Read Hope and Other Luxuries Online
Authors: Clare B. Dunkle
Hope and Other Luxuries
To all the parents who lie in bed and agonize every night, thinking,
What should I do?
. . . and then get up the next morning and do it.
But especially to two of the best mothers I know,
Grace D. and Cathy A.
Copyright © 2015 by Clare B. Dunkle.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Dunkle, Clare B.
Hope and other luxuries : a mother's life with a daughter's anorexia / Clare B. Dunkle.
pages cm
Summary: “Clare Dunkle seemed to have an ideal lifeâtwo beautiful, high-achieving teenage daughters, a loving husband, and a satisfying and successful career as a children's book novelist. But it's when you let down your guard that the ax falls. Just after one daughter successfully conquered her depression, another daughter developed a life-threatening eating disorder. Co-published with
Elena Vanishing
, the memoir of her daughter, this is the storyâtold in brave, beautifully written, and unflinchingly honest proseâof one family's fight against a deadly disease, from an often ignored but important perspective: the mother of the anorexic”âProvided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4521-2156-7 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-4521-3697-4 (epub, mobi)
1. Dunkle, Clare B. 2. Dunkle, Clare B.âFamily. 3. Anorexia nervosaâPatientsâFamily relationships. 4. MothersâUnited StatesâBiography. 5. Mothers and daughtersâUnited States. 6. Anorexia nervosaâTreatment. I. Title.
RC552.A5D875 2015
616.85'2620092âdc23
[B]
2014047354
Design by Jennifer Tolo Pierce
Typeset in Adobe Caslon
Jacket photo © 2014 by Sherjaca for Shutterstock
Jacket design by Jennifer Tolo Pierce
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Also available:
Elena Vanishing: A Memoir
,
by Elena and Clare B. Dunkle
Pages 544
&
545
: “We Should Talk about This Problem,” from
I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy
, renderings of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky. Copyright 1996, 2006 by Daniel Ladinsky. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Page 340
: Excerpt from
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
by Charles Dickens.
Excerpts from Elena Dunkle's journals. Copyright 2005â2009 by Elena Dunkle. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Excerpts from correspondence appearing in the book have been reprinted by permission of the authors.
Excerpt from
The Hollow Kingdom
© 2003 by Clare B. Dunkle. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from
In the Coils of the Snake
© 2005 by Clare B. Dunkle. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from
By These Ten Bones
© 2005 by Clare B. Dunkle. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from
The Sky Inside
© 2008 by Clare B. Dunkle. Reprinted by permission of Atheneum Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from
The Walls Have Eyes
© 2009 by Clare B. Dunkle. Reprinted by permission of Atheneum Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from
The House of Dead Maids
© 2010 by Clare B. Dunkle. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved.
This is a true story. But it is also a work of fiction. Every memoir is.
Every incident, thought, and work of creative imagination in this story happened as described. But my memory doesn't work like a security camera. It records the things it notices, but it can't necessarily tell me when they occurred. During important or dramatic events, it does a better job of saving that information, but during long, similar months, it can't tell me exactly when minor events happened.
The same problem occurs when I try to remember conversations. Because I work with words, I have a good memory for conversations: I easily remember the gist of what was said, and I remember the things I was thinking about as the conversation went on. My mind doesn't record exactly what someone said, though, unless those words struck me as particularly important at the time. So, rather than stop the narrative to explain exactly what I do and don't remember, I've strung together events that I do remember as accurately to my memories as possible, and I've filled in conversations with what I think was said, even if I'm not entirely sure.
I have not intentionally moved any events, and I have not changed the sequence of events. I have not moved events closer together in order to make the story more dramatic. If the story says that three dramatic events happened on the same day, then, to the best of my knowledge, those three events did all happen on the same day.
All manuscript, book, journal, and letter excerpts are real, with only clerical changes. While all the people in this book are real, all names outside the immediate family have been altered.
A few very minor plot or physical description details have been altered solely to protect the identities of others. And very minor physical details have been created, in a few cases, where such details have been forgotten.
M
y daughter Elena called me up last week, crying. She's twenty-four now, and she just broke up with a boyfriend she needed to break up with. It was a good thing, but that doesn't mean it was easy.
“Can you come out to see me?” she said. “If I had some company for a few days, I know it would really help. It could be an early Christmas present.”
How could I resist? What mother doesn't want to be her daughter's Christmas present?
Three days later, my plane landed in Texas, and Elena picked me up and drove me home. We walked around the house together and admired how she had decorated it. The house belongs to her father, Joe, and me, but Elena's living in it while Joe and I are stationed overseas in Germany. That way, Elena has a rent-free home while she goes to nursing school, and we have peace of mind.
After the house tour, Elena moved on to what really mattered. She introduced me to her new fish.
My daughter doesn't have just one aquarium. Depending on what's going on at the moment, she has at least four, and as many as six. She can take up to an hour to choose a new fish, although nowadays, her finest beauties have hatched out in one of her own tanks. The colors of Elena's fish are rich and brilliant: turquoise, fuchsia, lemon yellow, or blood red. Her aquariums are bold, fantastic worlds where the normal rules don't apply. In these mysterious realms, the artwork lives and moves. It drifts through its liquid landscape, rearranging itself second by second in an endless series of fascinating patterns.
I watched my daughter's expressive face light up as she explained their little quirks and habits. If her fish act like pampered darlings, that's because they are. But I wasn't thinking about the fish. I was thinking,
Elena's thinner than she was when I saw her three months ago. She's stressed. This isn't good
.
When this young woman was seventeen years old, you would have thought she had it all. She was a beautiful, cosmopolitan teenager fluent in two languages and at home in two cultures: the United States and Germany, where Joe's Air Force job had taken us when she was eleven. She made top grades among the students at the military base high school overseas, but she read her Stephen King novels in German so she could discuss them with her German friends.
By her junior year in high school, Elena was an honors student who volunteered for hours each week at the nearby military hospital. She bought the furniture for her bedroom with her own babysitting money, she knew exactly what she wanted to study in college, she couldn't wait to get started on her schoolwork each day, and she never got into troubleâ
ever
.
That's a lot of reflected glory for a mother to bask in.
But Elena has anorexia nervosa, a very dangerous eating disorder. Statistically speaking, it's the deadliest of all the mental illnesses, with a death rate four times that of major depression, even when you factor in the suicides. And when I had to see my perfect honors student, howling and twisting, out of her mind, held down by two frightened nurses . . . When I sat by her frail, damaged body as she lay in the ICU, strapped to a feeding tube and a twelve-channel heart monitor . . . When I helped her withdraw from college so that she could go into a psychiatric institution . . .
. . . that's a long, long way for a mother to fall.
And what has that fall taught me?
That it hurts.
That the first time the ax falls, it feels like a fluke. That the second time the ax falls, it feels like a curse. That the third time the ax falls, it feels like the new normal, so that, no matter how long things go well, a part of my mind is always waiting for another ax to fall.
And that's why, as Elena prowled from aquarium to aquarium and did her checks on her prized and petted beauties, I was doing checks and assessments of my own.