My ED is a response to abuse from someone who died years ago. The trauma she inflicted upon me didn’t die with her, though. I’d like to talk about that, if that would be okay.
I have almost no solid memories of being a child. My memories are almost totally blank with a few periods of foggy major events and even fewer vivid specific memories. I don’t know what my favorite colors were, what I wanted to be when I grew up, what music I liked, who my friends were.
But I remember my grandmother’s house. There’s a book Stephen King co-wrote with the title “Black House,” that features cover art of a house that appears to have rotted away. I remember seeing that book cover at a library as a child and thinking of how much it resembled Grandma’s house: not in outward appearance, but in how it made me feel. My grandma’s house was bleak, happiness rotted and twisted into something fetid and ugly, a place filled with trash and rotting food and animal waste. The kitchen was a dank mess of dirty pans used over and over without ever being washed, splatters of old food dripping from the walls, plates still coated in rotten food sitting stacked and soggy in the sink. The living spaces were stuffed from floor-to-ceiling with stacks of fast-food trash, old newspapers never once opened, empty boxes of sugary cereals, and photo albums filled with dusty portraits of people dead before I was born. My grandmother’s chair was in the living room: a faded green armchair with a sagging seat surrounded by TV trays stacked with the detritus of daily life all thrown together in one place: pill organizers stuffed with supplements and vitamins, letter openers that were made to look like medieval swords, TV remotes, and more newspapers. There were enough bedrooms for me to have slept in a room of my own, but she insisted that I sleep in bed with her under sheets caked in sour old sweat. I don’t like to think about that.
Nothing good that entered that house ever left wholly untainted.
And I remember my grandmother: Cold eyes incapable of conveying love she could not feel, mouth twisted into a lipstick-lined scowl, manicured acrylic nails grown out into talons. And she was fat. Not “soft and squishy for especially good cuddles” fat, like I had seen grandmothers portrayed on TV or read about in the books I read to escape my own life. I remember seeing a coyote dead on the side of the road once, how it had bloated up in the hot sun with its own gases fermenting in its belly. I remember wondering if the coyote would eventually burst open. I remember wondering if that was happening to my grandmother.
And I remember how my grandmother ate: endlessly. On more than one occasion, she would wake me late at night, bundle me into the passenger seat of her car, and take me to the grocery store or Dairy Queen if it was open, to buy party-sized sheet cakes or ice cream cakes. All for herself, which she would take home and consume entirely, sitting in her green armchair. I would curl up on myself in the corner while she binged. The morning after a binge, she would sleep in late with a headache and I would be forced to rummage through kitchen cabinets, searching for anything to eat hidden behind all the trash. Mostly there was nothing at all.
And I remember how my grandmother treated me: unpredictably. Some days, she was solicitous and would sit me on her lap to tell me about the people in all those stiff ancient photo albums. She would talk about her family, about her childhood, how she was eternally wronged and cheated out of a loving home. She would talk about her husband, my grandfather, and how he had been a vicious drunk who beat her and her children until he walked out and never returned. She complained bitterly about being left to raise 3 children alone, and how she was convinced that he had been hiding money from her. She ranted about her children, my mother and aunt and uncle, and how none of them appreciated all the sacrifices she had made for them. It had all been so unfair, you see, but I would be different, I would understand. And then, one day right before 9th grade, like the flipping of a switch, she stopped pretending to love me even that little bit. She grew cold, would pick at me, would compare me to people she had spent my childhood turning into monsters in my imagination. She grew hateful and bitter and sullen and I was so confused. Hadn’t I done everything right? Hadn’t I been exactly what she wanted me to be? I must be inherently hateful, for her to hate me so. But there was nothing I could do to change it. Nothing I could say to mend things. I hated myself for being so unlovable.
And I remember starving. How the world narrowed down to a pinpoint of eat or don’t. I couldn’t think about how unhappy I was if I was distracted by the gnawing hunger pangs and how good it felt to deny them. I was better than her, because I could command order in a way she could not. If she was chaos, I would combat chaos with control.
But even now, years after she died alone in a nursing home still filled with bitterness and poison, I am reminded that control cannot rule forever. Things always slide into entropy and I am no exception. In this way, my grandmother is my inevitability, and I will spend my entire life running from her. I will scour my kitchen until my knuckles crack open and bleed, I will go to bed comforted by the growling in my empty stomach, I will rid my home of any items not immediately useful, I will reduce myself to angles and shadows. But I can’t ever confront a ghost, and in that way she defeated me forever.
Submitted May 03, 2019 at 07:22AM by button_eyed_coraline http://bit.ly/2Jc1zsP
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