Thoughts on Recovery from a Recovering Mother

I recently gave birth to my second child, Gabrielle Eve. After two difficult pregnancies and two glorious births, I have learned a lot about how the process of recovering from an eating disorder changes and evolves. I do not consider myself fully recovered, but I have been essentially eating disorder behavior-free since 2004. But what remains is shaky territory. The way I feel about my body and mind now is a new beast. The days of starving and exercising to exhaustion and injury are happily far behind me. But today I struggle with living in a body that has been artificially shrunk to deadly proportions and subsequently stretched to fully pregnant proportions.

I have gathered so much insight into my eating disorder from being pregnant and, perhaps even more, from dealing with my postpartum body. It is a sobering thing to reflect upon what once was and what sustains me now. I offer the following thoughts with these unique experiences in mind.

1. Gaining weight does not equal recovery. When I was pregnant, obviously I gained a lot of pounds. Even people on my treatment team who are "in the know" were almost tricked into thinking that since I looked better, even "glowing," that I was out of the woods—but this was not true. Though I actually found pregnancy to be a wonderful period in my life in terms of body image, I very much struggled with the conflicts that arose from being in a body that, day by day, only grew.

2. Becoming a parent has altered the way I see everything. To say that I, now the mother of two precious daughters, abhor anything that even remotely threatens the well-being of my children is the understatement of the century. When I see the same old, ridiculous diet ads, I feel physically ill and enraged that "they" could threaten my daughters with their messages. My history of severe anorexia has made me a person who viscerally fears the dangers of eating disorders. When I imagine either of my children hurting emotionally as I have for years, it kills me. When my two year old asks for ice cream for breakfast, I'm quietly torn between letting her know that ice cream does not a breakfast make (!) and allowing her to have it since I can't bear for her to risk sensing the lie that ice cream is bad. When I nurse my four-month-old daughter, I secretly want her to know it is her human right to be fed on demand and yet to understand on a gut level that to be fed properly has to do with a million more things than just food. It seems the moment I gave birth I became an activist and a perhaps slightly intense woman who can and will not tolerate any harm to her daughters, or anyone's daughters.

3. Some days I hardly recognize myself. The decision to have a second child was, I believe, even more momentous than deciding to have my first. When my husband and I were trying to conceive our first, I had visions of rocking my precious newborn in a chic, modern nursery, wearing my pre-pregnancy designer jeans and feeling on top of the world (and not exhausted!). I reveled in the challenges I would face in helping my daughter become a good person with a solid sense of social justice. I yearned to be someone's mother, to be needed in the most primal way, to be loved back just because I inhabited that role. Not entirely naïve, many of these things have come to pass. But what I could not have been prepared for is the unbelievable shape my body and mind have been left in after two decades of restricting and two difficult pregnancies.

Head to toe, it goes something like this: I am exhausted and my hair is falling out. My eyes are always dry. I can't hear very well. My breasts are saggy and they leak strange fluids at the most inopportune times. My abdominal muscles are buried in a billowy sea of skin. My hips tell the story of a woman who has given birth vaginally, and I bear the telltale scar of a cesarean birth the second time around. My legs are long and strong and covered in tiny, roadmap-style veins, thanks to the pressure of bearing a basketball belly on limbs that were not quite ready. My feet need shoes that are a size bigger than before I got pregnant, and all of this—ALL OF THIS—is quite wonderful to report. I want my readers to know that though I have no illusions that this body is something I am comfortable with or even recognize some days, I am incredibly grateful to it for bringing me through my own personal wars. The peace that has come with, at last, arriving home as a mother is the greatest reward imaginable. I am in awe of this journey and so incredibly grateful to all the people who have listened to me, talked to me, fed me and held me so that now, I, joyfully, may do the same.