I spent this weekend with two dear college roommates and their families. A good time was had by all, with four children, five adults, and one very sweet and old yellow lab that I remember Kristin getting when the dog was just a wee puppy and the girl lived with me on Church Street in Iowa City.

How time flies.

So there we were, cradling babies and startling toddlers awake when my beloved would bellow profanities at the football game on television. Kristin’s parents often offer up their gorgeous and enormous house when we all come to visit, since our burgeoning group keeps getting bigger, with Cindy now pregnant again and Steph with a new beaux and Nicole living with some fellow in D.C. that she never brings around and blah, blah, blah.

I sat there thinking about how far I have come in the past eleven years since I graduated from college and left behind (mostly) my eating disorder.

Ironically, Kristin brought home this week’s People magazine, which boasted a cover screaming of celebrity skinniness. The picture of a skeletal Nicole Richie running on the beach brought up bile in my throat, because she looked so much like me at age eighteen, when I consumed five to seven hundred calories a day and vomited with the bathwater running on a regular basis.

I’ve blocked out a lot of that time, but I still remember making lists of the calories I ate that day in the margins of my college textbooks. I counted gum. I counted alcohol -- probably why to this day I’ve never consumed a beer. I never developed a taste for it when most people were choking down Natty Light for a cheap buzz in dilapidated, rented-out houses. When I pledged my sorority in 1992, I wore a size two red dress. I now wear an eight or ten, depending on the season. At the time, I was thirty-five pounds lighter than I am now. I am in the middle of my appropriate body mass index now. And yet, I never dipped below 105 pounds, and that was my ticket to assuring most people that I was still “normal,” even though I’m five-foot-six. Even at my lightest, I was still dense.

Despite the numbers not being that scary, my bones were horrifying. I would trace my fingers over my ribs every night to be sure I could still feel each one. I could feel my heart beating through my ribcage. Sometimes that scared me. A heavy door was hard to open, even though I exercised an hour and a half every day, seven days a week, including weekends and national holidays. Even when I was sick.

I started smoking my senior year of high school, a year after I started dieting. By the time I hit the University of Iowa, I was smoking a pack to a pack and a half a day, a habit I kept up until age twenty-five. Since then, it’s been spotty. Most of the time, I’m “good,” but every now and then I hear that old voice criticizing my inner thighs, and light up I do. Even as a mother.

God, I hate myself when I do that.

My head was too big for my body. I could make my fingers into a circle and fit them around the very top of my thigh. When I tried to go parasailing on vacation in Florida when I was eighteen, the parasail guy looked at my parents and told them he was afraid the rope might snap and whisk me away forever.

My sister, my parents, and my hometown friends were beside themselves, and they were sick of telling me I was going to die. Despite the fact that they stuck with me, they must’ve wanted to shoot me if I weren’t already on the fast track to a heart attack. I was a pain. I denied my problems. I told them there was nothing wrong. I told them it was my life. I hated them for getting in my business, for caring about me when I was so hell-bent on hurting myself.

I did go to college, though, and I did make friends. The summer after my freshman year, I went home. When I came back that fall, I was about ten pounds heavier. When I came back for our sorority’s first fall meeting, two of my friends started crying. My friend Julia told me she’d been certain I would die over the summer and she’d never see me again.

I don’t really remember how I got better, I just know it wasn’t an overnight process, and I never got professional help at the time. I started off a vegan, mostly to avoid eating anything with any real calories. I was eating cheese and eggs again by the time I was a college senior. I incorporated fish after I graduated, and I added back in poultry and pork after I married my beloved. At Cindy's house last year, I ate a hamburger, and everyone freaked out. It was the first time they’d seen me eat beef in fourteen years. I kind of had a tummy ache afterward, but it was good to be normal.

Getting pregnant was my own personal hell. As someone who’s a control freak about my body and particularly my weight, it was worse than waterboarding to have to gain weight on purpose, without checking it and without knowing when it would stop. To boot, I gained a ton of water weight--eight pounds of it my last week of pregnancy--and could leave lasting finger imprints on my legs at any time after six months. The scale was agony, and only knowing how badly it would hurt the little angel kept me from Just. Dieting. Anyway.

Pregnancy forced me to gain weight for someone else. And I hated every minute of it. However, the irony of the situation is that pregnancy seemed to reset my ailing metabolism--the same metabolism that had me gaining five pounds after one week of eating twelve hundred calories a day. Message to any ana-fans out there: be prepared to either die or fuck up your metabolism for years. Years, ladies. Yes, your ridiculous, low-calorie dieting will actually reset your metabolism at eight hundred calories a day, so if you try to recover you will gain weight faster than you want.

Faster than you know how to accept.

This message is not keep dieting. This message is don’t go low-cal in the first place. I was lucky. Pregnancy fixed my body. After the little angel was born, I went back to my prepregnancy weight in four months, and dropped five pounds below that after she started crawling. I’ve since gained back the bonus five, but I never became the dumpy person I was so fucking afraid of becoming.

Eating disorders are selfish, and that’s why it’s so hard for people to be understanding. Outwardly, it seems the afflicted person is just being vain to the point of killing themselves. I’m here to tell you that’s not the way it works. Eating disorders, textbook ones like the one I had, stem from the inability to control one’s life. In my case, it stemmed from two bouts of maternal cancer at a formative age, mixed with a super-Type-A personality, and shot through with an inherited predisposition toward the melancholy. Sometimes there may seem to be no trigger point, but I guarantee that somewhere in that girl or woman’s past (and it usually is a female) there was a combination of bad circumstance, perfectionism, and a mean comment about the girl’s butt.

I grew up tormented by skinny people. I was not a skinny person. Looking back at photos, I was not as fat as I thought, but I never was a skinny kid in an age when most kids were skinny. It wasn’t like now. People were wearing 6X into middle school when I was a kid. A lot of comments got through to me. Wearing a leotard in dance class drove home how different I was from the others--something I worry about sometimes at my daughter’s ballet classes. I have to remind myself that the little angel is not me and may not be plagued by my own insecurities.

I try so hard not to ever criticize my appearance in front of the little angel. I don’t want her growing up with a complex. But my own mother was a skinny bird--she never said things like “I feel fat” when I was growing up, so I most certainly didn’t get it from her. I want the little angel to always feel she is beautiful, but I’m a woman, too, and I’m just not naive enough to think she will understand how beautiful she is as a teenager. I am terrified she will doubt herself the way I have doubted myself. I want her to skip the journey and emerge on the other side.

My sister struggled with having red hair, because it made her different. I worry about that, too, since the little angel’s shade is the exact same as the one I envied my entire childhood. So far, the little angel seems to be a beautiful child, and I do think she will grow into a beautiful young woman. She will probably go through a chubby stage--I did and my beloved did. I hope that I can give her the right message when she does. The message that yes, there is an awkward phase, but no, it will not last forever. I don’t think lying to your kid does any good. My own mother said so many times that I wasn’t fat that I wanted to beat her with a wet noodle. I almost would have felt better if she would’ve just said, “Yeah, you’ve got a little extra. So do I--let’s go for a walk and skip the ice cream tonight.” I have no idea how to talk about this with the little angel when she gets to that age. I don’t know if it would be better to be honest about my mistakes or hold them back for fear of her repeating them.

I wish I had just been normal, so I wouldn’t have to make these decisions.

A friend of mine commented some months ago that I seem to have a lot of body confidence. Most of the time (when my jeans fit), I do. Somewhere along the line, I learned to put more stock in the quality of my words and my friendships and relationships than I do my jeans size. I’m not completely cured, though. I don’t think I’ll ever fall into the abyss again, but the first thing in my mind when life is completely out of my control is that maybe dropping five might make me feel better. I’m sure I’ve got it under control now, fourteen years later, but that pain lurks somewhere in the depths of my personality.

That ability to blindly, fervently hate yourself.

I hope to God she never feels that way. I love her so much, and I can’t stand the thought of her hating herself.

I finally understand how much my eating disorder must have hurt my mother.

I’m so sorry.