THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2019 89about the possibility of a life where I did
nothing but eat. I didn’t want to eat nor-
mally; I wanted to eat constantly. There
was something terrifying about finishing,
as if I had to confront that I hadn’t actu-
ally been satisfied.
In those days, I filled my mouth with
heat and smoke and empty sweetness:
black coffee, cigarettes, mint gum. I was
ashamed of how desperately I wanted to
consume. Desire was a way of taking up
space, but it was embarrassing to have too
much desire—in the same way it had been
embarrassing for there to be too much of
me, or to want a man who didn’t want
me. Yearning for things was slightly less
embarrassing if I denied myself access
to them, so I grew comfortable in states
of longing without satisfaction. I came to
prefer hunger to eating, epic yearning to
daily loving.
But during pregnancy, years later, the
ghost of that old skeletal girl sloughed
off like a snakeskin. I moved toward
chocolate- chip muffins of unprecedented
size. At the coffee shop near my apart-
ment, I licked the grease from an almond
croissant off my fingers and listened to
one barista ask another, “You know that
girl Bruno was dating?” She squinted at
her cellphone. “I know she’s pregnant,
but ... what the fuck is she eating? Horses?”
It took me five or six months to show.
Before that, people would say: “You don’t
look pregnant at all!” They meant it as a
compliment. The female body is always
praised for staying within its boundaries,
for making even its sanctioned expan sion
impossible to detect.WHEN YOU WERE the size of a blue-
berry, I ate my way through Zagreb, palm-
ing handfuls of tiny strawberries at the
outdoor market, then ordering a massive
slice of chocolate cake from room service
back at my hotel, then inhaling a Snickers
bar because I was too hungry to wait for
the cake to arrive. My hands were always
sticky. I felt feral. My hunger was a differ-
ent land from where I’d lived before.
As you grew from lime to avocado, I
ate endless pickles, loving their salty snap
between my teeth. I drank melted ice
cream straight from the bowl. It was a
kind of longing that did not imply absence.
It was a longing that belonged. The word
longing itself traces its origins back to preg-
nancy. An 1899 dictionary defines it as
“one of the peculiar and often whimsical
desires experienced by pregnant women.”
When you were the size of a mango, I
flew to Louisville to give a talk and got so
hungry after my daily vat of morning oat-
meal that I decided to walk to brunch, and
got so hungry on the walk to brunch that
I stopped on the way for a snack: a flaky
slice of spanakopita that stained its paper
bag with islands of oil. By the time I got
to brunch, I was so hungry that I couldn’t
decide between scrambled eggs with
biscuits, or sausage links blistered with
grease, or a sugar-dusted stack of lemon
pancakes, so I got them all.
This endless permission felt like the
fulfillment of a prophecy: all those imagi-
nary menus I had obsessively transcribed
at 17. Eating was fully permitted now that
I was doing it for someone else. I had
never eaten like this, like I ate for you.WHEN I WAS living on crackers and
apple slices, I didn’t get my period for
years. It made me proud not to bleed. The
absence lived inside me like a secret tro-
phy. Blood leaking out of me seemed like
another kind of excess. Not bleeding was
an appealing form of containment. It was
also, quite literally, the opposite of fertil-
ity. By thinning my body, it was as if I’d
vanquished my physical self. Starving my-
self testified to the intensity of my loneli-
ness, my self-loathing, my simultaneous
distance from the world and my hopeless
proximity, a sense of being—at once—too
much and not enough.
When I got pregnant at the age of 24, a
few years after I started getting my period
again, I saw the telltale cross on the stick
and felt flooded not by fear or wariness—
as I’d imagined—but by wonder. I was
carrying this tiny potential life. Even as
I knew intellectually that I would get an
abortion, I still felt a sharp rising lift of
awe in my gut. That awe planted some-
thing deep inside me, a tether. It said:
Someday you’ll be back.
It was only after I’d gotten the abortion
that I started to notice babies on the street.
Their little faces watched me from their
strollers. They had my number. It wasn’t
regret. It was anticipation. I’d been magne-
tized. I didn’t want to hold other people’s
babies; I just knew that I wanted eventu-
ally to hold my own—wanted to watch her
bloom into consciousness right in front of
me, apart from me, beyond me; wanted to
be surprised and mystified by a creature
who had come from me but was not me.
During the year I spent trying to get
pregnant, a decade after my abortion,my friend Rachel told me about watch-
ing her infant son have a febrile seizure.
Her descrip tion of her own terror was
humbling. It wasn’t something I could
fully understand. I’d always resisted the
idea that parenting involves a love deeper
than any love you’ve ever felt before, and
some part of me wanted to give birth just
so I could argue against that belief, just so
I could say: This love isn’t deeper, just dif-
ferent. But another part of me knew it was
possible I’d simply become another voice
saying: There is no love as deep as this.
Once I finally got pregnant, my grati-
tude was sharpened by the wait. My body
had decided to bestow this little purse of
organs when it could have just as easily
withheld it. This second heartbeat was
nothing I could take for granted. After my
first ultrasound, I got on the subway and
looked at every single passenger, thinking,
You were once curled up inside another person.AS YOU GREW to the size of a turnip,
then a grapefruit, then a cauliflower, I
wanted to build you from joy: summer
rainstorms and fits of laughter; the voices
of women in endless conversation. With
my friend Kyle, I swam naked in a pool at
night, under eucalyptus trees shushing in
the hot breeze, while your kicks swelled
under my skin like waves. With Colleen,
I drove to a rickety old house perched on
a hill above a post office, where rattling
trees tapped our windows. By lamplight,
we ate eggs with bright-yellow yolks. She
left the sink full of their broken shells, just
as she had when we lived together, after
both our hearts had been broken.
In Los Angeles, your grandmother had
a Cameroonian refugee staying with her.
What can I say? This was hardly surpris-
ing. It made me clench my fists with long-
ing, how much I wanted you and your
grandmother to have a thousand years
together in this world, nothing less. My
hunger for my mother during pregnancy
was like my hunger for fruit, for a second
Snickers bar, for the scrambled eggs and
the sausage links and the lemon pancakes.
There was no bottom to it. She told me she
could still remember looking at the snow
piled on the branches outside the window
of her doctor’s office when he told her I
would be a girl, as if all her longing had
gathered on those branches— impossibly
beautiful, utterly ordinary.
I wanted to give you the best parts
of my love for your father—how we
rented a house in a tiny town in northern