Lady Parts (9 page)

“If it will make you feel happy, Andrea.” Mom, smiling, could barely get the words out.

I put some baby oil in my hands and began to massage my mom’s feet. “Let me do this for you, Mommy. I know I can make you feel better. How does this feel?”

“If it makes you feel good, Andrea, that makes me happy.”

“Would you like me to read to you, Mommy?” My mom’s eyes were closed, but she nodded her head yes.

I began.

“Let yourself open to receive the moment, as it is in mercy and loving kindness.”

Mom lets me read to her, but I know she’s not really listening. She’s in and out of consciousness. “Mom, I’m so sorry for your suffering. I can read more to you, Mommy, if you like.”

“Go ahead, honey, if it makes you feel good. I love comforting you.”

I don’t remember ever seeing my mom without makeup on. She always looked her best, and loved to look pretty, like the little dolls she never had. As she lay in her bed now, her usually dyed-black hair was sparse and grey, but she had managed to do her face. She wore shimmering green eye shadow, mascara, and the same vibrant coral lipstick she had used for years. She wanted to look “done” when the doctor came to visit.

She opened her eyes and stared at me. She spoke in a whisper. Breathing was unbearable. Even the morphine drip could not dull her pain, nor could it dull the reality of her imminent death.

“Why me, Andrea? Why me?”

“I’m so sorry, Mommy. I wish I could do something to take away your pain.”

“I know, honey. I need to sleep now. I’m tired.”

My mother died a week later, the day after I flew back to Los Angeles. When I got home, I tried to write a scene for my one-woman show about my mom and me. It took months and a nervous breakdown to get up enough courage to write about a woman with whom I had unresolved conflict but whom I loved deeply.

It seems preposterous that a woman with so much vitality is no longer alive. I am so sad that my sons missed out on knowing their grandmother as they grew older. They would have worshipped one another. She would have taken them around the world, brought them to the opera, to the theatre, to concerts, and enriched their lives with her unbridled passion for living. She would have pushed them to reach for the stars.

“Jack and Joe, come in here,” she’d be saying. “Let’s practise some Christmas songs before everyone arrives. Do you know ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’? It’s my favourite.”

“No, Nanny,” my boys would say. “How does it go?”

“‘
Through the years we all will be together, if the fates allow …’”
Nanny would start to sing.

Jack would get behind the piano, and Joe would get out his sax, and Nanny would continue, a drink in her hand, beaming proudly at her two grandsons, and they’d accompany her, and finally guests would arrive and join in, and the
atmosphere would be jolly and festive, and the fire would be roaring, and snow outside the window would be falling, and my mom, their nanny, would make that moment into the best goddamn party there ever was.

Mom’s house, Cumberland Foreside, Maine

I
guess you could call it a nervous breakdown. No one ever used that word to describe my condition. But that’s what it felt like to me.

In February 1993, a month after my mom died and a year after losing my best friend to AIDS, I fell apart. My bulimia was at its height. I was divorced, living in Pacific Palisades, California. I was isolated and unemployed, and trying to be a mom to my two young sons, who were nine and eleven. I was crippled by depression. My first waking moments began with a glimmer of hope. Please God, I would pray, please let this new day bring me peace. Please help me be a good mother. With the little bit of energy I had, I would struggle to make the boys breakfast, help them get dressed, and drive them to school. I would try desperately to listen to them as they shared what was going on their lives—homework, music lessons, sports, sleepovers. I
couldn’t hear them. I wasn’t present for them. I was consumed with fear. I felt like a failure. My sons were my world, but even they could not compete with the hostile punishing voices in my head. All I wanted was to be alone, with food, in my bed, escaping the reality of my life.

After I dropped them off at school, I’d get back in the car and be crippled with self-doubt. Where should I go? Who could I talk to? Should I start the car and keep driving? Should I call their dad and tell him to take the boys, confess to him that I didn’t think I was capable of raising our sons, that I was a terrible mother, that I was riddled with anxiety and my panic attacks were out of control? The only thing that calmed the anxiety was driving to Gelson’s supermarket, where I would buy wine, cookies, ice cream, cake, loaves of bread, cheese, and candy. I would drive back to my home, where I would binge on everything I could swallow and keep down, and then I’d make myself throw up and binge some more.

I told no one about the black hole I lived in. I believed that I’d be all right if only I could control my bingeing and purging. I would go back to bed until it was three o’clock and time to pick up my sons. Again I would attempt a cheerful demeanour as I pretended to listen.

From the time I got back home with them at four, I would stare at the clock and pray for night—two hours, two minutes, one minute before I could put my sons to bed, and then I would binge all over again. If I didn’t have food in the house, I would leave my sons alone, while they slept,
and would drive in desperation to the store, binge in the car, and then drive home recklessly to purge again. I’d binge until I couldn’t feel. Every night I would fall asleep with a distended stomach, a burning swollen throat, and the smell of vomit on my fingers. And then one morning, I broke. I had finally come apart. I called the boys’ dad, hysterical and unable to breathe, and told him to pick up the boys. Then I called the nearest hospital.

I don’t remember the details of how I found the psychiatric ward at Centinela Hospital in Inglewood. All I remember is some intake person over the phone asking about insurance and me responding with “Call my business manager,” but mostly I was crying, begging them to help me: “I can’t stop bingeing and purging and I’m scared I’m not going to make it and I don’t know what to do and I need someone to talk to, somewhere to go that’s safe. Please help me. I don’t know how to be a mother. I can’t be alone with my children. Please, I can’t do this anymore.”

I checked into the eating disorders unit at Centinela and stayed for a month. I was one of eight female patients. Our eating disorders ranged from bulimia and anorexia nervosa to obesity. All of our eating disorders were accompanied by depression, despair, denial, rage, and shame. We were medicated with antidepressants and monitored by a psychiatrist who visited twice a week.

The youngest patient was fifteen and anorexic. She weighed sixty-five pounds. This was the third rehab her
parents had sent her to. She was defiant and didn’t believe she belonged there. Every day she begged to leave. She had outbursts constantly and was disruptive.

The oldest woman was in her fifties, five feet tall, and weighed over three hundred pounds. She had four children. She was unemployed, on disability, and divorced. Her children had been taken away from her. She didn’t know how to stop eating. She was not functioning. She was severely depressed. She wanted her children back.

There was a beautiful young girl in her early twenties who was addicted to crystal meth. She had started taking it a few years earlier to lose weight and then got hooked. She did not think she had a problem. She said she could stop anytime but that she liked the feeling of being high. She was in sales, a good-paying job, and had been given an ultimatum. That was the only reason she was there.

We had group therapy every day, where we sat in a circle with our facilitator, who was a recovering anorexic, and we talked about our lives and our addictions and what events had brought us to the hospital. We had art therapy classes, where we had to draw what we thought we looked like. I drew a circle for my head but couldn’t draw in my face. I had no conception of what I looked like. I had always adapted to what other people wanted me to be. Without their input, my face was a blank canvas.

We had to learn to eat differently. We had to eat slowly and talk about what feelings came up as we ate. I had never
thought about how food tasted before. Food was my drug of choice. I had been bulimic for almost fifteen years. I consumed food quickly so as to not feel. I didn’t care if I stole half-eaten food off someone’s room-service tray that lay in the hotel hallway or picked garbage out of a wastebasket after throwing it out. I would eat at the fanciest, most expensive restaurants with a group of friends, then excuse myself, go to the washroom, throw up, return to the table, and eat again. Not feeling was the only purpose food ever held for me.

I had been obsessed with my weight all my life. I had been chubby as a child but never obese, and yet at age thirteen I was prescribed my first diet pills. Eskatrol, they were called. Little orange pills. Basically, the pills were speed. I took diet pills all through high school. When the doctor would no longer prescribe them, I started exercising compulsively.

It was in my late twenties that I discovered bulimia as a way to control my weight. I was living in Toronto and appearing in the Second City stage show. Our group had replaced the original members, three of whom had left after being cast in
Saturday Night Live
—Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray. We were at a reunion party with the original cast. Gilda was clearly the breakout star on
SNL.
Every so often as we talked at the party, she would excuse herself. I asked her where she was going and she said to the bathroom, where she was making herself throw up. It was a way to control her weight, she said. And she wanted to keep
slim with all the attention she was now getting on
SNL.
I thought at that moment,
If Gilda’s doing it, then so will I.
It seemed harmless to me. I don’t think the disease even had a name, and if it did, I wasn’t aware of it. No one in my circle talked about eating disorders. I rationalized my behaviour by saying I wasn’t the only person to do this kind of thing. I reminded myself of the Romans and the way they ate: gorged, threw up, and gorged again. Throwing up as a way to look and feel good seemed glamorous.

Gilda wrote a book entitled
It’s Always Something
in which she chronicles her battle with bulimia. I never confided in her that I picked up the practice. I wonder if we could have helped each other. Gilda died of ovarian cancer when she was forty-two. You would think that her tragic death would have stopped my destructive behaviour, but I continued, in silence, through both my pregnancies, and through my marriage.

My eating disorder was a secret that kept me sick for so long. It was not until I got into the hospital and heard like-minded people talk about their addictions that I got the courage to admit my addiction myself.

We were not allowed to exercise at the hospital. After the lights went out, I would lie on the hospital floor at the side of my bed and do sit-ups compulsively for hours. When we went for our afternoon walks as a group, we were not allowed to run or jog—anything that looked like exercise was forbidden. The nurses kept us in line. We were accompanied
to our rooms after we ate, to keep us from throwing up. All packages of honey and sugar were rationed. Anything that we could binge on was taken away. We went on outings to restaurants to learn how and what to order and then how to eat what we ordered.

As I write this, I know that to the normal person it all seems crazy. But for those of us who had an unnatural relationship to food, the act of ordering and eating was fraught with profound anxiety. At our first outing to Baja Fresh, a fast-food chain that uses healthy and fresh ingredients, I stared for thirty minutes at the menu and, with my therapist by my side gently supporting me, tried to order. Every item on the menu was the enemy staring back at me, wanting to control and destroy me. It wanted to lodge in my stomach and make me fat and ugly and undesirable and alone and unsafe. I hated ordering. I hated eating what was placed in front of me. But I had no choice. And I wanted to get better. I knew I had hit bottom. I knew there was no place else for me to go. I had to face the feelings that came up while I had food in my stomach, and the feelings that came up when the meal was over. I was in my late forties. I had repressed many feelings. And mostly they started with shame.

My sister, Marcie, always jokes with me that we must have had different parents. We remember our childhood differently. I once asked Marcie if she ever woke up with anxiety.
She stared at me in disbelief and answered, “No, never. Why, do you?”

“Marcie,” I replied, “there hasn’t been a day in my life when I
haven’t
woken up with anxiety. That’s how I start my day. For the rest of my waking hours, I am feeding the tiger!”

For whatever reason—whether it was having a critical and controlling dad or a narcissistic mom, being the firstborn, having an addictive personality, being overly sensitive, or having an unresolved karma from another life—from the moment I came out of my mom’s womb, I needed more. Of everything. To fill me.

I chose food and then alcohol, and only when the unmanageability of my life became greater than the fear of letting the destructive behaviour go was I willing to change.

After I left the hospital, and after another month of outpatient care, I had more slips with my bulimia. But my stay in the hospital gave me the courage to continue on the path of recovery. I realized I wasn’t going to die if I kept the food down, if I put on a few pounds, and slowly I stopped bingeing and purging. I have been in recovery from bulimia for twenty-one years now. And I haven’t had a drink for twenty-two.

In all honesty, my obsession with my weight continues. It’s still difficult for me to eat in a restaurant. I would prefer unwrapping a Lean Cuisine meal and putting it in the microwave to sitting down and talking with a group of people over dinner. I want to get the food thing out of the
way so that I can be present for the company I’m with. But I no longer take pills, go on restrictive diets, or starve myself. I exercise moderately. If I have any feelings, happy or sad, my inclination is to stuff them down. But instead I sit with them. I feel what I’m feeling until it passes.

I am grateful to have hit bottom. I pray that my sons will understand after reading this why their mom was not always there for them while they were growing up. I have enormous guilt about the years I spent acting out and hiding. I know both my marriage and my children suffered from the result of my addictions. I hope my sons forgive me, though I know it may take a lifetime of uncovering and facing their own truth and pain. I want to believe I did the best I could, like my mom, who did the best she could. My grandmother survived a genocide, and when she died took many secrets with her. I hope I have been able to stop the cycle of secrets in my family. I want my boys to stand up proudly and own who they are, warts and all. Shame passed down through generations is palpable. Authenticity trumps all.

My intention in writing this is to speak the truth, and in so doing, give something back to my sons. Every day, I’m grateful for the opportunity to make up to them the years I took away.