Two Hundred Grams of Love

I have always had a tiny appetite. If I swallowed anything over two hundred grams, my throat would seize, my esophagus burning as my body violently forced it back up. Because of this, I weighed forty pounds less than my sister, who was six years younger than me. Every time I watched her pile her plate with mac and cheese, hot buttered biscuits, and pulled pork, tearing through chicken tenders with greasy fingers, a quiet, dark rush of superiority hummed beneath my skin. I would gaze down at my own wrists—so thin I could wrap a thumb and forefinger around them with room to spare—and trace the sharp, bird-like cages of my ribs. I was proud of them. Sometimes Mom would break down at the dinner table, sobbing, begging to know why I had turned out this way. Watching her cry for me gave me a profound, intoxicating peace. Dad would spend half his paycheck and endless sleepless nights securing consults with the top pediatric gastroenterologists in the state, his dark hair turning prematurely stark white. In those moments, I felt exquisitely, completely loved. Whenever the therapists asked if there was some deep-seated wound, some hidden trauma locking me in this cage of starvation, I would just smile and shake my head. I told them my parents spoiled me rotten, that they favored me above all else. Why would someone like me have trauma? That was until Mom completely shattered in the therapist’s office, dropping to her knees and pressing her forehead against the cold linoleum floor three times in frantic supplication. "Please," she choked out, her voice ragged. "Please, forgive us. Stop doing this to yourself, baby... please." … The therapist froze, rising quickly to help my mother up. Mom wouldn't budge. She stayed folded on the floor, her knuckles white against the tiles, her entire frame shuddering. "Hannah, please. Mommy was wrong," she wept, her voice shaking violently against the floorboards. "Don't punish yourself like this anymore. Please." I looked at the faint red mark blossoming on her forehead, and a strange impulse to laugh bubbled in my throat. "Mom, what are you even talking about?" I asked, tilting my head. "I was just born with a weak stomach. What does that have to do with you?" Dad was standing against the wall, his face drained of color, gray as sheetrock. He had aged so fast over the last few years. He was barely fifty, but the lines around his eyes were carved deep, his temples dusted silver. For my sake, he had set alarms for 3:00 a.m. to snag cancellation spots with specialized nutritionists; he had driven out to boutique wellness clinics in the mountains just to buy unproven organic broths. All our relatives whispered that my parents were saints—the most devoted, doting parents in the world. And I agreed with them. Every single time a doctor or a counselor asked about our home life, I answered with absolute sincerity: "It’s wonderful. My parents adore me. Honestly, my little sister is jealous of how much they fuss over me." Hearing me say those words now only made Mom weep harder. She gasped for air, burying her face in both hands as if she couldn't bear the sight of me. The therapist’s hand hovered in midair, holding out a box of tissues. She paused. "Hannah, you just said your sister is jealous of you?" I nodded easily. "Yeah. Lily has always had an appetite like a horse. She eats whatever she wants—burgers, fries, deep-dish pizza. I’m different. A couple of spoonfuls of broth and I’m completely full. Mom and Dad have to revolve their entire lives around getting calories into me. Of course she resents that." Mom snapped her head up, her lips pale and trembling. "No... no, that's not how it was..." I smiled softly at her. "Then how was it, Mom?" Her mouth hung open, but nothing came out. Not a single sound. "I know it must have been hard on Lily," I continued, smoothing down the fabric over my hollow lap. "Mom and Dad favor me so much. It’s natural she felt left out. But there’s really nothing I can do about my body." I looked down, pretending to feel guilty, but I couldn't stop the small, private smirk tugging at the corners of my mouth. The silence in the room stretched until it felt suffocating. Finally, Dad spoke, his voice hoarse, like sandpaper rubbing against bone. "If you can just get better, Hannah... your mother and I will do whatever you want. Anything." I stared down at my left wrist. Skin stretched taut over fragile bone, a delicate branch ready to snap. I loved being this small. When you are small, you take up almost no space at all, and everyone looks at you like you are made of blown glass. Everyone looks at you with terror and devotion. A warm, eerie comfort settled over me, carrying my mind backward, through the fog of childhood. Back to when Lily was small. Whenever Lily cried, the whole house would echo with the same tired refrains: "She’s just a baby." "She doesn't know any better." "If she wants the toy, Hannah, just give it to her." Back then, I had wanted someone to coddle me like that, too. But Mom would sigh, her voice tight with exhaustion: "You’re the big sister." And Dad would say: "You’re six years older, Hannah. Be the mature one." Nobody said that to me anymore. The therapist cleared her throat gently. "Hannah, when exactly did you start restricting your intake?" I shook my head. "I never restricted. Like I said, it’s just how I’m built. If I eat too much, I throw up." Mom let out a broken, pathetic sound. "No... no, you weren't like this before. You weren't." She propped herself against the wall, trembling as she slumped back into her chair. The therapist turned to her, her gaze steady, unrelenting. "The very first time she forced herself to throw up after a meal—what had just happened at home?" Dad opened his mouth, but Mom blurted it out before he could stop her: "Her sister was lost in the mall... and all Hannah could talk about was how hungry she was..." Mom’s words cut off sharply. She clamped a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide with terror, while Dad flinched as though he’d been struck. I remembered that day. It was my twelfth birthday. Dad had promised to take me to the Italian bistro downtown—the one with the handmade ravioli and garlic knots I’d spent all month dreaming about. Mom had kissed my forehead that morning and told me I was the birthday girl, that today, my word was law. But the moment we stepped into the mall, Lily had wrapped both arms around Mom’s thigh, wailing and kicking until she was allowed into the indoor playground on the third floor. Mom had looked at me with that familiar, apologetic grimace. "She’s little, Hannah. Just thirty minutes, okay? You’re the older sister. What’s thirty minutes?" I nodded. Thirty minutes bled into two hours. By the time Lily was dragged out of the ball pit, our reservation had been canceled. Dad said we could just grab Auntie Anne's or food-court pizza, that it didn't really matter. But then Lily spotted a boutique window and threw a tantrum for a plush bear. She yanked her hand out of Mom's grip and darted into the sea of Saturday shoppers. Within ninety seconds, she was gone. My parents completely lost their minds. They ran screaming toward the security desk, begged store managers to pull up security feeds, dialed 911. Mom collapsed in the middle of the corridor, sobbing so hard she couldn't breathe, while Dad stood near a kiosk, slapping himself across the face in a frenzy of panic and self-blame. Nobody remembered that I hadn't eaten since seven that morning. By dusk, the edges of my vision were speckled with black dots. My stomach felt like an empty, acid-burned pit. As we passed an artisanal bakery stand, I saw a sampling dish of cinnamon brioche bites on the glass counter. Trembling, I reached out and took a small piece. I had barely touched it to my tongue when Mom turned and smacked my hand away with a violent crack. "Your sister is missing!" she screamed, her voice cracking across the crowded corridor. "Your sister is gone, and you’re standing here stuffing your face?!" Shoppers stopped and stared. I cradled my stinging wrist, shrinking back, my voice barely a whisper. "Mom... I’m starving." Mom was beyond reason. She grabbed both of my shoulders and shook me so hard my teeth rattled. "She’s six years old! She’s out there alone, terrified, and you don't give a damn! Why don't you care?!" I tried to tell her that I did care. I had run behind them all afternoon until the soles of my flats wore through and blisters burst on my heels, staining my white socks red. Mom didn't care. She didn't look down at my feet. "Is this because we didn't go to your stupid dinner? Are you pouting because today isn't all about you?!" she hissed. "Would skipping one meal kill you, Hannah? Why are you so damn selfish?!" I stared at her, frozen. The moment the words left her mouth, a flicker of horror crossed Mom's face. She reached out, perhaps wanting to pull me into her arms, but right then the mall PA crackled to life. "A six-year-old girl in a pink sweater has been brought to the customer service counter..." Mom pushed me aside and sprinted down the concourse like a woman possessed. Dad bolted after her. Neither of them looked back. Not once. I stood there alone by the glass display case. Slowly, I knelt down, picked up the cube of brioche from the dirty floor, and blew off the gray lint. I didn't eat it. I just held it in my palm, letting Mom’s words settle into my bones, cold and heavy as lead: "Skipping one meal won’t kill you. Lily is what matters." The therapist spoke softly, pulling me back into the room. "And from that day on, you stopped eating?" I shook my head. "Not at first. At first... I just wanted to see what would happen." I skipped breakfast the next day. Nobody noticed. I skipped dinner the day after. Mom smiled, praised me for being so grown-up and not making a fuss, and slid my portion of pot roast onto Lily’s plate. On the third day, I passed out cold during fifth-period algebra. Dad walked out of a major client presentation to race to the hospital. Mom sat beside my gurney and wept all night, clutching my cold hand to her chest. When I opened my eyes to their terrified, tear-streaked faces, I felt something I had never felt before. I had won. I had looked up at Mom that night, my voice faint and sweet, and whispered: "You were right, Mom. Skipping meals didn't kill me after all." Sitting in the therapist’s office now, Mom buried her head in her lap, letting out a dry, choked sound. The therapist frowned, leaning forward. "Where was Lily found that day? When she went missing?" Dad swallowed hard. "In the service stairwell behind the playground. She said she got lost." A soft laugh slipped past my lips. "You guys never checked, did you? A few weeks later, I went back to the mall and asked security to let me see the footage." Dad looked up, confused. "What?" "She wasn't lost," I said gently. "She was hiding behind the mezzanine railing the whole time. She stood right above us, watching you both scream her name. She watched Mom slap the bread out of my hand. And the second Mom hit me... Lily leaned over the railing, and she was smiling." Dad sat frozen for a long moment before muttering, "She... she was six, Hannah. Just a baby." Mom nodded eagerly, grasping at straws. "She was probably scared! She probably froze and didn't know how to come down. And... and kids smile when they’re nervous! It didn't mean she was laughing at you!" I wasn't angry. Not at all. They were just so wonderfully, pathologically soft-hearted. Even when the evidence was right in front of them, they couldn't bear to believe their little darling was capable of malice. The therapist turned her dark eyes on me. "Hannah. Your parents blamed you, struck you, and minimized your pain. And instead of resenting them, you’re here making excuses for them. Why?" I blinked, genuinely surprised by the question. "Because they love me the most." After I fainted at school when I was twelve, Mom didn't sleep for three straight days. Dad cleared his entire calendar, practically living in the pediatric ward, questioning every nurse and resident about why his little girl couldn't keep food down. Lily had thrown a screaming fit in the corridor, claiming I was faking it. She cried that I had deliberately ruined her weekend, that I did it just to get Mom and Dad to yell at her. For the first time in her life, Dad had roared at her: "Your sister is in a hospital bed! Can you stop thinking about yourself for five damn seconds?!" Lily had run out crying. And Mom hadn't chased her. She had stayed right there on the edge of my mattress, blowing gently on a bowl of warm chicken broth, feeding me one tiny spoonful at a time. It was the first time in six years they hadn't run after Lily. I will never forget that feeling. I was sick, dizzy, and hollow, but deep in my chest, I was glowing with warmth. From then on, the rules of our house changed. If I ate half a grilled cheese, Mom grew anxious. If I skipped food for an entire day, she hovered, begging me to take a bite of an apple. Two days, and she would weep openly at the kitchen island. By the third day, Dad would blow off Lily’s parent-teacher conferences to sit in waiting rooms with me. When I was fourteen, Lily had a regional dance recital. Mom and Dad had promised for months that they would both sit in the front row. Right before we had to leave the house, I forced myself to swallow a few spoonfuls of creamy potato soup. My stomach heaved violently. I bolted to the bathroom, gripping the porcelain as everything came up in agonizing dry heaves. Mom took her coat off immediately. "We’re not going," she said, her voice trembling. "We have to take your sister to urgent care." Lily stood by the front door in her sequined costume, her makeup pristine, her eyes welling with furious tears. "Today is the finals! I've practiced all year!" Dad frowned at her, annoyed. "Your sister is throwing up blood, Lily! Do you really only care about a trophy?!" In the end, Lily went alone with a teammate's mother. And I lay propped up on a clean white hospital bed, my left hand held tight in Dad’s, my right hand cradled in Mom’s. Lily won first place that night. She set her glittering trophy right on the center of the mantle when she got home. Neither Mom nor Dad ever looked at it. They were too busy reading the lab results from my abdominal ultrasound. I was the fragile, precious centerpiece of our family. So naturally, I loved them more than life itself. The therapist looked at me, her expression unreadable. "Hannah... if they truly loved you the most, why did you have to almost die just to get their attention?" The smile froze on my face. "What are you talking about?" She reached across the low table, her fingers gently touching mine. "When you were healthy, Hannah... what did they ever sacrifice for you?" I opened my mouth to answer, but my mind went entirely blank. A vast, echoing white noise rushed through my ears. Mom burst into frantic tears. "Stop it! Stop asking her that! She's too fragile for this!" I quickly nodded, exhaling a breath I hadn't realized I was holding. "See? Look at how much my mom cares about me. She won't even let you speak harshly to me." The therapist studied me for a long, quiet moment before picking up her clipboard. "The patient insists that anything exceeding two hundred grams triggers nausea and vomiting," she read aloud. "However, the human stomach does not possess an internal scale capable of measuring two hundred grams with mechanical precision." She looked up, fixing her gaze squarely on Mom. "She didn't invent that number, did she?" Mom flinched, pulling back into her chair as if she’d been slapped. I let out a light laugh. "No. Mom came up with it. The little silver digital kitchen scale on the counter? She bought that for me." Mom’s hands flew up in defense. "I bought that to track your nutrition! Your stomach was so weak, I just needed to know how many grams of solid food you were actually managing to keep down!" I shook my head, amused by her revisionist history. "No, Mom. You bought it to punish me." All the blood drained from Mom’s face. The day after Lily was found at the mall, we had a family dinner. In front of all my aunts and uncles, Lily sobbed into her cloth napkin, telling everyone how awful I was. "Hannah kept complaining she was hungry," Lily had cried. "While I was all alone in the dark, she was stuffing her face with pastries." Every relative at that table looked at me like I was a monster. Mom had felt so humiliated, so thoroughly ashamed of having raised such an uncaring eldest daughter. That very afternoon, she came home with a digital food scale from Target. She took every box of cookies, every loaf of sourdough, every granola bar and bag of chips, and locked them in the basement pantry. Then she dished mashed potatoes onto a small plate and set it on the scale. '201.0 g'. Right in front of my face, Mom scraped the entire plate into the trash. "Not a single gram over two hundred," she said, her voice icy. "If it’s over, you get nothing." I had burst into tears, clutching my stomach. "Mom, please. I’m so hungry." She pointed an accusing finger at Lily, who was sitting on the living room sofa eating a warm cinnamon roll. "When your baby sister was missing, weren't you only thinking about your stomach?!" Mom shouted. "Then I’m going to make damn sure you remember what real hunger feels like!" Dad stood nearby in the hallway, looking uncomfortable, clearing his throat to intervene. But the moment Lily sniffled, he swallowed his words and looked away. Mom taped an index card to the refrigerator door. "Max 200g per meal." "One gram over: meal thrown out." "Sneak a bite: forfeit dinner tomorrow." "Complain of hunger: stand by the counter and watch Lily finish her plate." The first evening, as I set my plate on the scale, Lily casually dropped a greasy barbecue rib into my mashed potatoes. The digital display jumped: '234.0 g'. Before I could pluck the rib out, Lily screamed toward the kitchen: "Mom! Hannah's taking extra again!" Mom stormed in, seized the plate, and dumped the meat and potatoes into the garbage with a sickening wet thud. "You just can’t help yourself, can you?!" she snapped. "Fine. You go to bed with nothing." I stood by the edge of the dining room table, my stomach cramping so violently I had to press my forearm against it to stay upright. Lily sat in my usual chair, chewing the tender meat off the bone, her eyes shining with triumph. "Hannah," she whispered sweetly, "are you still hungry?" I didn't dare answer. If I said yes, tomorrow's breakfast would be gone too. By the second day, I had mastered the scale. If a single macaroni noodle tipped the sensor, I picked it off with tweezers. If a roasted baby carrot pushed it over, I trimmed it in half. Then, while my back was turned to fetch a glass of ice water, Lily poured a heavy tablespoon of brown gravy over my plate. The numbers climbed past two hundred. Mom dumped it without hesitation. By the third night, I was dry-heaving bile into the toilet. Sometime around 2:00 a.m., my legs gave out as I tried to walk to the bathroom, and my forehead struck the radiator, splitting open. When Mom found me lying in a pool of my own sweat and blood, she finally broke. She held me against her chest, wailing that the punishment was over, that I could eat whatever I wanted—pancakes, burgers, pasta, anything. The card was ripped from the fridge. The padlock on the basement pantry was removed. Everyone in the house thought that nightmare was over. Except me. I never stopped. Because on that third night, the truth had finally clicked into place: "If I starve myself close enough to death, Mommy will hold me. If I am light enough to blow away, Daddy will forget Lily even exists." The scale wasn't a punishment anymore. It was my golden ticket. It was the only doorway back into my parents' hearts. The therapist’s eyes were glistening with unshed tears. "So... two hundred grams was never your biological limit. It was the boundary of your mother’s punishment." Mom sank against the wall, shaking her head frantically. "It was three days! It was only three days! I was just trying to scare her... I just wanted her to realize her sister mattered more than food!" I lifted my chin, looking at Mom with wide, affectionate eyes. There was no hatred in my gaze—only a pure, sickening gratitude. "It’s okay, Mom. Honestly, I love that scale. It gave me back your love. How could that be a punishment? It was the best gift you ever gave me." The room fell into an eerie, suffocating quiet. Until a phone shattered it. It was Dad's phone. Lily was calling. The moment Dad hit speaker, Lily’s hysterical wails filled the small office. "Dad! Mom! I fell down the stairs! My ankle is broken... it hurts so bad! Please come home!" Mom sprang to her feet like an uncoiled spring. I lunged forward, grabbing Mom’s cardigan with both hands. "She’s faking it! She knows you’re here with me! She always does this!" Dad looked torn, his eyes darting toward the door. Mom was already reaching for her purse. "Hannah, let go. Mommy just needs to go see. Just to make sure she’s okay, and then I’ll come straight back. I promise." "Just to make sure." That was what she had said twelve years ago at the mall. And now, her fingers were peeling mine off her sleeve, one by one. I watched her turn toward the door, her steps hurried, desperate. And in that quiet fraction of a second, an icy clarity settled into my chest. I still wasn't thin enough. I wasn't pathetic enough. I hadn't suffered enough to make them stay forever. I turned and walked toward the tall window on the far side of the room. The therapist was the first to react, her chair scraping loudly against the floor. "Hannah! What are you doing?!" Mom finally turned around. I climbed up onto the wide sill, looking down at the concrete alley four stories below, and then I looked back at her. I gave her the sweetest, most innocent smile I had left. "Mom..." I whispered softly. "This time... who are you going to save first?" Every drop of color vanished from her face. "Hannah, no!" she screamed, lunging across the room like a madwoman. She was too late. I stepped backward into the empty air.