Doubletake: How a Mother's Depression Influences a Daughter's Body Dysmorphia

My mother refuses to see a therapist. Instead she sees a soft-spoken psychiatrist, or pill pimp as I like to call him, with skin the color of Bit O’ Honey and a mild manner. He’s Indian, or so she says. This could mean he’s anywhere from Mexican to Iranian. My mother, being mostly around Portuguese or Portuguese-Americans her entire life, has never had an eye or ear for cultural distinction.

Last week she told me the news. After a year the new anti-depressants magically stopped working. Wary that she’d only jumped the gun, I dipped my foot slowly.

“Well, how long have you been sad?” I asked. My fingers were already itching to feel the contours of my face. I thought about the mirror in the bathroom off the kitchen from where I sat. I couldn’t wait to get off the phone so I could perch myself before it like a chicken anxious from being caged for so many days.

“Twenty-four hours.”

“Mom,” I sighed. “That doesn’t mean anything, You cannot take a new pill every time you get a little sad. That’s not human.” I wanted to add that it wasn’t very plucky either, but with a limited English vocabulary, she wouldn’t understand.

I thought she would listen to her college-educated, Summa Cum Laude, 5th in her graduating class daughter. I had somehow forgotten that when it comes to advice, my mother tends to come begging but almost always snatches her palm away when I open my purse of hard-knock logic.

“No, you don’t understand. I have a sickness. It’s controlled with chemics.”

Chemics are chemicals. No matter how many times I have corrected her on this point, it never sticks.

“Mom, all I’m saying is sometimes you’re supposed to be depressed. We all are. Maybe you should talk to someone instead of just popping pills. Maybe that could help you modify behaviors.” I gritted my teeth and counted the seconds before I’d hang up. I gave her exactly ten more seconds in which to elaborate on how sick she really felt.

“I don’t need to talk to a therapist,” she explained a little too confidently for someone on the verge of a breakdown. “They can’t help with the chemics! Don’t you understand?”

Like many a grieved daughter, I rolled my eyes. I knew what was coming. What she didn’t see miles away in her suburban vinyl-sided Connecticut Colonial. My face before the mirror, picking, tugging, scratching away, like I’m fourteen again, completely convinced that I will look like Cindy Crawford someday. I mean, sure, my hair was already brown. But when will the rest catch up?

“I’ll talk to you later. Hope you feel better.” I forced the words out. I was not feeling very charitable and recognized this more as the defect of a flawed daughter, not as the sensible reaction of a stressed one.

“Call me later. I need to talk to you more.” Then the kicker. “That will help with my sickness.”

I reluctantly promised to call later. I told myself that I wouldn’t, but I always do. I imagined myself later that night, pulling away from the mirror, picking up the phone, dreading the onslaught of words like “illness” and “depression.”

In the bathroom I feel completely in my element. I breathe in slowly, prepping myself for the coming ritual. I turn my head to the side and finally stare up my nostrils. I feel the jut of my chin and practice smiling, first with teeth showing, then close-lipped. I even smile to the side, a sly Elvis-grin. I look grim instead of alluring, though. I pretend to be someone else, seeing myself for the first time. I try to gather the image of this stranger in the mirror as I would a real stranger or a new face in a magazine. I hang my head and start the process all over again. In short, I begin a whole new cycle of obsession.

I didn’t stumble upon the pattern between my reaction to Mom’s emotional life and my own neuroses about my appearance until about a month ago. Actually, I didn’t even notice it. My husband did. He tightened his lips into charming worms and stared fixedly. I had just asked him for the five-thousand-and-seventy-fourth time if he thought I looked any different.

“Like how?” he asked tightly. He was used to this needy, stereotypically womanish behavior and was sick of it. I knew he was sick of it because of the fed-up flash in his eye. Also, because he told me this in not so many words.

“Fuck you,” he said gracefully one evening after I’d nearly burst into tears about my hideousness. “Just fuck you. I can’t take this anymore.”

Not that I blame him. “But if you’re sick of it, try to get into my head,” I, again girlishly, whined. “Don’t you feel sorry for me?” I never got an answer. He was too annoyed to speak.

“Like how?” he repeated now. His scowl took on a mean, sarcastic swagger. “Like different from yesterday? Do you realize that if we get a divorce it will be because of your mother?”

“My mother?” I drew away from the mirror. The anchor of what I pretended not to know grounded itself deep in my groin. So now I had an anchor in my vagina. What next?

“Yes, your mother. Every time she uses you for a shrink you make a beeline to the mirror. All of a sudden you’re gruesome and your mother is busy trying a new drug.”

We didn’t say, “I love you” before bed that night. I was still mad at him for being so unsympathetic to his ugly wife. He was still angry at my weakness and at my mother’s weaknesses, which somehow became part of me, like another limb, a baby umbilical cord I couldn’t cut off with the most expensive electrical saw at Home Depot.

After I made the connection, I quit searching in the mirror for what I saw as signs of failure. Mostly. A few days later, with Mom’s good old pills keeping her relatively sane, my nose somehow got smaller. My eyes grew less piggy. My lips took on their normal fullness. Even my hair retained an unusual luster. All was well. I quit looking in the mirror for that enormous pore and hid the baby umbilical cord in my underwear.

She called this afternoon. Things didn’t go so well. Let’s just say I’ve finished half a Toblerone and wolfed four mini chocolate bars with seemingly innocuous cartoon packaging. As can be expected after such a minor binge, I also snuck a few visits to the bathroom mirror. I managed to keep the inspections down to three minutes, mostly thanks to my five-month-old’s heartbreaking abandonment issues. I shudder to think where I’d be without the baby’s urgent cries for attention, for love.