Mothers Day looms...

Last year I spent a large part of Mothers Day sitting alone in my car on top of the Moors 'drowning my sorrows' in a box of Belgian chocolates which Ben had given me earlier in the day, armed with a box of tissues to wipe my tears. In those days I spent a lot of time at weekends, just grabbing some 'comfort food' and my car keys and driving off into the distance because life at home had got too stressful to cope with. I left my husband in charge while I took 'time out'...


Other times I'd head round to my sister's house in floods of tears because I found it so hard to cope and so heart-breaking. I used to cry every single day and you could have cut the atmosphere in the house with a knife. Ben had transformed from the boy we knew and loved into an unrecognisable 'demon' whose behaviour was incredibly erratic and predictable in the way you could predict that every single day would be a total and utter nightmare. Mothers Day was no different. By lunchtime the 'anorexic demon' was spitting venom at me on a day when mothers should be spoiled rotten. My Mothers Day was spoiled for all the wrong reasons...

So I sat up on that hillside overlooking fields of sheep and bare moorland, heart-broken and terrified of what the future might hold.

In the evening we did manage to get out to a local country pub for a meal. But you could almost physically feel the stress and the meal ended with Ben storming to the gents' toilets mortified because he'd eaten a desert.

Although it isn't Mothers Day until tomorrow, tonight we're all going to Pizza Express and I have no qualms whatsoever about it. Even 5 months ago on my birthday we managed Pizza Express without any stress whatsoever - in stark contrast to a visit to the restaurant 11 months before when Ben had made a noisy and embarrassing 'scene', eventually storming out, threatening to throw himself in front of a car and physically fighting his Dad and me on the way home. He almost pushed me to the ground with the violence.

This is why so many people describe it as an 'anorexia / ED demon' because it really is as if the sufferer is possessed...

I will be extremely surprised if this Mothers Day and the Pizza Express meal don't go 100% smoothly. I am absolutely confident it will be completely without stress and that Ben will be able to choose from the menu in minutes rather than spend almost an hour chopping and changing his mind interspersed with visits to the Gents' toilet to exercise... And he's planning to have one of the larger pizzas...

How far we have come since then...

Thousands and thousands of miles....