I realise I am doing this as a way of rejecting her, punishing her, hurting her. In a way I want to shut her out because I felt as though my opinion when In treatment mattered very little to her. She shut me out, watched as people did things to me that I didn't want. Being a predator and aggressor doesn't always have to be first hand, if you exist as a witness you are involved, you are not removed from responsibility. I want to hurt her in a way that she and others have hurt me. They made me into a person i do not know, with a body I not only don't know but hate. I equate what they did to me as a moral rape, manipulating, moulding and shaping me into a fat suicidal mess. It took time to lose the weight, they destroyed me. As a consequence I have destroyed the relationship with my mother.
2) This leads me to my second point, the question she asks are not out of concern for me but for herself, she cares what people think of her. She states 'this has been going on too long now, I thought you would get over it by now and just put on the weight'. Six months in a treatment facility and she still speaks like a foreigner to anorexia. Her comment makes me angry, really angry to the point where I want to wrap my hands around her throat and throttle her. Throttle her for what they did to me, for how unhappy they have made me, for the selfishness that stands behind her desire for me to change and her disregard for how I feel. She had as always prioritised her own feelings above my own.
3) she then decides having no joy from her previous comments to pull out the big guns.also known as emotional blackmail. This portion of the game she is has coerced me into playing involved demeaning me, reinforcing how awful a human being she thinks I am in a hope of me having some kind of wake up call, she calls me deluded, she should take a look at herself. She hopes by stating 'we have no family life because of you' will make me want to change. As if this sudden knife to the heart will make me come to some epiphany like something out of a Jane Austen novel, declare my deepest sympathy for my behaviour and conform to societal ideal. Please it may have been like that for Marianne in 'Sense and Sensibility' but we're living in the book of reality not fiction. S the response is simply met with anger, as I ask her whether she should perhaps consider her own faults in this situation. My uncle and his family do not want to see me now that I have the label of 'anorexia' on me, despite socialising with me at a lower weight, the label appears to superficially changed everything, this annoys me as much as it frustrates me. The irony of this statement is, my family at home want me to eat with them, why would I want to partake in the act I find most disgusting in front of people who not only incur my anger and hate but who blame me for everything. It is my mothers opinion I should be martyr myself for the sake of everyone else's happiness. She stupidly states 'As you put on weight you would be happier', what an idiot, when I left treatment at a bmi of 15, I was the most unhappy I had ever been, angry, sad, hateful, why would I want to do something that makes me so unhappy? I already feel like I have been massacred, what they did to me made me more fearful of gaining weight than my fears before treatment, they have made me afraid of my own body, fearful I can't eat anything without gaining weight, the experience was entirely negative, I do not see one aspect of it that made me feel any better. I have told her this but it is ignored. When I was a bmi of 15 when I left treatment my mum was ecstatic she made comments like 'you look normal now'. This elation was for herself, but was bad for me. It further fuelled my core belief that I look heavier than others at my weight or when I put on weight and therefore need to be lighter in weight in order to look thin. And also that if that was the case there was no way I would ever put on more weight ever again. I felt as though my label, identity and the essence that I had been comfortable with had been stripped away. Stupidly my mother assumed as I put on weight that my anorexia 'just went away' that the desire to lose weight wasn't there any more, that my fear of weight gain disappeared and that I was no longer entitled to the feelings that I had initially because I was 'better', the mental side of it remained the same for me throughout treatment. At the end of my stay though I just felt like an anorexic inside sewn into a fat suit, I was and Amin a disguise that hides the real me, and I wish I could take off. The only way to take it off is to lose weight.
'Go and see someone' she urges to talk about how you feel. This change in tactics is often deployed when my mother realises she has taken a wrong tern much like a fault in monopoly ' she cannot pass go'. No. Way. I will never be honest or talk openly with any professional again. They threaten section or weight gain and I'd rather chop off my own fingers than face that ever again. Why would I do that? When I can keep it to myself and not live in the fear. I will never share anything with Any of those psychopaths ever again.
Another game my mother and I have taken to playing is 'hide and sneak'. The local services write letters to me, and i sometimes write a diary and she then attempts to find them and read them, sneaking through my drawers and wardrobe in order to find any kind of ammunition or information she can use against me and to control me. I confront her about this ' I was just tidying up'. Pretty feeble move. ' really I ask her, what exactly needed tidying in my shoe boxes above my cupboard? I didn't know shoes in boxes created mess'. Busted. Her response is that 'she cares', you are a liar and a nosy bitch I tell her. I do not trust her at all, I give her nothing and she can drive herself mad with it. As a result of her snooping, I have come to carrying everything on me, letters, the diary and of course an online blog. The game ends with me leaving, as I tell her ' have you achieved anything by saying what you have said?', 'well it's got it off my chest' she tells me, we both know this is nothing the treasure she wanted the prize as the end of this game we play has ended as it began full circle. A power struggle, a game she cannot win, a tug of war that she can only engage in for a limited time.
In this game of life that we all play, willingly or not, we all probably feel we have someone or something we need to defeat. I feel like the treatment centre, have one up on me, they are winning- I have not lost all the weight they put on me. Tey have planted doubt in my mind about whether i can eat and not gain weight or eat and lose weight. But as the local services told me ' weare not plants we cannot make our own food' , so 'out of nothing, nothing can be made'. I know that for the rest of my life I am going to try to lose this weight. Hoping to lose 4/5lbs this week, on a diet of 140-200 locals a day, restricting liquid to 1700mls. No weighing in until 5 days have passed, seeing no loss can be demotivating, frightening and discouraging. The scales use to be my best friend now they reveal a number that makes me feel at war with my body and the world.
Now that, that rant is over I can get back to uni, so I went to the lecture it was fine, discussing female autonomy, how ironic? Next week is Alice in Wonderland, considering satiety, hunger and female consumption. Something that I am sure will be acutely uncomfortable for me. Maybe I will have a lot to say, having spent all of my life confused by female consumption and attitudes towards it, and at least 5 years trying to ignore hunger.
I guess my question is, do you have a turbulent relationship with your mother? Do you play similar games? Are you resentful or angry of putting their comfort and desires above your own?
Looking forward to hearing from you.
V
Xxx
