It turns out that Noah did, indeed tell Emily about his addiction to on-line pornography. It was also discovered that his entire family knew about it and while they all claimed to love her like a daughter or sister, they didn't feel the need to tell her. One of the things Noah was critical of was Emily's weight. Compared to the women he was seeing on-line, Emily was fat. Her breasts were too small. Her hips were too wide. I have done a ton of reading about Eating Disorders in the last two weeks. I know that for Emily to have had self-esteem low enough to put up with this treatment, she had to have had other deeply rooted emotional problems. Most of a child's emotional problems can be traced directly back to the way they were parented. I know, it's always the mother's fault, right? Well, guess what? That is a cliche for a damn good reason. Without too much detail (that's another blog altogether!) Emily's father is a workaholic who is emotionally unavailable to her. I suffered a tragic loss around Emily's second birthday which caused me to spiral into deep depression and anxiety from which I have honestly never recovered. Emily told me "Mom, you didn't stick my fingers down my throat, I did". I understand the factual correctness of this sentence, but symbolically, her father and to a larger extent, I am responsible for her choice to stick her fingers down her throat.
Please don't comment that it's not my fault or the loss I suffered was so bad that no one could have been a good mother afterward. I know all those things, I really do! I just refuse to accept them as my reality, just the way Emily refused to accept that she was smart, funny, beautiful, loving and deserving of being treated like a princess. Instead, in her reality, she was fat and ugly. Her breasts were too small and her hips were too big. At the other end of this process upon which we are embarking as a family, I hope that both Emily and I will be able to accept reality as our reality.
So, at Thanksgiving (BTW, this is when Noah told Emily about his addiction) Emily was a size 10. Noah still considered her fat. And so did she. One of the things about the conservative nature of the college they were attending was that the girls were not allowed to wear tight clothing. Even if Emily were a size two, she still wouldn't have looked like the women in the porn sites because her clothes would all be baggy and cover her from collarbone to ankle! Believe it or not, the reasoning behind this method of dress is that men are sexually stimulated visually. If a man is presented with a pretty, well built woman in tight,short clothes he won't be able to control himself. It doesn't give young men any credit for having self-control. In this case, that turned out to be the right call!
Earlier in November, Noah had taken Emily ring shopping. They had discussed marriage and he said he wanted to get an idea of the kind of ring she liked. So, when at his family's home he treated her like shit, she felt so betrayed. His whole family loved her! Why didn't he? In her reality, it was because every mean thing he had ever said about her was true. She was convinced that if she could lose more weight, he would love her again.
When Emily and Noah returned to school after Thanksgiving, they had only three weeks until Christmas break. Noah had stopped saying "I love you" to Emily. They still spent alot of time together, much of it doing Noah's school work. Emily knew things weren't right, but she didn't know why. She figured losing more weight would fix it.
The Sunday night before exams were to start, Noah broke up with Emily. He said that he had asked her out for the wrong reasons to begin with. He thought it was just the next thing to check off on his list: find a girlfriend. He said that he had wanted to break up with her many times during their relationship. He said he never loved her nor planned to marry her. The next day, Emily got her first ever failing grade on a test. Her 4.00 GPA was shot in the ass. She didn't know why at this point, she just knew that she needed to get skinnier.
I don't know when Emily first put her fingers in her throat to make herself throw up. I don't know when she first decided to see how many days she could go without eating a thing. I do know that this became her norm. When she came home for Christmas her senior year, Emily had dropped to a size eight. She was depressed and not eating. I attributed this to the break-up. Who didn't cry all the time and stop eating when they experienced their first heartbreak?
Let me just tell you that the women in my family all have unhealthy relationships with food. My grandmother, mom and I all eat compulsively. We binge eat (no purging for us though!). We eat our feelings. I don't know what the hell happened to my sister, she eats healthily and exercises regularly (I just shuddered thinking about it). We always tease her that she's strange to this day because she came out backwards (breach). Knowing now that all of us women folk have a messed up relationship with food, it shouldn't surprise me that Emily does, too. I just never could have imagined that it would go the way it has.
When Emily went back to school in January (that's this year, 2012) she was miserable. Couldn't wait to get finished with school. She had been looking forward to this semester so much. I thought that once she got back into her school routine and involved in her classes that she would begin to feel better. I figured her friends would be there and the professors and their wives that she had formed strong bonds with should also helpful. Just being back where she lived the last three and a half years would be good for her.
Turns out I couldn't have been more wrong. Noah was everywhere. He waited for her outside her classes, he texted and called her, he watched her from whatever hole he could hide in. Stalker much? It was as if he somehow blamed her for their breakup. The guilt over his porn addiction and the way he mistreated, used and tossed her away must have been eating away at him. Well, it was eating away at Emily, too. She "couldn't" go to meals at the dining common because she'd see him there. He would often stare at her while she ate, looking away quickly when one of her friends turned to stare right back at him.
During the previous semester, Emily had spent most of her time with Noah and his friends. I don't know why they never spent any time with her friends. Maybe because he felt his needs and his friends were more important than hers. I do know that a few of Emily's friends felt something was off about Noah. So, when she returned to school, not only had Emily lost the man she loved, her future husband and fellow servant in Christ, she had lost all of her friends, too. The people who were Noah's friends before Emily came along were still his friends, not hers. The friendships she had built during her first three years of college had drifted away. All she had was her eating disorder. She knew she could control what went in her mouth even if she couldn't control the people around her. She knew she could count on vomiting when she did weaken and indulge. Since she had no close friends at the time, no one saw her not eating at every meal. No one noticed that she was skinny, her eyes were sunken in, that she went to the bathroom after the infrequent meals she did manage to eat. Until she had been back to school about a month. Then someone did notice. Almost the last person you would expect (no, not him!).
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