part iii-c; dark side of night
ino

You're probably thinking a story like mine has probably been told a million times. This is going to be the simple tale of a pretty girl who goes on a diet because she thinks she's fat and it ends up becoming so much more than a simple diet.

Well let me tell you something, there's much more to it than that. It was never a diet. This isn't something that I wanted. What I wanted in my life was a little bit of control …something that wasn't fleeting, something I could keep a hold on. Something that gave me some sort of stability when I felt so out of control.

Oh, I have control alright.

I have so much control that I have no period. I have so much control that my insides are all fucked up. I have so much control my heart is weak after everything I've put my body through. I have so much control that I've got this giant bald spot in the middle of my head where I fasten my ponytail. I have so much control that every minute of my life is spent calculating when I eat, what I eat, what I can't have, what I can, what can I do to get rid of it?

Control, hm?

People say I'm this way because of my mother. I don't know how much truth there is to that statement, but I guess I'll elaborate.

My mother was a dancer. Lithe, strong and beautiful. She had a natural talent, a gift of dance, they had told her. To my mother, her dancing was everything. She had been training in ballet and various forms of dance ever since she was a child. It was all sacrifice, long hours and dedication, but it was her passion, her dream. When she met my father, he knew what was most important in her heart. They were young, barely out of their teens …and yet, he shared that space with her love for dance and with it, they were married.

I …was a blessing to the two of them. …Or so, my father calls me a blessing ...

To my mother? I always felt like I was her curse. The thing that ended her life.

It was a miracle they had conceived a child in the first place. Her body wasn't really suited for childbirth, and it hadn't handled having a child well. Her once small and lean figure was now disfigured and foreign to her. She now carried weight in places she hadn't before she had me. My mother was always beautiful, but she always carried this androgynous look to her when she was a dancer. And now that she had me, all her feminine qualities were coming out. Budding breasts, curvaceous hips, signs of a full-fledged woman. And she hated, oh how she had hated it.

As a child I remember my mother always being conscious about what she ate. Every morsel that entered her mouth …everything was always fat free, sugar free, and if she could, calorie free. Anything so that she could keep her weight down so she could keep on dancing.

Children learn from their parents, it's a fact. Everything they inherit from this world? It's from their parents. The thing I inherited from my mother? Staying thin would always take precedence over my health. Gaining weight was like a comparison to death.

And it would become her death.

My mother worked long hours as a dance instructor at the local dance studio not too far from where we lived. I rarely saw her except for on weekends, and even then, she spent most of her time sleeping. When she wasn't sleeping, she would spend her time holed up in her room with my father trying to coax her into eating something. She always refused, screaming at him that he was always trying to fatten her up and that she was already fat enough. He would always leave the house after that to distance himself away from her when she was in her irrational moods.

That was when she turned her attention on me.

She would call me into the room, often stripped down to her underwear and she would be standing in front of the mirror with this eerie looking smile on her face. When I appeared, she would talk to me while looking in herself in the mirror.

See, Ino? Do you see me? Do you see mommy?

She had this ritual. She would always trail her hand from the top of her head, fingering her cheekbones, her jaw and then gripped at the loose skin that hung there. Next would be her neck, and then her collarbones. She'd draw both her arms up, holding them over her chest and fingered the sharp bones with her thumbs, pushing at them and trying to make them more pronounced. Following that, she'd trail her hands over her ribcage, counting each rib and then stopped, to talk to me again.

Do you see how fat she is? She is fat, isn't she, Ino? Isn't mommy, fat?

And then she would turn to look at me and cock her head to the side so that her blond hair swished over her shoulders and cascaded down her back. Her hands would trail down to her hips which she pressed on just like her collar bones. She would pause, and then look at me.

But look at you. You're fat like mommy, Ino. You're more fat than mommy, Ino. You can't be like this. No, not at all.

She was the first person to ever call me fat.

After that, she would turn away from me and just stare at herself in the mirror for the longest time. When my father came home, she would be dressed and sitting at the kitchen table. My father was none the wiser about the fucked up ritual that would commence every Sunday afternoon until the day she died. Following that, they would both apologize, he would give her anti-depressants and the three of us would sit down to dinner like a normal family, even though we were far from it.

She passed away when I was ten years old. I don't remember much about that day. She had been in the hospital for quite some time and I was often left in the company of one of my dad's friends when he went to the hospital for hours on end to be with mom. They said she had a heart attack. Her heart just gave out after thirty-one years and she couldn't fight anymore. After her death, my father invested all his time in me. I became his world now that my mom was gone.

However …those same behaviors my mother had had started to manifest as my own. I was around that age where everything was starting to revolve around looks and only looks. Boys wouldn't like a fat girl, would they?

I was only thirteen, five foot one, and a little over ninety pounds. But all I saw was fat. Everywhere, it was going to consume me. So it began. Restrict, starve, exercise, purge. It was a deadly cycle and my weight dropped from ninety to almost seventy pounds. The red flags went up. I was eventually diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, put into treatment and I started seeing a therapist, just as my mother had. My father wasn't going to lose me like he lost her.

Over the next two or three years, it was a never ending battle with the disorder. I fought with my father constantly about him trying to "fix" me and how he needed to leave me alone because I was just fine. It was therapist, after therapist, after therapist. I had been in and out of hospital inpatient programs four times. I'd been put on a feeding tube so many times; I can pretty much put it on myself if someone asked me to. Every cure they tried on me never worked, I always relapsed back into my old ways.

When I was sixteen, I had a heart attack ...just like my mother.

I flat lined at the hospital but they were able to bring me back. After that, I was kept in the hospital until I was partially stable and then transferred, for the first time, to residential treatment. Which is where I am now.

Part of me realizes that I need food to survive ...but then there's that bigger part of me that rationalizes that it's the enemy. I have to stay thin, that's the only way I'll be happy. But then I think ...why me? Why not someone else? Why am I the one that has this crazy voice in my head telling me that if I eat no one will like me? Or why do I have to feel guilty every time I eat? I know this is the disease that killed my mother, so where is the sense in me holding onto it?

I don't know.

I just don't know.