JELL-O Girls by Allie Rowbottom

Author:Allie Rowbottom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

18

When I turned two, my mother began to disappear. I looked for her in her studio, in the kitchen, the garden, but found her in her bathroom, hunched over the toilet bowl, little tears in the corners of her eyes. “Hi, honey bun,” she’d say, frowning and holding out her arms to me when I cried at the sight of her. “Everything’s all right”: a refrain. But she turned pale, grew thin. She went to doctors, one after another. “It’s stress,” they told her. “You’re being hysterical,” they said. “But look at my family history,” she insisted. She brought out the paperwork from Riggs, the psychiatric evaluations. “Well, here you go,” doctors told her, suggesting her symptoms were probably part of a psychotic episode. Their coincidence with her menstrual cycle made it all the more likely that she was suffering from conversion disorder, or PMS, which was itself considered a kind of hysteria. They suggested tranquilizers. “You’re perfectly physically healthy, Ms. Fussell,” they said as their pens scratched across their prescription pads. Not, it would one day turn out, unlike the girls of LeRoy, who, following doctors’ visits and ER trips, were told the same thing as my mother. Anti-anxiety drugs, hormonal birth control, and pamphlets on stress relief remained, by the time the LeRoy girls sought help, twenty-four years after my mother’s first symptoms, the first line of defense for doctors faced with complaints historically attributed to “female problems.”

At first Mary tried to believe them. Better stress than cancer. She tried the drugs. She tried calming teas and long naps. She tried meditation, self-help books, classical music. Years passed and she remained sick. “Nothing helps,” she told a new doctor, who suggested she cut wheat and yeast out of her diet. So she did. Nothing changed, and she wondered if she was imagining her illness after all, conjuring it like a shadow from her childhood, her memory of Midge, whose symptoms had arisen at this very age.

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