Body Horror/Body Healing

I’m writing this on my phone because I lent my laptop to my mother, who needed it more than I do. I got home from work a bit ago and immediately scrounged up something to eat. I woke up this morning feeling so hungry I thought I might vomit. No vomit though, thankfully. I’m beyond hungry all the time and sort of scared that I’m going to gain 500 pounds over the next eight months.

I (like far too many women) have struggled with body dysmorphia since I was a girl. My body has never quite felt like mine, more like a thing that I was inhabiting that insisted on weighing me down. I even went so far as to become completely vegan in sixth grade (might write more on that later, fun times) in the hope that it would help me lose weight. It did.

I’ve always wanted children, ever since I was a toddler playing with dolls, I knew that one day I would be a mommy. My mother had her first child at twenty-two. My grandmother was in her early twenties when she had my mom. There seems to be something very fitting that I should have my first child at twenty-two, too.

And yet I’m scared. Not scared of the baby, or childbirth, or of becoming a mother. I think all that will come naturally, with challenges though of course. I’m scared of what my body will become, how that becoming will affect me. Many women see pregnancy and childbirth as pure body horror, something so violent and terrifying that it should not be permitted in civilized society. The thought of gaining twenty pounds or more is body horror for me. It terrifies me and that little girl who stopped eating meat so she could be thinner.

But, what I pray, is that this source of horror will be transformed into a font of healing. I am excited to be pregnant, beyond grateful to become a mother. But it will be scary and hard and sad at times. I might have to face myself in the mirror and realize that the body I had relied on to appeal to men, is not the body I have or need now. My body is doing the most important work it will ever do. I’m doing the most important work I’ll ever do.

Pregnancy offers the chance to finally come to grips with the fact that I am my body. And my worth is not tied to how I look. My baby surely won’t care what I look like. Only that I’m his mother.

My husband just got back from the store. Someone was eating fig newtons in the show we’re watching and suddenly I wanted nothing more than fig newtons. He left to get them for me. We will drink some tea, eat fig newtons, and keep watching Call The Midwife. The pain of watching my body change in simultaneously wanted and unwanted ways will continue to weigh on me. I’m still working on learning to love the unwanted changes. I probably will be for the rest of my life.