88 SEPTEMBER 2019 THE ATLANTIC
W
HEN YOU
were the size of a
poppy seed, I sat
in the bathroom
of a Boston hotel
room and peed
on a stick I’d bought from an elderly man
at a drugstore near Fenway Park. I laid the
plastic on the cold tiles and waited for it
to tell me if you existed. I wanted you to
exist so badly. It had been a year of chip-
per emails from my fertility app, asking
if I’d had sex on the right nights, and a
year of sunken hearts whenever I spot-
ted blood: at work, at home, in a sandy
bathroom on a chilly beach just north of
Morro Bay. Each rusty stain took away
the narrative I’d spent the past few weeks
imagining—that this would be the month
I found out I was having a baby. My body
kept reminding me that it controlled the
story. But then, there you were.
A week later, I sat in a movie theater
and watched aliens hatch from their
human hosts in a spaceship mess hall.
Their dark, glistening bodies broke open
rib cages and burst through the torn skin.
An evil robot was obsessed with helping
them survive. When the captain asked
him, “What do you believe in?” the robot
said: “Creation.” This was just before the
captain’s chest ripped apart to show its
own parasite baby: horrific, beetle-black,
newly born.
When a nurse asked me to step on a
scale at my first prenatal appointment, it
was the first time I had weighed myself in
years. Refusing to weigh myself had been
one way to leave behind the days I’d spent
weighing myself compulsively. Standing
on a scale and actually wanting to see that
I’d gained weight—this was a new version
of me. One of the oldest scripts I’d ever
heard about motherhood was that it could
turn you into a new version of yourself,
but that promise had always seemed too
easy to be believed. I’d always believed
more fully in another guarantee—that
wherever you go, there you are.
WHEN I WAS a freshman in college, I
walked into my dorm-room closet every
morning to step on the scale I kept hidden
there. It was embarrassing to starve myself,
and so for the ritual of weighing I retracted
into the dark, out of sight, tucked into the
folds of my musty winter coats. Since my
growth spurt at 13, it seemed like I’d been
looming over everyone. Being tall was sup-
posed to make you confident, but it just
made me feel excessive. There was too
much of me, always, and I was always so
awkward and quiet, failing to earn all the
space I took up.
In the years since those days of restric-
tion, I have found that usually when I try
to articulate this to people—I felt like I
wasn’t supposed to take up so much space—
they understand it absolutely or not at all.
And if a person understands it absolutely,
she is probably a woman.
Those hungry days were full of Diet
Cokes and cigarettes and torch songs on
Napster; a single apple and a small allot-
ment of crackers each day; long walks
through frigid winter nights to the gym
and back again; trouble seeing straightas dark flecks crowded the edges of my
vision. My hands and feet were always
cold. My skin was always pale. It was as if
I didn’t have enough blood to go around.
During my pregnancy, 15 years later,
my gums bled constantly. I thought I’d
heard a doctor say it was because my
body was circulating more blood—four
pounds more of it—to satisfy the tiny
second set of organs. This extra blood
swelled me. It heated me. My veins were
feverish highways, thick with that hot red
syrup, flooded with necessary volume.WHEN YOU WERE about the size of
a lentil, I flew to Zagreb for a magazine
assignment. As our plane banked over
Greenland, I ate a huge bag of Cheez-Its
and wondered if this was the week your
brain was being forged, or your heart. I
pictured a heart made of Cheez-Its beat-
ing inside me, inside you. Much of thatfirst trimester was spent in awe and ter-
ror: astonished that a tiny creature was
being gathered in my inner reaches, pet-
rified that I would somehow knock you
loose. What if you died and I didn’t know
it? I obsessively Googled miscarriage
without bleeding. I kept my hand over my
abdomen to make sure you stayed. You
were my bouquet of cells, my soft pit of
becoming. I cried when I found out you
would be a girl. It was as if you had sud-
denly sharpened into focus. The pronoun
was a body forming around you. I was a
body forming around you.
When I told my mom I was flying to
Croatia, she asked me to consider stay-
ing home. “Take it easy,” she said. But
she also told me that when she was five
months pregnant with my oldest brother,
she’d swum the length of a bay in Bari
while an elderly Italian man, worried, fol-
lowed her the whole way in his rowboat.
On our plane to Zagreb, a toddler cried
ahead of us, and then another toddler
cried behind. I wanted to tell you, I know
these wailers are your people. I wanted to tell
you, The world is full of stories: the men in
hand-knit yarmulkes who had delayed our
takeoff for an hour because they wouldn’t
sit next to any women; the man across the
aisle who’d stabbed himself with a blood-
sugar needle right after eating his foil-
wrapped square of goulash, who watched
the little icon of our plane creep over the
dull blue screen of the North Atlantic.
Who could know what he was dream-
ing? What beloved he was flying toward?
I wanted to tell you, Baby, I’ve seen such
incred ible things in this life. You weren’t
a baby yet. You were a possibility. But I
wanted to tell you that every person you’d
ever meet would hold an infinite world
inside. It was one of the only promises I
could make to you in good conscience.WHEN I WAS starving myself, I kept
two journals. One tallied the number of
calories I consumed each day. The other
described all the food I imagined eat-
ing. One notebook was full of what I did;
the other was full of what I dreamed of
doing. My hypothetical feasts were col-
lages made from restaurant menus and
saturated with the minute attention of
desperation: not just mac and cheese but
four-cheese mac and cheese; not just bur-
gers but burgers with melted cheddar and
fried eggs; molten chocolate lava cake
with ice cream pooling around its gooey
heart. Restricting made me fantasizePeople 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.