The Wishing Well

       Throughout my life, the wishing well has repeatedly popped up.

       My mother, ever into home gardening, eventually fulfilled a personal dream when she added a red version to our backyard. It completed the landscape of lawn ornaments, peonies, tulips and her much beloved lilac grove. It was in that grove, she chose to nestle her wishing well.

       Once placed, now it was all about taking photographs to commemorate the accomplishment.

      This is where I come in.

      My first wishing well photograph is taken when I’m about five years old, soon after my parents bought the decoration. Wearing a red jumper-style dress, standing in bare feet and holding a baby doll, I look every bit the happy little girl.

Indeed, I was.

      And, it is here, looking through the hindsight filter of my own personal disordered experiences, where it holds special significance to me.

      This was me, “B.D.” This was “Before Disorder.” And it was reflected at the wishing well.

I have no memory of taking this first photograph. Likewise, I also have no memory of being “issue-less” concerning disordered image and eating. But at one time, I was. There was no dieting; there was no awareness I was defective because I was “fat.” I was unaffected.

“I feel a resurgence of my 6-year-old self… that little warrior, goddess of a girl reminding me of who I was when I was little, before the world got its hands on me.”
Jennifer Elisabeth, “Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl”

        I didn’t need to wish I was happy. I already was.

        That little girl, however, could not last.

“... Mom had battled her own ‘weight problem’ her entire life. She was alarmed to see the dreaded sin manifesting itself in her little girl. It was time to fix the problem. It was time to fix me... she introduced me to my first diet. I was seven years old... I thought, ‘If I do this, then I’ll be okay. If I do this, then I’ll make things better.’ A diet was the answer...”

“40% of 9-year-old girls have dieted.”

Susan Ice, M.D., Medical Director, The Renfrew Center, www.renfrew.org

(Excerpts included are from Cruse’s book, “Thin Enough: My Spiritual Journey Through the Living Death of an Eating Disorder”)

        The culmination of abuse within my home and my mother’s food, weight and body image issues produced an environment in which Mom and I engaged in unhealthy enmeshment and coping attempts. They flip-flopped from sharing our love of food to sharing our self-hating belief we were “too fat” and, therefore, needed to engage in mother-daughter diet projects.

This was to achieve, as my mother often vocalized, our “right weight.” This was our wish.

        Now I was in “A. E.D.” This was “Approaching Eating Disorder” territory. And again, it was reflected at the wishing well.

        By this point, I had learned image manipulation strategies, like the clothes I wore. This education was featured in my second photograph; I was eight.

        Here, I see a different little girl from the five year old. This photograph is me, now fully aware I am “too fat.” And so, already experienced in failed dieting to “cure” the situation, I learned I needed to alter my image any way I could.

“... Dressing joined dieting as a new strategy to ‘fix me.’ I never really paid much attention to clothes until it was pointed out at seven years old that I needed to ‘cover up.’ I remember my first attempts at dressing in a ‘slimming’ way...”

        Achievement of that tactic was now my wish. Months earlier, Mom bought me a red and white cheerleader Halloween costume (which I never wore for that occasion because it was too tight).

       But here’s where I had a revelation; this “tightness” could serve as a corseting device.

       Indeed, the costume was at its tightest around my midriff, the area I was most self-conscious about. Although I was uncomfortable while wearing it, I did look thinner.

       Because of that result, this attire became one of my “go-to” outfits. Knowing I could not get away with wearing it to school in its original cheerleader form, I tucked it into tight jeans, maximizing the aesthetic.

“...I couldn’t breathe very well, but I was successfully ‘held in.’ I was also successfully acquiring kidney and bladder infections, due to the restrictive clothes’ pressure on my organs. It took my doctor two months to treat these infections...”

        So, this wishing well photo, depicts me, a rigid toy soldier, standing stiff, with bulging eyes, holding my breath. I was beyond uncomfortable; I was in pain. The midsection of the costume was cutting into me.

       But this was what I needed to do, because, after all, I was “too fat.” I had to use any means necessary to at least, look thinner if I could not actually be thinner.

        I was not acceptable until I was at my “right weight,” ergo, “thin.”

        So, now, I wished I was those elusive words, the promise of forever happiness. That desire remained throughout my overweight adolescence.

“Wishes, I am finding, are fickle things when they turn on you.”
 Jennifer Ellision, “Threats of Sky and Sea”

       And this leads me to my next wishing well photograph; it was taken on my last day of high school.

      Leaning on the well, wearing dark blue cut-offs, a tank top and a jean jacket, I didn’t know I was at a crossroads. This photograph captured innocence unaware it would be lost, that summer on, to the beginnings of full- blown disorder.

      Wishing morphed into reinvention.

 “...As I prepared for college, I had a lot to prove—to myself, to the haunting jeers of classmates, to the boys who had not been asking me out...But that would all change this summer.

So I started another diet...I drank diet drinks that tasted like chocolate-flavored chalk. I started exercising on a stationary bike, a real bike, and a mini trampoline. The exercise sped up my success. I started losing weight and keeping it off! I felt exhilaration and power...”

        But things took a sinister turn over my freshman year of college. Wishing became obsessing about emaciation...

 “...Each comment, lost pound, and lost inch gave me more of an incentive. As I lost weight, I found myself always in need of a new goal...”

        And no, there are no wishing well photographs of me in this state.

“She wondered again about her inclination to wish for things that made her so deeply unhappy.”
Ann Brashares, “Sisterhood Everlasting”

       There are no photographs because my world became so constricted, I rarely went outside. My life was all about starvation, over-exercise, trying not to die, but not wanting to live.

“...Every morning, my heart and pulse would pound and race. I could feel throbbing from veins that were sticking out on the backs of my knees and the crooks of my elbows. Every morning, I would stand up, shaky, dizzy already, only to then have everything go black. And then, I’d wake up, lying on the floor. Passing out was now a regular part of my day... I was tired physically, emotionally, spiritually... I didn’t want to be here anymore...”

       The only wishing going on now was the desire to disappear. I am now in “After Disorder” territory.

“...I daily prayed, ‘God, just let me die...’”

       For many years, as I struggled with various disordered eating and image issues, as I experienced the lessons and milestones one accumulates in adulthood, the wishing well remained stagnant. As I grew up, went to college and got married, obviously, I spent more time away from that particular object. Life, like it always does, moved on.

       Indeed, much has changed from those three photographs. Mom now resides in a care facility, having had a stroke which has rendered her wheelchair- bound.

      And I am currently faced with the task of cleaning up the home I grew up in. And that includes the backyard.

      Its reality is disturbing. Left neglected by my mother, the once visionary gardener, the onetime flower garden is now overgrown with weeds. The flowers are gone. The lawn ornaments are broken and dirty.

      And that includes the once charming red wishing well. It’s still in the lilac grove. But it is now crushed by that grove.

      That’s the discovery I made when I returned to my childhood home. Nature’s barrier of fallen branches, tall grass and briars has also made it challenging to take a current photograph of me positioned next to the broken decoration.

      And with that reality, I had the revelation of a spell broken.

        Looking at the once mystical wishing well, with its promises my mother and I counted on for years, I now feel a freedom. This exists, even in the midst of the recovery challenge- from disorder, abuse and unfulfilled wishes.

        For most of us, reaching some form of adulthood and/or healing, there is nothing new under the sun about that. We deal with the painful, sometimes ugly, truth. We recognize the hard work of the backbone must override the magical solution of the wishbone. We must get beyond simply wishing for something external to give us “happily ever after.”

“The only difference between a wish and a prayer is that you're at the mercy of the universe for the first, and you've got some help with the second.”
 Jodi Picoult, “Sing You Home”

       The promise is found in the engaged, intentional living, not the wishing.

       I have learned the wishing well is passive- and not in a healthy grace kind of way either.

Wishing can, with insidious subtlety, disconnect us from ourselves and the real, honest, responsibility work we need to execute. Wishing can keep us stuck; it can make us regress. And we need to face that.

       At any given moment, we are subject to various stages of the wishing well: the unaware bliss, the naïve hope, the desperate striving, the broken heart, the imperfect acceptance.

      Wishing is there, at every phase; it has brought us to and through every era, behavior and mindset. That includes our recovery.

       You may or may not have ever had a wishing well in your backyard, but, nevertheless, its power can still resonate.

       What is it which compels you, tortures you...or threatens to destroy you?

       What is your wishing well? And what are you doing with it?

Copyright © 2018 by Sheryle Cruse