My mother has no pictures from when she was pregnant with me.

*               *               *               *

My friend recently moved into a luridly purple room, and she asked for my help attaching photos to her walls. The sweat on my fingers made delicate prints on the edges of the photos, which I carefully adhered with blue masking tape. One photo, caked in shadow, featured the dark interior of somebody’s house, the torso of a pregnant woman slightly off center. She has one hand placed casually on her belly. She’s wearing overalls.

“That’s my mom,” my friend said, and smiled softly, “I love that photo.”

My friend is not close with her mother. Her mother is an unraveling, manipulative drunk who loves to tell her daughter that pregnancy ruined her body. But this photo was taped, on my friend’s request, in a prominent spot, where she’ll see it every day. My friend floats, contentedly, in her mother’s overall-clad womb, forever on the wall.

I have two hefty photo albums. I made them the first time I developed the COVID-19 virus, isolated in my aunt and uncle’s house in a purple room not dissimilar from my friend’s. I lovingly positioned each photo onto the white backing, admiring the handsome face of my father, the beautiful lines of my mother’s nose, the languid embrace of my friends, my boyfriend’s perfect eyes. I smiled at a photo of my baby sister holding a chicken, the crumbling wall of my mother’s barn in the background. Myself in the orchard, holding my hand out to a turkey. I traced the achingly sweet curves of my sisters’ infant faces, the huge brown eyes that the three of us share with my father.

My mother gave me an album recently, old, the binding sloughing off like powdered sugar. It was full of photos of myself as a baby. I moved every photo inside this album to one of my sturdier albums. Rare photos of my parents when they were still a couple, florid princess dresses from my aunts, myself with enormous cheeks, perpetually clad in a velvet leotard and a jester hat. My round toddler belly.

*               *               *               *

When my mother was pregnant with my youngest sister, we bought a new digital camera.

I was thrilled, because I was going to get to learn how to use it; I was six, old enough. My father taught me how to drape the wrist strap around my arm, to press down on the button slightly to focus before taking the photo. The next morning, I entered the kitchen to find my mother preparing to make waffles. She was sweaty, swollen, my future sister pressing against her narrow pelvis. Her hair was short, curling against the planes of her face. Her green eyes were rimmed in shadow. She crouched, her knees folding uneasily, to grab the cast iron griddle from the cabinet.

I bored of watching my mother, and, while wandering around the kitchen, discovered the camera sitting by a box of crackers. I secured the wrist strap and looked through the viewfinder. My mother shimmered, slightly, a black crosshair on her back. I squinted, pressing lightly on the button. She bent over again, opening another cabinet to pull out a bag of pancake mix, and I pressed down on the shutter.

This photo wasn’t very interesting, so I tried taking another, of one of our chickens perching on our bird bath. This was better.

Later that day, I showed my parents the photos I had taken. I was proud, pointing out the grey sky glowing behind the dead lilac, the Fuji apples on the dining room table, my sister fussing with her blanket on the couch. We got to the one of my mother in the kitchen, and my mom winced.

“Laura,” she intoned, looking close to tears, “that’s horrible.”

I didn’t understand.

“I look terrible,” my mother choked, and this confused me. My mother, who didn’t allow us to have Barbies, who wouldn’t let us watch Disney movies, who told us that everything in the fashion magazines we saw at the grocery store was fake.

“I think you look great,” my dad smiled nervously at my mom, then at me, “I’m glad you’re using the camera, Laura, it seems like you’re having fun.”

Years later, I came across the photo again. My mother is wearing a pair of pants that are a little too tight, her pregnant belly pushing them a little bit low, so when she bends over one can see the fleshiness of her back, the wide stripe of skin above her waist band. She had been humiliated, her fecundity criminal, but to my young self, there was nothing to be afraid of. I felt ashamed. Clearly I had done something awful.

*               *               *               *

My mother told me that when she was in her 20s, living in a cabin at the edge of the sea, she would buy tubs of ice cream from the Thriftway. Gallon tubs. Sugar free, nonfat. Cookie dough flavor, orange cream. She would score them with a butter knife, sixteen even sections. She would eat each section with a soup spoon, one by one, until the ice cream was gone. It would take her about an hour.

My mother said that she met an anorexic woman who killed herself. In the woods. My mother has a letter she wrote. She showed it to me once. I remember that the handwriting was beautiful, looping and elegant.

My mother has osteoporosis and osteopenia, and has since she was 28.

*               *               *               *

Usually, we were only allowed to have one sweet thing a day, a protein bar. The protein bar had to have less than ten grams of sugar in it, and it couldn’t have any artificial sweeteners, either. There’s a certain brand of protein bar that I can’t stand to buy, anymore, because it’s the only one I could find as a child that fit my mother’s requirements.

My dad and I were at the grocery store recently, picking out protein bars for a hike. He told me that he remembers the protein bar rules, that he still checks the protein and sugar count whenever he eats a protein bar, even now that he and my mother have been divorced for over ten years. He remembers texting his friends, asking them if such rules were normal. He remembers their alarm.

*               *               *               *

When I was ten, I spent weeks teaching myself how to bake chocolate chip cookies. I used a recipe dating back to the 40s, belonging to my mother’s grandmother. It called for a cup and a half of sugar and two sticks of butter. I obsessed over how to best soften the butter so that the cookies wouldn’t turn flabby in the oven. I learned that if I put the butter in the microwave for around eighteen seconds it was pretty much perfect, a soft, pale yellow log with a golden well in the middle where the butter had melted completely.

When I creamed this butter and the sugar together with a spoon, I would lick tiny gobs of the mixture off of the spoon. Granular and unctuous. Making cookies was a collection of sensory pleasures, the gritty flour, the rattling of the drawers as I opened them, the cold tin of the measuring cup. The careful cracking of the eggs against the counter. I liked to cook alone, when the kitchen was quiet. It felt like praying.

When the cookies were out of the oven, perfuming the house, I would select one and eat it with feverish joy. I would bring one to my father, and he would exclaim over them, ask for another. I would not bring one to my mother.

My mother hadn’t had sugar in ten years, as she told us proudly, frequently, because she said that she had an addiction to sugar. A sugar addict. She said it made her mean. That it made her lose control. She said she didn’t want us to be mean, and that was why she only let us have ten grams of sugar a day. A batch of cookies had 300 grams of sugar in it, I discovered after some research on my dad’s laptop, which meant that if I made twelve cookies per batch that each cookie had 25 grams of sugar in it.

I told my mother this. I’m not sure why I told her. Her eyes flickered and her voice flooded brittle and cold.

“That’s why you girls get whiny after you eat them.”

I huddled at the table. My dad’s laptop glowed. Guilt lurched through my spine and I felt sick.

“Let’s try to bake less cookies, Laura, you’ve been eating too much sugar, I can tell.” I stared at my dad’s keyboard. I nodded.

*               *               *               *

A few months after my sister was born, shortly following my seventh birthday, my mother and I were in a grocery store. My dad and my sisters were drinking steamed milks in the bakery nearby, and my mother and I were in the bulk aisle. I was holding a paper sack of Fuji apples, smoothing it while my mother scooped rolled oats into a bag.

Another child, looking about my age, was helping her mom fill a scuffed tupperware container with dried mango. I was envious, as dried mango was deemed too sweet by my mother

for us to have, so I followed the mango with wide eyes as it tumbled into the tupperware. My mouth watered. I appraised the girl, whose sleek brown hair was collected into neat braids. They were affixed with the kind of tiny, multi-colored rubber hair bands that I always wished my mother would buy me, but she deigned them “too plasticky”.

I imagined my mother winding my hair into braids. My hair, I knew, was impossible to brush. Impossible to take care of. It tumbled from my scalp in dirty blonde ringlets that went untended, because neither of my parents knew how to take care of curly hair. My mother’s hair fell in thin, shoulder length waves. My dad’s was coarse, dark, short. I was an anomaly. My mother did not braid my hair.

The girl’s jeans had sequins on the pockets. Her boots glistened yellow and clean. Her pink shirt was appliqued with a flower. My shirt was blue. It did not have a flower on it. This girl’s belly created a gentle curve, pushing against the fabric of her shirt. Her thighs round in her jeans. A slight double chin that grew bigger when she smiled. I placed a hand on my own belly. I imagined its outward curve. My thighs, were they also squishy and soft? I rubbed my chin, furiously, did I have fat there, too? Panic mounted. I grabbed my mother and pulled her away from the girl and her mother, until we were out of earshot. I crouched behind a rack of candy bars. My mother crouched with me.

“Mom,” I whispered, the sudden terror in my stomach heaving its way up my spine, carving through my limbs, “Mom, am I fat?”

“No, honey, of course you’re not. And it would be okay if you were.”

“But I’m not, right? I’m not, I’m not, I’m not chubby either, am I?”

“No, honey, you’re not.”

“Okay. I don’t want to be fat. Can I make sure I’m not fat?”

“You don’t need to worry about that.”

“Can you promise?”

“I can’t promise that, sweetheart.”

“Please?”

A few days later, we were in the bathroom at my grandparent’s house, in which there was a scale. I stepped on it, after carefully removing my pink velcro shoes.

“The number went up.”

“Sometimes that happens, honey, sometimes we feel a little icky from eating too much sugar.”

“I had a lot of sugar.”

“Sometimes it’s okay to just sort of eat a little less after we have a weekend like that, just listen to your body.”

“If I eat a little less, the number will go down?”

“Yes, probably, sometimes it’s just bloating. It helps to eat less sugar and drink a lot of water.”

“Does cake have sugar?”

“Yes, cake has sugar.”

“Okay. Is it okay to have cake after dinner with everybody else?”

“Just listen to your body.”

*               *               *               *

Age seven seems to be a turning point. A few weeks after my little sister turned seven, in the middle of a Sunday, she started crying suddenly. When I asked her what was wrong, she said that she was hungry. She played with the velcro on her shoes. I asked her if she wanted a snack.

She sobbed and told me that sometimes she didn’t eat when she was hungry because she didn’t want to get fat. I have never felt angrier at my mother.

*               *               *               *

When I first moved out of my house and into my own apartment, I developed a brief obsession with Costco. The sheer abundance of food felt subversive, thrilling. I would stare at the clamshell packs of cookies, my mother’s voice lapping, itchy, unbidden, the corn syrup, the palm oil, the certainty that if I bought such a large serving of cookies that it would be impossible to eat just one.

She had recently started eating sugar again, my mother, her boyfriend at the time having convinced her to try some ice cream. Coffee chocolate chip. Her voice jittered as she described her boyfriend’s family’s troubles with diabetes.

I bought large bags of semi-sweet chocolate chips and made cookies in my apartment. I arranged them on my one nice plate and stared at them. Guilty, somehow, still.

Since my little sisters were always clamoring for snacks, and my mother still didn’t buy anything that wasn’t organic or in a small bag, I brought them a huge bag of kettle corn. From Costco. They loved it. We sat around my mother’s counter and gleefully crunched, salty-sweet, licking the oil off of our fingers. I felt proud. My mother pulled a bowl from her cabinet and every few minutes would lift the kettle corn bag and refill her bowl, eating one kernel at a time.

When it was time for me to drive back to my apartment, I asked her if she liked the kettle corn. She looked away. Muttered to herself.

“What?”

“When you bring things like that into the house, I don’t have a choice other than to eat all of it. It’s addictive. You know what’s in that stuff.”

“It’s not that sweet, Mama, that’s why I thought you would like it. Maggie and Ella loved it. It’s airy.”

“You have no idea how much sugar’s in there. Now I feel gross. Please don’t bring big bags of stuff in here again.”

Every time I went to Costco, for years after that, I would see the bags of kettle corn and a persistent nausea would trickle down my throat.

*              *               *               *

My mother is tiny, now, she weighs less than she has since she went through puberty. I fold her pants when I’m home, smoothing the size zero waistbands of her jeans with sadness furring my hands, I hear her tell me weekly over the phone that she needs to stop eating so much sugar.

*               *               *               *

When I was eleven, I decided that I wouldn’t eat any sugar for three days. My mother encouraged this, saying that the cravings would be really bad but that I would feel so much better, my head would be clearer.

I remember sitting in class, staring at the ceiling while hunger tore violently through my belly because I hadn’t eaten my protein bar, the one source of sugar I usually had in a day. I felt holy. I looked at all of my sixth grade classmates and knew that they would never have the bravery, the fortitude, to listen to their bodies as well as I did.

When I was 14, my parents had just divorced and I wanted attention, so I decided that I wouldn’t eat any sugar for an entire summer. I made lists of snacks that didn’t have sugar in them, frozen cherries, sparkling water, chips. My mother warned me not to replace sugar with salty, fatty snacks. So I wrote down cucumber slices instead of chips.

I made “muffins” out of maple syrup and cocoa powder. They flattened into a sort of leather, which I offered to my mother. She said that it was cheating to replace sugar with maple syrup and refused to try any.

My father offered me ice cream, took me to the store and gestured to the chocolate aisle. I loved chocolate. I acquiesced and bought a bar of unsweetened baking chocolate. I shaved little pieces off of the bar with a knife, a trick my mother taught me.

By the time freshman year started, my classmates remarked that I was the skinniest one in our grade. This was my annunciation. The burden, the righteous duty, it was mine. I would carry it proudly. The stark circles underneath my eyes prompted my teachers to ask me to stay after class, where they gave me pieces of cheese from their lunches. Within a few months, I would lose my period. It would take years to get it back.

*               *               *               *

The dietician at the eating disorder clinic wanted me to eat 5,000 calories a day.

“Weight restoration,” he said, crossing his legs and turning from his computer to face my mother and I, “it’s the first step. The most important step.”

I leaned into this fate, relieved. I was ready to surrender to this place, with its minifridge stocked with chocolate Boost, this place that would, in a few months, discharge me with my lost weight regained and a benevolent attitude around sugar, but my mom’s eyes turned truculent and I sank into my chair.

“But can’t it be argued that too much sugar is bad for her?” My mother was practically spitting. The dietician addressed her coldly.

“Ms. Duncan, right now sugar is what her body needs. She is dangerously underweight. Sugar will help your daughter.”

I felt protected. My mother looked like a scolded child. I smiled.

*               *               *               *

I daydream now, now that I’ve had my period back for years, now that I eat sugar whenever I want to, I daydream about pregnancy. Of a child, tunneling through my body into light. I imagine my cells dividing and growing. I imagine a baby with my boyfriend’s coffee-colored ringlets, my brown eyes, the neat slope of my mother’s nose. I think about maternity clothes, think about if I would still get my nails done, if I would still drink coffee.

*               *               *               *

When my mother had cancer, I went to a coffee shop once a week. This coffee shop was holy to me, a place where I could complain to my friends about my life, which had become in its entirety shoring up my mother’s farm against the erosion of her cancer. It had deteriorated for years, I would tell my friends, as we sat at the heavy wooden tables, the fatigue in her body and the fog in her brain striping the coating from the fences, filling the pastures with inexorable mud, infiltrating the house with mold and useless objects and dust. I tried to breathe my desperation into stories, stories about bunny poop being allowed to pile up on the stairs and washing the baseboards in vinegar soaked cloths, thinking that it would be more palatable if I did so. I rubbed iron stains from my nails and laughed about the water there, so hard that my bras turned a little redder each time they went through the washing machine. I mentioned the piles of laundry to be folded each night, the leggings that my mother shared with my thirteen year old sister because finally cancer had taken from my mother the weight she always wanted to shed.

It was nice, to sit in that coffee shop once a week, to not move, even for just a moment, to smell something other than my mother’s steroid sweat, animal pee and gelid mud, it was nice to see the glossiness of my friends’ hair and the cleanliness of their shoes. The ordinary sizes of their leggings.

After the coffee, I drove back to the farm.

*               *               *               *

After my mother went through eight rounds of chemotherapy, after the port in her chest was allowed to heal, after she was no longer prescribed 100mg of Prednisone daily, she gained weight. Not a lot. She will remain small. She’ll go up from children’s sizes to a size zero. She’ll be skeptical when I gain weight after I start taking an anti-anxiety medication. She won’t say it to my face, but she’ll comment on the hunch she perceives in my back, the way I breathe when I go up a hill, the way I decline a walk in 30 degree weather. I’ll stop taking the anti-anxiety medication after a while, since my doctor says that it could be dangerous whenever I want to get pregnant. When I lose the weight I gained from the medication, she will appraise me, quietly, and express that she’s glad I’m doing such a good job of listening to my body.