Pregnancy after an eating disorder: A story of two births
August 23, 2019 1:46 PM   Subscribe

Some part of me craved pain as proof that I was already a good mother, long-suffering, while another part of me wanted to reject hardship as the only possible proof of devotion. (CW: disordered eating, pregnancy) 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.
posted by stillmoving (8 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
i will hopefully never be pregnant but the ED descriptions rang very very true to me. uncomfortably so. great piece.
posted by capnsue at 2:00 PM on August 23, 2019


In the years since those days of restriction, 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.

The female body is always praised for staying within its boundaries, for making even its sanctioned expansion impossible to detect.

It was what I was most afraid of—being disrupted. It was also what I craved more than anything.

y'all mind if I weep
posted by FirstMateKate at 3:06 PM on August 23, 2019 [6 favorites]


This is such good writing
posted by Aubergine at 4:22 PM on August 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


Such an incredible article
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 5:42 PM on August 23, 2019


This is, strangely, the second time Leslie Jamison’s work has shown up in my life, unexpected and unsought, at a moment when it was so unbelievably needed and so serendipitously perfect that it’s literally given me chills.

This piece is too close to home and almost too raw for me to fully process right now, but I’m sure I will revisit it again, and again, in those moments when when I forget that I am not the first, or the last, or the only one to attempt to navigate these waters.

Thanks for posting.
posted by Dorinda at 6:03 PM on August 23, 2019


The female body is always praised for staying within its boundaries, for making even its sanctioned expansion impossible to detect.

And the same for the female mind.
posted by The Toad at 8:32 PM on August 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


I cried and I am childfree by choice.
posted by floweredfish at 4:43 AM on August 24, 2019


I cried and I am childfree by choice.
posted by floweredfish at 7:43 AM on August 24 [+] [!]


Same. It's funny, I am very set in the fact that I never want to be pregnant. I was pregnant once before, at 25 I was raped and went through a pretty traumatic abortion. Reading this article is the first time I felt connected to the idea of pregnancy.
posted by FirstMateKate at 8:04 AM on August 24, 2019


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