Recently in the inpatient psychiatric unit I have been working in, I have been in the company of adolescent females and girls that are suffering from the various stages of anorexia nervosa and bulimia. The girls that I have seen so far have been in the age range of 10 to 17 years old, some with the onset of the eating disorder being 8 years old (for two of the 10 year olds in particular). I have felt awed and perplexed by the characteristics of the disorders as manifested in the lives of some of the girls I have encountered...the obsessive behavior, the distorted body images, the inability to share emotions or state what one really thinks, needs or wants, the feelings of meaningless and unimportance, etcetera. I have found it all so alarming and confusing. I recently went to the library to get some resources to begin to inform myself about eating disorders, such a complex area of topic. Eating disorders are a crisis to all systems really.....physical, mental, emotional, spiritual.
In some of the literature that I have looked at there have been many theories about the causes and development of eating disorders psychologically and so on. I came accross a book that is not so much academic but more of a subjective telling from a therapist of her experiences with women suffering from eating disorders and the stories that they have told her over the years. The book, The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity, was published by Kim Chernin in 1985. The book concerns her thoughts and theories about women's identity development, or lack there of, with disordered eating and she takes particular notice of relationships between mothers and daughters. The book takes a feminist perspective concerning women's development and has been a little window into feminist thought for me around the time that I was born. Here is a somewhat long excerpt that I found particularly striking and resonating:
"For the older woman, what a terrible sorrow there must be . Her life has gone by. It is too late, she thinks, to do all those things about which this young girl, with her fresh face and eager expectations, rushes home to tell her. And so we imagine that the daughter finds her mother standing in the kitchen. She knows, this mother of the 1980s, that no one any longer values much the care she gives to the preparation of the family meals. And yet, in that quarter hour before her adolescent daughter entered the room, she had been wondering what new form to give the food she serves up, so dutifully, each night. She looks up, this woman in her fifties, who weights ten to fifteen pounds more than she wishes to. She wipes her hands on her apron. She lifts a hand to tuck back a straying wisp of hair, remembering this same moment in her own life twenty-five years earlier. And did she go to college? Did she have her pick of the finest universities in the land? Did she go there to get a husband? Or because, as this girl claims, the digging up of ancient cities presses upon her with a restless lure? She does not want money, this daughter who has known every privilege. She does not want to marry, she says, and have children, until she has lived. And what is life, then, the mother asks, trying to keep that edge out of her voice? Are you telling me, she wonders, falling silent, pressing her lips closed, are you telling me that my life of sacrifice and devotion was not living at all?"
"For the daughter (or the woman of any age coming of age in this new way we now invite women to develop), the confrontation with despairs and failures of the mother's life must inevitably produce a feeling of profound dismay. Any one of us could surround ourselves with pictures of Emma Goldman or Fannie Lou Hamer or Radclyffe Hall or Margaret Sanger made abundantly available in popular women's magazines and derive from them all the sustenance and encouragement our mothers lacked. But the fact that few women of any age fill their homes with this iconography may have something to do with the battle of opposing imagery that faces us today. The dominant image for the woman vomiting is not the image of Fannie Lou Hamer, the black activist who struggled for her people's right to vote; for the woman getting into bed to devour chocolate it is not the image of Margaret Sanger conquering fear by crossing the railroad tracks alone. For the woman vomiting it is the image of a fat mother hiding at home, a sacrifice to an earlier generation's conception of motherhood and appropriate female destiny, that dominates her imaginary life"
"If it is true that our mothers in their time suffered from a lack of imagery and were severely limited in their development because of this, we their daughters suffer from an acute, unnamed conflict between the image of mother we carry as a restless inheritance and the new image of female possibility our time presents. Here, precisely, is a piece of the missing chapter we need to write. For here is a feeling so bitter in its implications few of us have been able to become aware of it. Imagine a woman stepping out joyfully into her own new life who now feels herself torn between her loyalty to her mother and her response to that new woman, that new female being we are all struggling toward. Of course, she cannot go back to being what her mother was, but we can imagine how this inability must fill her with remorse."
-Posted by Britt C.
