The Atlantic – September 2019

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92 SEPTEMBER 2019 THE ATLANTIC

the scale grow bigger, who treated her-

self well, and focused on her baby, and

devoted herself wholly to unconflicted

calories and virtuous gratitude.

But as it turned out, pregnancy wasn’t

a liberation from prior selves so much as

a container holding every prior version

of myself at once. I didn’t get to shed

my ghosts so fully. It was easy to roll my

eyes at people saying, “You don’t look

pregnant at all,” and harder to admit the

pride I felt when I heard it. It was easy to

call my doctor absurd when she chided

me for gaining five pounds in a month

(rather than four!), and harder to admit

that I’d honestly felt shamed by her in

that moment. It was harder to admit the

part of me that felt a secret thrill every

time a doctor registered concern that I

was “measuring small.” This pride was

something I’d wanted desperately to

leave behind. I worried that it was imped-

ing your growth, which was really just the

distillation of a deeper fear—that I would

infect you with my own broken relation-

ship to my body, that you would catch it

like a dark inheritance.

WHEN YOU WERE the size of a pine-

apple, I wrote a birth plan. This was part

of my birth class, but it was also a species

of prophecy: telling the story of a birth

before it happened.

The birth-class teacher pointed tri-

umphantly at a model pelvis made of

plastic. She said, “People think there’s

not that much room for the baby’s head

to pass through. But there’s actually a lot

of room.” I squinted at the pelvis. Not that

much room.

When I finally got treatment,

it gave me a sudden,

liquid thrill to glimpse the

diagnosis written on

one of my medical forms:

eating disorder.