I remember putting on Sarah’s small robe in the bathroom, thinking that somehow with the robe on I was Sarah and I could think with her thoughts. I could finally understand her anorexia from inside her mind. The matronly voice of the gentle and wise woman doctor came from somewhere, but I could not see her. I looked down at my body—a woman’s body—and saw a crooked line of discharge from my right breast. The doctor said, “I feel privileged to care for you at a time when we can actually pinpoint something that is wrong, something that we can treat.”
I woke up. It was nearly 4 a.m. The dream was so vivid. Surrounded with the firm but peaceful voice of the woman’s doctor. Feeling the anguish of being unable to enter Sarah’s head as I wore her blue robe. Sensing the comfort that there was something physical to treat that was tangible, finite, possible. And thinking about a weeping breast.
There is perhaps no better analogy for anorexia than this one which arose from the depths of my unconscious self during a summer night…the weeping breast. I never thought I would have the uncommon and agonizing experience of mothering a severely anorexic adolescent daughter. A woman living in the crossfire of generational transitions and changing women’s roles…an adolescent, looking at the world her foremothers and forefathers have created and doggedly refusing to grown up.
To be the mother of an anorexic child is to live daily with a magnifying glass peering at the devastating effects of patriarchy on young, impressionable minds. I pick up a newspaper and discover an article entitled, “Girls Depressed Early Fretting over Looks.” A psychologist suggests that concerns about appearance are at the top of a girl’s mind by age ten. I remember my own daughter when she was eleven, peering over the edge of adolescence, frightened by her changing body, determined to subdue the forces that threatened to overwhelm her, quietly and discreetly experiencing the wild onrush of an eating disorder and some chaotic semblance of pseudo-control.
I watch an old movie from a series I once laughed at, loved, and found entertaining. The masked ball in the movie grips me—not for its content but for the body shapes of the men and women who attend. There are men with pudgy middle-aged bulges, tall lean men, short stocky men, solid muscular men. Bear costumes, pirate costumes, regal costumes—I can’t remember them all.
I compare the men’s shapes to the women, who are all about size 5, slithering around in bikini-like dress. I want to scream and weep.
I read books on anorexia. The mother/daughter bond is the problem, so many say. Too much closeness, too tightly bonded. Oh, God, must the woman always, forever be the problem? Years spent working through my personal and theological struggles with womanhood—codependency, periods of depression, sexism encountered as a woman pastor—does all that growing mean nothing for my child? Must we mothers attain the perfection the anorexic so elusively seeks? My husband tells me he knows few people anywhere as in touch with their inner selves as I. What does it all mean?
Hot words of anger tumble from my mouth during a Parents Support Group. The male counselor suggests that the real solution for all eating disordered children is to “fix the family/fix the illness.” So many neglect to acknowledge unknown physiological factors and inborn personality traits, as well as the social context of eating disorders known only to cultures of affluence. I’m soured on the simplistic nature of such responses.
When I can bear books on anorexia no more, a friend suggests I read about gifted children, since most anorexics are high-achieving, competitive, perfectionistic females. My woman-friend learns from an international expert on gifted children that white, bright young females have the highest suicide rate in our country, and that around 4 percent of highly gifted children struggle with debilitating emotional problems.
I finally find a place for myself to read about my daughter and not weep.
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Is growing up gifted and female a disability women must learn to accept?
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I discover smart girls/gifted women, by feminist psychologist Barbara Kerr, who documents the struggles facing women growing up in a culture that devalues their gifts. Her conclusion—that growing up gifted and female is a disability women must learn to accept—places documented evidence behind my growing feeling that all is not easily reduced to family systems when a brilliant anorexic refuses to grow up.
I, like many other mothers of anorexics, struggle to avoid putting on the weight my child won’t. I do not succeed. I talk with a woman who gained fifty pounds after her daughter became anorexic. I feel better about my eight pounds. She tries a well-known weight control program, enduring the sales pitch on the relationship between thinness, success, and self-esteem. She never returns. We both wonder: where is the program for women who want to be healthy, to confront their own body image issues, to eat sensibly and stay fit, but embrace as good the body God gave them?
I notice that few women are immune to the body image distortion which is incredibly magnified in the anorexic’s self-image. Non-anorexic women around me begin to notice their own body image distortion for the first time. “I always thought I was fat as a kid. My self-image was of someone chunky. But now, after putting on forty pounds in ten years, I realize I had to look pretty good then. I wish I could have enjoyed looking good when I did,” says one woman. Must accepting our bodies be a privilege we earn?
I peruse a book of goddess images at a local bookstore. Pregnant, full-breasted women—bearers of life—stare at me from the pages. Flipping through the book, I notice bony, emaciated women, arms folded inward. The chapter heading is “Symbols of Death.” I gasp as I visualize my own child in this picture—bones protruding, a life turned inward, the threat of starvation ever near. Images of life, images of death—turned around, twisted. Life is death—death is life—what have we done?
I wander through the 5-7-9 Shop, the only clothing store to carry size 0-1. I don’t belong here in my size 14-16 body. I ask the clerk about an item in Sarah’s size. A female customer who overhears me remarks to her friend, “Oh, wow! Wouldn’t it be great to wear a 0-1!” Their admiration makes my heart sink. I almost blurt out, “My daughter has just spent two months in the hospital for anorexia. Let me tell you, it’s not worth it!” Instead I silently walk away. Shopping for clothes has become more than necessity; it is symbol as well.
The weeping breast, a fleeting image in a dream…the hope that something tangible—like a simple physical discharge—could be “the problem” for my anorexic daughter. Not the complex web of female giftedness, the cult of thinness, patriarchy, personality, physiology, and history. The agony of wearing the robe of this child whose personality so mirrors my own, yet being completely unable to enter her reality. The gentleness of the matronly doctor—an image of competence, of wisdom, of compassion, perhaps even a word of comfort to my unconscious self from Mother God. But most poignant, the weeping breast. My mind sees again a one-day-old baby refusing to nurse, a two-day-old baby nearly jaundiced finally taking to the breast…a ten-month bundle of energy weaning herself before her time, more interested in the world around her than the milk of life.
The weeping breast…an adolescent frozen, not in the shapeliness of budding sexuality, but in the pre-pubertal state…a body not allowed to become what time wills it to be…a childhood retained, a womanhood deferred.
The weeping breast…a mother of a 14-year-old girl hospitalized eleven times, tube-fed for weeks on end…a mother whose tears could fill an ocean, whose anger could slay a dragon, whose vision is sometimes more than she can bear…a mother to whom womanhood as cross mingles with the bittersweet paradox of womanhood as crown.
The weeping breast…when will it be healed?
This article was originally printed in the Winter 1992 issue of Daughters of Sarah. Illustration by Kari Sandhaas. The magazine ceased publication in 1995, and the article is used by permission.
Mary Hammond is a long-time peacemaker. She co-pastored First Baptist Church/Peace Community Church with her husband, Steve in Oberlin, Ohio. This labor of love, along with volunteer Campus Ministry at Oberlin College, community leadership, and parenting their three amazing daughters, was her life work until retirement in 2019. Mary co-authored Jesus, las mujeres y yo with American Baptist missionary Ruth Mooney in 1989. She is also the author of two books, The Road Toward Wholeness: Biblical Meditations for the Recovery Journey (1998) and The Church and the Dechurched: Mending a Damaged Faith (2001). In her younger years, Mary published several articles as well. With two degrees in Piano Performance, she freely shared her musical talents at church and taught private piano students at home for 31 years. Mary and Steve were co-recipients of the American Baptist Edwin T. Dahlberg Peace Award in 2013. The couple now live near family in Central Ohio.
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