Our mothers often give us our first cues about our bodies. So what happens when a severe eating disorder keeps your mom hospitalized for most of your life? Writer and Sundance-featured filmmaker Hope Hall shares her struggle to embrace and understand her bulimic and anorexic mother, and to overcome the eating problems she inherited.

My mother has been anorexic and bulimic all of my life, and most of hers. She is 59; I am 29. When I was seven, my father filed for divorce and sued for custody of my sister, brother, and me. In a time when mothers normally gained custody, de facto, he won. She was deemed unfit to care for us, proven by her unsuccessful attempt at being a single mother the year before.

That year was a watery memory of smelly good night kisses, open containers of food lining the kitchen counter, tiny portions furtively saved as leftovers, strict lists of expected or denied food items, and formal, gourmet dinners (a dark, wood table set with china, hardly a word spoken). To round out the picture, you must understand that my mother is also an alcoholic and the daughter of a man who was at the very least, verbally abusive.

As I piece my mom's life together from confusing stories and ever-unfolding accounts, I discover that she attempted suicide more than once as a mother and again after she lost us, and suffered at the hands of doctors and kin who treated her various maladies with forced eating, electric shock treatment, straitjackets and verbally abusive comments like, "just eat, goddammit."

For the majority of my life, I was sheltered from her. My older brother and sister were the parental figures in my life. I thought I would not be affected by my mother and her destructive habits but she'd already had a profound affect on me before I was old enough to know it.

I Went from Imitation to Denial
As a toddler, I stored food in my cheeks for hours after a meal. My sister says because I grew up never seeing my mom swallow, I was following her lead. I was an unbelievably quiet child, speaking rarely, shyly. I chewed meticulously, waiting to swallow until the food felt just ready to slip down my throat.

My sister would stay with me to help me keep eating, my plate still full, the table cleared. She would pick a number, usually 40, and count my chews until we got there. Then I was to swallow. I remember asking for 20 more chews and getting them. I only liked a few foods: Ovaltine, toast, Pop Tarts, and peanut butter. I did not like other foods: I detested corn and hot dogs most of all. I was waifish, drifting about the house in a white nightgown, and always the smallest and most quiet of my class.

As a teenager in a big, loving, loud family, I came out of my shell. In my heart, my mom didn't really exist. I always carried sadness from the night, I was11, when my father came to my bed and told me that my mom was in the hospital and might die. From then on, I accepted that she was gone.

"Her Eating Disorder Was Destroying Our Lives"
We went to visit her twice a year, per the court agreement. We stayed with her parents because her place was too small (a dorm room she called the "black hole of Calcutta"), or perhaps because her behavior was too upsetting. I tried to repress memories of my mother's reality and those tense hospital visits with the excitement of my own junior high school life, filled with giddy crushes on boys, long bike rides and palm trees. Eventually the latent sadness inside and all around me became too huge to ignore.

At 15, I began to put faces and words to this emptiness, to the space where my mother was supposed to be. As a teenager, my estranged relationship with mother was awkward. When I did visit her, I felt more like her mother than her daughter. It felt like she was my responsibility, like she needed me to help her define who she was.

Rather than face the fact that my mother's eating disorder was destroying all of our lives, I constructed crude, dramatic, explanations for her disappearance and detached behavior.When I returned to my own pleasant existence, she seemed dead.

Like Mother, Like Daughter?
Meanwhile, an incredible fear seeped ever deeper into my bones: I would become like my mother one day. Eating became my symbolic attempt to identify with her. If I left food on my plate, all eyes were on it and brains spun tales that lead to the conclusion that I was starving myself. My unbelievably skinny arms, the ribs poking through my shirt, and the sharp line of my shinbone were clues that I tried to hide. They were not emblematic of any other problem than the looming spectre of my inherited sickness.

I have never made myself throw up, seen myself as overweight, or even dieted. I have often seen myself as too skinny and regimented myself to try to gain weight. But my relationship to my body and to my emotional figure was wrapped too tightly in my mother's eating disorders.

Healing Myself
Over the past few years, I have liberated myself somewhat from the overbearing assumptions of my tangled mind and its machinations, but only through nearly 15 years of intense dialogue with my mother, counselors, friends and family. I have covered the most ground with my mom, who has stayed up nights with me, cried and listened and explained tirelessly, and ultimately heeded my loudest call, that of the desire to have her as a mother, not a figurative daughter.

I have yet to figure out how to wrest my behavior from the web of caring for a sick mother. I complacently excuse her for placing her disease before me. I tell her that I love her, and that the love I give is not contingent on her getting well. I try not to pressure her, but instead to support her. She says that I am helping her to become a mother. I do not truly believe that she can support me in any sort of consistent way. Her touch does not even console me.

I have no way of separating this dynamic from that of my other relationships, because I still want to define it as love. In this way I am fearful, guilty, and a long way from forming healthy, adult relationships with others. So, it seems that her legacy--and my burden--is that while I worked so hard to gain her affection and closeness, the job that lies before me is to let it, and her, go.