Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia Read Online Free PDF Page B

thinner, sharper, more silent. I looked at each and settled on both: eat, throw up, starve, scream, skip town, disappear, reappear screaming and skinny, smoke and smoke and smoke. Of course there were other, numerous, factors that helped create my eating disorder, but I took the prototype of my family dinner table and elaborated on it. While my relationship to my parents has always been very complex, there is also the simple fact that both of them used food—one to excess, one to absence—as a means of communication, or comfort, or quest. Food was a problem in my family. A big problem. The shrinks say that two common elements in an anoretic's family are a focus on food and diet, and a significant degree of personality disturbance in one or both parents.4
    My father was a periodic heavy drinker, ate constantly, and was forever obsessing about his weight—he would diet, berate himself for falling off his diet, call himself a pig.5 My mother was a 4Casky, 186.
    former—or was it closet?—bulimic with strange eating habits. She'd eat normally for a while, then go on a diet, pick at her food, push it away, stare at her butt in the mirror.
    Watching the two of them eat played out like this: My father, voracious, tried to gobble up my mother. My mother, haughty and stiff-backed, left my father untouched on her plate. They might as well have screamed aloud: I need you/I do not need you.
    And there I sat in my chair—two, three, four years old—refusing to eat, which created a fine little distraction from the palpable tension that hummed between them. I became their common ground: Piglet, they said, please eat.
    This, the shrinks tell us later, is called being the “symptom bearer.”
    You get to do a little pantomime of the family's problems, playing all the parts, and everyone claps and you bow. What really happens is everyone gets into a big fuss over you and stops fighting for a while. This only works for one or two hospitalizations. After that they think you're crazy, so you have to come up with a new reason to starve yourself to death, which you always do.
    “The parents of the anorexic person are often preoccupied with themselves but overtly appear worried or concerned about other family members.”6 I was my parents' only child, which is unfortunate, because you are their pride and joy and the bane of their existence all at once. You get way too much hyper-invested attention and become very manipulative. My father had adoptive twin sons from a previous marriage who spent some time with us, and whom I adored. When they were not there, there was no mitigating factor, no other focus of attention. My parents' fury with each other was somehow always related to, or channeled through, or deflected onto, me.
    You do a little tap dance all the time to try to make what is very obviously not working, work. You, imagining yourself a small Hercules, hoist your bickering parents onto your shoulders and carry them around. You also begin to tire of it, so it is not so surprising that one day you will up and quit. Weaken yourself. Drop them, oops. Take
    5Friendly nicknames probably being fairly benign, it is still worth noting that my father calls himself Mr. Pig, calls my mother Dr. Pig, and (before my eating disorder came out of the closet) called me Piglet. None of us is, or ever has been, fat, and I have no idea where this came from.
    6Zerbe, 131-32.
    up residence in a hospital bed, where everyone is taking care of you.
    Where you, vindictive and infantile, can turn your sunken eyes on them and say, J'accuse .
    Whereupon they promptly begin blaming each other for the mess that you've become.
    Let it be noted here that it is decidedly not their “fault.” If someone tells you to jump off a bridge, you don't have to jump. But if you jump, you can always blame them for pushing you. It would be very easy to blame this all on my parents, if I weren't so painfully aware that I was also very curious about how it would feel to fall.
    The