The night Rich and I agreed to separate we were laying on our bed, in and out of tears, doing our best to anticipate the decisions that now lay ahead. Toward the end of that conversation I said, "Someday, I may want to write about my illness...and I won't be able to tell the story without also writing about you...is that okay?" He said yes. This Thanksgiving, with the decisions we'd yet to make that night now behind us, I asked him again and he gave me his permission.
Although I was socially and emotionally detached during my illness, the people in my life were familiar: family, friends, co-workers. The people who came along when I entered treatment and recovery, taking an active role in my daily life and decisions, were strangers forcing themselves into my private world.
Rich was one of those people.
We'd been acquaintances for a couple of years, talking during our commute to and from Berkeley on BART, but never more than that. Over time, however, as our commute came to include crutches and long disappearances, our conversations took a less casual course.
I don't remember him ever asking me what was wrong or where I would go for weeks at a time, but I do remember exposing the details of my routine. Specifically, I recall sharing how I'd just been on a run in a particularly isolated section of my favorite regional park when I'd tripped over a root, flipped onto my back over the trail's edge, and skidded down the steep side. Before I reached the bottom of the ravine, I managed to dig my heels in, turn onto my stomach, and crawl my way back up onto the trail.
Days after I told him this story, Rich approached me on the train home with a book about trail safety and told me to read it. Eventually, he began to appear on my regular running and hiking routes, suggesting we go to coffee or to the bookstore instead.
One morning just before dawn, sitting alone in his car at the reservior waiting for me to show up for my run, he attracted police attention. He managed to wave them off just as I drove up, but I was not pleased with his attempt to dissuade me from running and angrily shot out of my car while he called after me.
Something about his persistance, though, finally cracked my resolve and one day, on the eve of another hospitalization, I asked him to spend a few hours with me.
We drove to the Marin Headlands and looked out over the ocean. We talked about the future, about life without this disease, and about my most recent EKG results. My doctor called periodically to check in with me. I was embarassed; trapped as I was between debilitation and treatment, commitment and resistance.
By that time, I'd lost a lot of hair and what was left was matted and coarse. My face was scarred and cracked, my skin was pale and webbed with veins, my hands were spindly claws -- I was not a young woman. I kept losing my breath while sitting motionless in the passenger seat, and I wasn't sure if I was about to die or if I was about to be saved.
I was about to be saved.
With Rich I'd found enough hope and willingness to carry me through this next phase into recovery, and I would survive.
He visited me in the hospital a week after our trip to the Headlands. I was laying on my bed, wearing my favorite gray shirt and, at one point, I rolled away from him and told him I cared about him. It was astonishing and terrifying to care about anything at all.
From there we began a tentative relationship. He soon knew my doctors and had appointments of his own. He read books about recovery and told me what he learned. When I panicked and cried and threw food in the trash and ran for hours on end he came to my tiny studio apartment. He brought movies and went to the store with me where I paced the aisles, stared at the shelves, and voiced my internal chat: weighing, measuring, negotiating, battling. Every day he helped me make choices.
Slowly but surely, I let him in.
Meanwhile, I was back at work. Re-building. Going in to the office at 4:30am so that I could continue my outpatient program. Doing things right, yet digressing at a moment's notice. My body started rejecting food at this point which set off another round of testing.
It was a slow climb out of that delicate state.
Just a handful of months later, to my utter disbelief, I was pregnant with our child and Rich and I were on the road to parenthood and marriage. I continued the outpatient program for another 2 years but my recovery was put on hold. I switched gears from moving past anorexia to preparing for motherhood and the divide between us grew. Where once we had been teammates, we now were on opposing teams: he fought for my recovery, I fought to forget.
In retrospect, I see why we struggled so much and how we went from allies to combatants. Rich saw my illness; I lived inside of it. Daily, he witnessed the tightrope upon which my existence balanced and fought the minutia of my anorexia with every weapon he had; I re-internalized my choices and fought to maintain the autonomy I needed to conduct my life. He poured himself into continuing my treatment and was met with resistance at every turn. The imbalance in our relationship, caused by our dichotomous demands and needs, was palpable.
Anorexia treatment is appropriately but maddeningly pedantic. It involves a lot of hand-holding and repetition, tears and basal fears. It is an endless conversation between those caught in fight or flight mode and those who see but can't feel the threat. It is adrenaline crashing against calm; a ruthless but necessary deconstruction of everything real and imaginary. It is hard to remain proud when everything from which you derive pride is considered lethal.
Because of this, I never fully surrendered to treatment. I trusted my team and I trusted Rich, and for the most part I did what they said. But I resented them all deeply during those years for what I perceived to be a smothering invasion of my rights. The moment I was free from anorexia's deadliest clutches I restaked my own claim in my life and protected my territory fiercely.
In so many ways, Rich's and my relationship came unhinged the moment our child came into being. I would not be sick and be a mother. I would not be anorexic and be a mother. I would be fine. I would be okay. I would pretend, in many ways, that those years had never happened. Rich, on the other hand, did not feel our work was done and he wanted to finish what we'd started before our daughter was part of our lives. I couldn't go back.
Now, everything has changed.
I see what I've done to myself by keeping those years at an unreachable distance. I see what I have to do now to live a full and abundant life. And I see that the love I give to my daughter must flow through me, not just from me. I accept that I have to let this in.
Relationships are made of a million tiny threads, and it takes the unraveling of as many to undo what two people have built, especially two people who share a child. Anorexia and its power over us in those early days did not undo what Rich and I had. We have come to believe, as we shared on that park bench in lovely St. Helena this Thanksgiving, that the blame for our unraveling cannot be placed on the illness itself but on the fact that it caused us to collide in the first place.
This much we now understand and can agree upon after untangling our worlds, picking up the threads of our own stories, and moving on with our lives.
~ Katie
