> [!cite] > Jamison, Leslie. ‘The Quickening: A story of two births’. *The Atlantic* (online). September 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/leslie-jamison-pregnancy/594784/. --- ‘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. It was as if there was finally an official name for how I felt—the sense of inadequacy and dislocation—as if the words had constructed a tangible container around those intangible smoke signals of hurt. It made me feel consolidated.’ [[Jamison, ‘The Quickening’, 2019|(Jamison 2019, n.p.)]] ^d1176a ‘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. And if a person understands it absolutely, she is probably a woman.’ [[Jamison, ‘The Quickening’, 2019|(Jamison 2019, n.p.)]] ‘I wanted to tell you, Baby, I’ve seen such incredible things in this life. You weren’t a baby yet. You were a possibility. But I wanted to tell you that every person you’d ever meet would hold an infinite world inside. It was one of the only promises I could make to you in good conscience.’ [[Jamison, ‘The Quickening’, 2019|(Jamison 2019, n.p.)]] ‘It took me five or six months to show. Before that, people would say: “You don’t look pregnant at all!” They meant it as a compliment. The female body is always praised for staying within its boundaries, for making even its sanctioned expansion impossible to detect.’ [[Jamison, ‘The Quickening’, 2019|(Jamison 2019, n.p.)]] ‘Eating was fully permitted now that I was doing it for someone else. I had never eaten like this, like I ate for you.’ [[Jamison, ‘The Quickening’, 2019|(Jamison 2019, n.p.)]] ‘Starving myself testified to the intensity of my loneliness, my self-loathing, my simultaneous distance from the world and my hopeless proximity, a sense of being—at once—too much and not enough.’ [[Jamison, ‘The Quickening’, 2019|(Jamison 2019, n.p.)]] ‘I’d always resisted the idea that parenting involves a love deeper than any love you’ve ever felt before, and some part of me wanted to give birth just so I could argue against that belief, just so I could say: This love isn’t deeper, just different. But another part of me knew it was possible I’d simply become another voice saying: There is no love as deep as this.’ [[Jamison, ‘The Quickening’, 2019|(Jamison 2019, n.p.)]] ‘After my first ultrasound, I got on the subway and looked at every single passenger, thinking, *You were once curled up inside another person*.’ [[Jamison, ‘The Quickening’, 2019|(Jamison 2019, n.p.)]] ‘I kept trying to explain myself to that doctor, kept trying to purge my shame about the disorder by listing its causes: my loneliness, my depression, my desire for control. All of these reasons were true. None of them was sufficient. This was what I’d say about my drinking years later, and what I came to believe about human motivations more broadly: We never do anything for just one reason.’ [[Jamison, ‘The Quickening’, 2019|(Jamison 2019, n.p.)]] ‘By getting pregnant, it seemed as if I had finally managed to replace “the narrator of this essay”—a sick girl obsessed with her own pain, difficult to like—with a nobler version of myself: a woman who wasn’t destroying her own body, but using her body to make another body she would care for. A stubborn internal voice was still convinced that the eating disorder had been all about the “I,” all about whittling myself to the shape of that tall rail. Now pregnancy promised a new source of gravity: the “you.” Strangers smiled at me constantly on the street.’ [[Jamison, ‘The Quickening’, 2019|(Jamison 2019, n.p.)]] ‘It was what I was most afraid of—being disrupted. It was also what I craved more than anything.’ [[Jamison, ‘The Quickening’, 2019|(Jamison 2019, n.p.)]] ‘In a way, I was grateful for the physical difficulty of my third trimester. It made me feel like I was doing my job. During the first few months, when morning sickness hadn’t shown up, it had been like failing to cry at a funeral. Wasn’t I supposed to feel my boundaries flooded by pregnancy? Wasn’t I supposed to hurt? Wasn’t that Eve’s original punishment? *I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children*.’ [[Jamison, ‘The Quickening’, 2019|(Jamison 2019, n.p.)]] ‘At her office, my doctor said it was a funny thing about storms—some people believed they made a woman’s water more likely to break. It had to do with the drop in barometric pressure. This seemed like something one midwife might whisper to another in the barn, while the sky filled with clouds, and like a fairy tale it came true that night. I woke at three in the morning, stepped out of bed, and the hot warmth gushed out.’ [[Jamison, ‘The Quickening’, 2019|(Jamison 2019, n.p.)]] ‘The pain meant my body knew what it needed to do to bring you here. And I was grateful that my body knew, because my mind did not. It was now the body’s humble servant, begging with its crudest, truest words: *Please do this. I want this more than I’ve ever wanted anything*.’ [[Jamison, ‘The Quickening’, 2019|(Jamison 2019, n.p.)]] ‘Your heartbeat always came back up, my doctor said. But we needed to stop it from dropping. It was supposed to stay between 160 and 110. *Don’t drop*, I willed the graph. *Don’t drop.* I watched the monitor vigilantly. It was as if I believed I could keep your heart rate above the danger line through sheer force of will. Belief in willpower was another familiar ghost, one of the gospels of my hungry days.’[[Jamison, ‘The Quickening’, 2019|(Jamison 2019, n.p.)]] ‘Every birth story is the story of two births: The child is born, and the mother is born, too—constructed by the story of how she brought her child into the world, shaped by the birthing and then again by the telling. My birth plan stayed folded in my hospital duffel bag. It was the story of a thing that never happened.’ [[Jamison, ‘The Quickening’, 2019|(Jamison 2019, n.p.)]] ‘I’d always heard labour described in terms of triumphant capacity, but giving birth to you was a lesson in radical humility. My story was disrupted. My body was disrupted. You arrived and showed me that pain had never been my greatest teacher. You arrived and showed me I’d never been in control. Giving birth to you didn’t matter because my body had been in pain, or because it hadn’t been in enough pain. It mattered because you showed up glistening and bewildered and perfect. You were still part of me. You were beyond me.’ [[Jamison, ‘The Quickening’, 2019|(Jamison 2019, n.p.)]] ‘There you were: an arrival, a cry, the beginning of another world.’ [[Jamison, ‘The Quickening’, 2019|(Jamison 2019, n.p.)]]