Eating
Disorders
Learning About Real Me
Abandoned as a baby, Anne Beattie has spent her whole life battling eating
disorders and depression.
(Jul 21 2004) She told her amazing story to Beth Neil.
The baby screamed for her mummy. But she never came. She was already on the
first train down to London leaving her seven-month-old daughter
abandoned in a
freezing railway station.
The baby girl was Anne Beattie. She was handed over to the authorities who
placed her in a children's home while staff desperately tried to track down her
parents. Her horrified grandmother recognised her photograph in a newspaper
appeal and came forward. Before then she had been completely unaware of what had
happened to her precious grandchild.
"My father was Canadian and a very domineering character," says Anne, now 42.
"My mother fell pregnant just after they got married, they had very little money
and he didn't want a baby so soon. He pressured my mum to leave me."
Before she was dumped at the train station Anne's mother and father had
attempted to abandon her outside an amusement arcade. That time they were caught
and amazingly, their tiny daughter was handed back to them.
The police finally traced Anne's parents in London. Her father was sentenced
to six months in prison and her mother to three.
On their release the couple set up home just two miles away from where Anne
was being brought up by her grandparents. They went on to have two more
daughters who they kept.
"I always knew who they were and my gran was a very forgiving, very resilient
woman, so we were all in touch. She would never have turned her back on her own
daughter."
Anne's earliest memory is being taken to a courtroom when her grandparents
adopted her.
"I remember that quite vividly," she says softly. "We were quite a
dysfunctional family and I remember a lot of trouble going on around me. I
didn't have a particularly happy childhood. There were happy times, but a lot of
insecurities."
Adding to Anne's vulnerability was her family's point-blank refusal to
discuss their unusual living arrangements. No one would talk about the past and
any questions she had were batted away; "We'll tell you when you're older," they
used to say.
"I didn't know why I didn't live with my mum," says Anne. "My dad had left by
that time and gone back to Canada. But I couldn't understand why my sisters were
with my mum and I was with my gran. I thought there must be something seriously
wrong with me.
"I grew up with a pretty screwed-up idea of what relationships were.
"I had so many questions, I still do now. But it got to the stage where I
knew I was hurting my gran by bringing up the past, so I just stopped asking.
"I know now that my mum must have struggled hugely with the guilt. She was a
very weak woman and easily led."
When Anne was 12, her gran gave her a plastic bag full of newspaper cuttings.
"Have a look at that," she told her granddaughter. "This is all the
information you will need."
Anne knew that was as much as she was going to get out of her. She opened the
bag and began to piece together the puzzle of her life.
"It had been big news at the time, a really big story," she remembers. "There
was such an awful lot about it. I read through it all but instead of answering
all my problems, it just left me with even more questions. I wanted to ask my
mum what jail had been like. How did she feel? But most of all, why did she do
it?"
Sitting today in her South Shields home, Anne is philosophical about the
past. She accepts that her gran, who died more than 10 years ago, was from a
different generation where the need to block out the shame was greater than the
importance of reassuring her confused granddaughter. She suspects now that her
gran was suffering from depression.
"She had all the classic symptoms but of course it was never diagnosed.
Knowing what I do now, I'm almost certain she was depressed. When she died that
was a huge tragedy in my life."
Anne was a frustrated, angry and self-conscious teenager. At 16 she developed
anorexia and her weight dropped by four stone in six months. When she hit seven
stone she was tired and depressed.
"I became immersed in the illness," she says. "It was like everything around
me was madness and I had this really little thing that was pure. It was mine and
I could control it. I could escape into my own little world.
"My gran would get angry with me, but I just wouldn't eat."
After months of starving herself, Anne went completely the other way and
started bingeing.
"It was another way of controlling her life through a coping mechanism of
food.
"I ate a chocolate bar and once I started I just couldn't stop. I put all the
weight back on and more besides. I had obsessive feelings about food."
On the occasions that Anne didn't have the money to satisfy her cravings for
food, she would steal it. She would get through a dozen chocolate bars, cakes,
packets of biscuits, not even giving herself time to taste them as she ate.
When Anne was 23 she met Neil through a computer dating agency. They moved to
Scotland where they settled. A few years later Anne gave birth to their
daughter, Catherine, now 15.
But instead of revelling in the joys of motherhood, Anne was plunged into a
deep depression. Becoming a mum made her even more confused about how her own
mother could have treated her so callously all those years before.
"There was nothing on earth that would have made me leave her," she says.
"And I didn't feel I could ask my mum for any advice on being a first-time mum.
I felt very isolated because I didn't have that support.
"I put so much pressure on myself to be the perfect mum and set myself very
high standards. I wanted to make life so good for Catherine so she would never
have to cry. Whenever she did cry I saw that as a personal failure.
"I ended up phoning social services because I was afraid I would hurt her.
But, like I'd been taught, I kept it all to myself. People thought I was coping
fine but I was really climbing the walls."
With her obsession with food spiralling out of control, in desperation Anne
joined her local Overeaters Anonymous group. At last she felt she was getting
some sort of help for the problems that had plagued her all her life.
"All of a sudden I was around people who knew exactly what I was feeling and
what I was going through. I learned that I was using food to mask all the
emotional feelings I had inside.
"My rock bottom came when I contemplated suicide when Catherine was nearly
two.
"She was the only thing that stopped me. Who was going to look after her?"
continue to page 2
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