I Remember Everything: the first time I saw my mum cry

Anorexia - a crippling disease

I remember everything about the first time I saw my mum cry. It was a hot sticky day in July, and my parents and I were clustered around a hospital bed trying to fight back the panic clawing its way up our throats. In the bed was my little sister, then 14 years old, out cold whilst machines beeped frantically and nurses rushed around, shouting at each other. It was so unreal, a textbook scene from any medical drama or film and I felt strangely out of place, as if someone would suddenly call ‘Cut!’ and everything would go back to normal. I saw my mum, my tight-lipped, strong, emotionless mum with fat tears rolling down her cheeks, making an inhuman, almost animal-like keening sound. My sister came so close to death that day and it was made all the worse by one fact – she did it to herself.

Anorexia is something that is very difficult to understand unless you’ve experienced it firsthand. There’s always a touch of scorn in someone’s voice when describing it, because to a lot of people it’s not a real illness. You could even see it in some of the nurse’s eyes that day in the hospital. When my sister was transferred into the Intensive Care Unit, there were children there that had cancer, had been hit by cars – and she had done it to herself. When I told people that she suffered from anorexia they would trivialise it and ask ‘That’s the thing where you don’t eat right? Just waft some pizza under her nose, she’ll be fine.’ Or even worse, ‘I think I had that once, I felt so fat one day and didn’t eat for a week! But then my mum cooked spag bol...’ No, no you didn’t.

My sister had always been a bit of a perfectionist. It just happened to be her body that she decided to perfect next. We slowly drifted apart as she became more and more withdrawn, her eyes sinking into her skull. Next came the fights, night after exhausting night at the dinner table, always ending in tears, accusations...and no food eaten. At her worst, the week before she collapsed, she looked like a skeleton. People stared and pointed wherever she went. Left alone with her one night I was ordered by my parents to not let her go outside to run off the food she so desperately loathed. I sat on the door key in front of Eastenders, with tears silently pouring as she alternately screamed hatred at me and sobbed uncontrollably. What had she become? A monster, a shadow of her former self. I scratched my wrists in a frenzy, drawing blood. Anything to distract me from her.

She’s better now. Of course she’ll never be entirely free from her obsession with food, but she looks a sensible weight now. She’ll never eat chocolate or crisps but we get on. We watch trashy TV together, we go for walks – trying to rebuild a friendship that was shattered for a good 3 years. Our family still tenses every time an advert about weight loss or anorexia comes on the TV. Never fall into the trap of thinking that anorexia is selfish, is stupid, is just someone being stubborn. It is an illness and one that affects the whole family. And the person who hates it the most is often the victim. I hope I never have to see my mum cry again.

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