The error of our weights
On the glory of unruly bodies and the surprising truth about weight surveillance in pregnancy
Many thanks to reader Marybeth Seitz-Brown for inspiring this post with the question, “How has pregnancy affected your relationship to your body when you’re not pregnant?” Please also note this post contains references to disordered eating and sexual violence.
I’ll never be quite sure what made me became singularly focused on the idea of having children at the tender age of 24, spending the next three years researching everything I could about pregnancy, birth, and attachment parenting while I bided my time until Andy was convinced . It was, by all accounts, an illogical and ill advised fixation. I was in a PhD program and most of my friends were fellow academics or artists and musicians who weren’t partnered, let alone contemplating children. My annual income, as student and adjunct partnered with another student and adjunct, was laughable; I had no health insurance; there would no “maternity leave.” It was not a desire that made sense.
It was furthermore, a fixation came out of seemingly nowhere, a complete 180 from the self who had spent the entirety of her adolescence and young adulthood sure she would never have children: I was, I believed, too sick, too broken, too alien to nurture a small child. As someone who had experienced sexual abuse, I controlled everything I could control — my grades, my body, how likable and acceptable I was — to hide what I believed was the incontrovertible truth of my essential wrongness. I was, I believed, a ruined person, and ruined people were not equipped to handle children; it was too unpredictable and too high stakes a choice for someone as imperfect as me. And, besides, I had spent the last over a decade anorexic, starving myself to a lightness that allowed me to forget I had a body at all, which was a fine way to bury the trauma inherent in that body but not the best path to a body that could nurture a pregnancy. Though I had learned to manage my disordered eating enough to bring back my menstrual cycle usually (with the help of the gynecologist at my college’s health office, who put me on birth control pills at age 18 to “help me regulate things” without screening me for an eating disorder at all), I had spent the entirety of my teenage years skipping periods for months at a time, and still routinely escalated my efforts in ways that disrupted it.
There was nothing rational about my fixation on having a baby. But I was fixated. Something in my body was insistent.
I do believe it was the part of my body that became my children, calling to me. It was the part of my body that was their’s.
And it was the part of my body that knew what it needed to heal.
My last severe anorexia relapse was in 2006, and it became severe enough to disrupt my period once more well into that fall. But somehow, miraculously, against all odds, I became pregnant, on our first try, in February 2007.
It sounds banal and hackneyed to say and I never starved myself again.
And yet: I never starved myself again.
This is not the script our culture wants me to follow. Everyone and everything in our culture colludes to try to make you feel the absolute worst you possibly can about your body in pregnancy: somehow, people who would never comment on you gaining or losing weight when you’re not pregnant will suddenly feel free to scrutinize every inch and pound you do or don’t gain; random strangers will skeptically assess your belly as too small for how many months you are or jocularly ask if you’re carrying twins; waiters may judge your choice of meal or refuse to serve you a glass of wine as if you are no longer an autonomous adult who can make choices for their own body; a friend or relative will predict you are carrying a girl because “they steal your looks,” as if doesn’t completely deviate from the accepted social conventions of not calling people ugly. Then there’s the aftermath: “the bounce-back culture” and the corresponding pushback, the TikTok and Instagram videos of people’s deflated postpartum bellies encouraging you to feel better about the magic of yours, which is all well and good and well intentioned but yet also feels a bit like the lady doth protest too much and also, at the end of the day, contributes to the narrative that we absolutely may not just be a body without judgement. We are not allowed to just not pay attention. We cannot be ambivalent. There can be no body neutrality. The fact of our pregnant and postpartum bodies is endlessly remarkable in the true meaning of the word.
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