Appetites

by Caroline Knapp

  I no longer fear sliding back into the anorexic prison, but I am somewhat stunned, and a little rueful, at how arduous it all is, how long it can take a woman to achieve a degree of balance around appetites, to learn to feed herself and to understand and honor the body, and to hunger for things that are genuinely sustaining instead of hungering for decoys. In a cruel twist of irony, the diminution of physical appetite appears to be a by-product of at least two things that can liberate it emotionally, antidepressants and aging. The Zoloft that can free you up enough to explore the world may also kill the libido; the Sisyphean terms of therapy that can help you understand your hungers may last straight through menopause. So the prison fear has given way to the fear of the ticking clock: Will I get the right emotional balance—the right combination of joy and entitlement around the vast blend of human hungers—at the same time the body starts to lose interest? Will I feel truly entitled to be fed only to find myself staring at a bowl of oatmeal in the nursing home?

  Granted, that’s a rather ageist fear, and it’s not one that really keeps me up nights—given the emotional contexts in which physical appetites always exist, I’d like to believe that time will do more to encourage than dampen desire, at least in my own foreseeable future. What plagues me more is the matter of “getting it right” in the first place, as though there is some achievable balance of hungers and satisfactions, some place of repose where the struggle finally ends, the battle is won, you have enough.

  Enough. Now, there’s a word that can keep you up at night. What, finally, is enough? Ask me this question on a bad day and I’ll probably shrug. Maybe this little landscape I’ve created isn’t enough, and never will be enough; maybe there’s no such thing. I once maintained in a column that there were three ingredients to a woman’s true happiness and that most of us never have all of them at once; two were destined always to be missing. The three in my assessment were a joke—a woman, I wrote, needs a good mechanic, a good gynecologist, and a good therapist—and I’ve toyed with the equation over the years, recasting the three ingredients as a good job, a good boyfriend, and a good apartment, which can be an equally evasive combination. Levity aside, I think there’s some truth behind both equations. The mechanic represents freedom and mobility, the gynecologist physical health, the therapist emotional well-being, all defining characteristics of appetites that are healthy and freely expressed; the job-boyfriend-apartment combo is a similar construction—to get all three down requires a rare combination of self-determination, self-knowledge, and good fortune. And it does seem, in either case, that achieving all three is woefully difficult. Perhaps there’s emotional freedom and poor health. Or a great job and a disappointing boyfriend. Or a promising love life but no real sense of home. On my bad days, my worst days, I can see something missing in any realm: The boyfriend is getting on my nerves, the words won’t flow, the paint is chipping on the psychic walls. But even through the periodic haze of despair, I can shift the kaleidoscope a little, long enough at least to understand that a certain degree of emptiness and dissatisfaction is not only an inevitable part of life but also a useful one: Hunger, no matter how uncomfortable, is like fuel; it’s what keeps you striving, it’s what powers those baby steps, impels you in fits and starts onto new terrain.

  So is this enough? Ask me on better days, on the best days, and I’ll count the blessings, I’ll talk about the hard-won intimacies and the minor victories over fear, about the friends and the dog and the woods and the work, but I still won’t answer unequivocally. For there is no unequivocal answer, no final resting place, no pinnacle reached, all appetites understood and sated at last. Instead, there are moments of contentment, moments of sudden alignment between body and mind and spirit, moments of feeling fed that arrive unexpectedly, like gifts from the universe. These come in the simplest packages: in a look of love from the dog, a joke shared with a friend, a spark of affection here or understanding there. They come in the morning light, which hits the water just so as I set off for a row; they come in a perfect meal, a perfect sentence, a touch, a glance. There are moments, which in the end may be the best you get in this life: flashes of satisfaction, glimmers and tastes of hope, fleeting moments that you have to relish and eat up like pie.

  EPILOGUE

  THERE ARE FEW THINGS like the sight of a woman in labor to shake up your perceptions of the female body. Last December, at age forty-one, my sister gave birth to a baby girl, using a system of natural delivery called the Bradley method. She spent a good portion of her labor in a chair, flanked by her husband, Jim, and me, and when a contraction came, she’d lean back, shut her eyes, and focus on relaxing as much of her body as possible. She’d breathe very deeply and evenly, and she’d try, as she described it, to dive down into the pain rather than flee from it, the idea being that if she could get out of her own way—calm the muscles, resist the urge to fight—her uterus would do its job.

  Which it did, brilliantly. My sister had labored at home for the better part of the afternoon and evening, contractions mild-to-somewhat strong, and then arrived at the hospital around nine that night, contractions stronger and more regular, her cervix dialated to about six centimeters, past the halfway point. At about 10:30 P.M., with contractions coming every three minutes or so, she was wheeled into the delivery room, and as the intensity increased, she asked Jim and me to help her stay relaxed by evoking images of her favorite beach on Martha’s Vineyard. When a contraction came, we imagined them as waves, using as our guide a monitor, affixed via suction cups to her belly, which recorded both the baby’s heartbeat and tension in my sister’s abdomen. Between contractions, the tension numbers stayed very low: eight, nine, eleven. When the numbers started to climb—twenty-eight, thirty-five, fifty-four, eighty-two—we’d see her close her eyes and lean back, poised for the pain, and we’d describe the wave building: You’re half-way there, we’d say, this is a big wave, you’re almost at the top . . . The contractions seemed to reach peak intensity at about 127, and then they’d gradually ease. Okay, we’d say, you’re coming down, three quarters of the way down the wave, halfway down, it’s over. And she’d exhale, and sigh slightly, and say, Okay. Periodically, she’d comment with a kind of awe and wonder at what her own body was doing, at the sheer power of the uterine muscle and the sense of independent drive it seemed to possess: She could have been in a coma, she said; she could have been completely unconscious and her body would still be doing this work, this miraculous and innate system having kicked in and rolled up its shirt sleeves and begun its job, operating on its own timetable, equipped with its own tools.

  This was astonishing to watch. At about 11:35, contractions coming more rapidly and with greater intensity, my sister moved from chair to bed, and the room, relatively quiet and dim until then, sprang to life: urgency in the air; obstetrician, medical student, nurses suddenly present; bright lights flooding the room. My sister began to push at this point, and when the baby came she came fast: five contractions, a set of pushes with each, a great deal of vocal encouragement from the obstetrician—that’s it, that’s it—and then, amazingly, a tiny human, the abstract suddenly rendered tangible and extraordinary. I was standing by my sister’s left knee, holding her foot so she could push against the palm of my hand. I looked down during the last contracted push, and there, within a matter of seconds, was the small round curve of an infant’s head, and then suddenly shoulders, and then an entire miniature body, curled in the fetal position still, eensy fists against an eensy chest. A human, attached to mother for only seconds more by the umbilical cord, and then snipped apart, and breathing on her own, mouth open in a first choking sob.

  Later, I would describe this experience to friends as a cross between a breathtaking miracle and an episode of The X-Files, there being something almost inherently cinematic about such a literal expulsion, and about the sight of blood, and about the eerie gray cast of a baby’s skin before it begins to pink up. Given our distance from the natural world, these are the kinds of things most of us o
nly witness in horror movies or on TV, and during the actual delivery, I had a momentary flash of such cinematic detachment, a sense of visceral shock paired with a split-second inclination toward disbelief, as though I were watching something at the local multiplex: great movie, amazing special effects. Wow, I said aloud, eloquently.

  The next split seconds, though, are the ones I want to remember, for a birth really is the most extraordinary feat of nature, and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt such profound respect for the female body or such awe in its presence. A body creating a body; a woman’s body, equipped with this exquisite knowledge and stunning capacity to create life, and then to house it and protect it and nurture it through its own web of cord and fluid, and then to bring it into the world, producing human life itself. To watch my sister deliver this creature with such focus and grace, and to see that baby in its first instant outside the womb—a perfect replication, with tiny perfectly formed ears and fingernails and toes—and then to grasp in the same instant the reverberant power and potential of that new life, which is the potential of humanity itself, the potential to go out in the world and develop a cure for cancer or to set a new world record for the hundred-yard dash or to simply live as humans live, a life of joy and sorrow and intimate struggle, each one of us touching and shaping irrevocably the lives of countless others—this is quite truly the stuff of miracles, and it begins in the body of a woman, and it springs from the body of a woman, and it takes your breath away.

  This birth had its moments of particular meaning for me, given my immersion at the time in the world of women and their bodies and appetites; it also had its moments of particular irony. In an almost perverse testimony to the extent to which we are creatures of culture, inhaling media and imagery like air, there are TVs everywhere in hospitals, affixed to the walls in the waiting areas, in the maternity triage areas, even in the delivery rooms themselves, some of them blaring, some muted, but all of them on. After the delivery, after the dust had settled and the nurses were busy weighing and measuring and swaddling the baby, I happened to glance up at the TV screen above my sister’s bed and noticed that a PBS station was rerunning a documentary about anorexia that had debuted the night before. The show opened with images of fashion models, their beauty typically cool and frightening and seductive, and it went on to images of anorexic women: a teenage girl as skeletal as a concentration camp victim; a compulsive runner, who’d realized she had a problem when, twenty-three miles into a marathon, she found herself obsessing about when she’d next get to the gym; a retired ballet dancer in her fifties, anorexic for decades, hobbling across a street on a walker, her bones as brittle as those of a woman in her seventies.

  So the birth of this child was punctuated by imagery and omen, body-loathing and self-contempt almost literally written on the walls. I stared at the screen for several moments, dumb-struck by the sense of discord. On one side of the room, the shockingly familiar: the cold, angular ideal, the attendant press to whittle the body down, pare it away, attack it at the core. And on the other, this shining truth: a mother’s body delivering life.

  Late that night, driving home, I thought about the world this new baby had just come into, which seems to me a place of such mixed and partial blessings. Several months before her birth, I’d spent an evening with a group of high school girls, eleven in all, sophomore to senior years, whose feelings about appetite seemed to hint at what lies ahead, a strange combination of promise and peril. The promise comes from the landscape they inhabit, a vastly altered world where girls are entitled to every opportunity boys are, where parents share child-raising responsibilities, where confidence and voice and entitlement are neither as elusive nor as rare among girls as they once were. The Family and Medical Leave Act passed while these girls were in puberty, a feminist was named to the Supreme Court, a woman was appointed to run American foreign policy, and if this group didn’t particularly like the label “feminism,” they certainly shared feminist principles and they have certainly benefited from feminist values. They are products of supportive families, of a liberal pro-woman community, and of a suburban Boston school system that works particularly hard to embolden girls.

  All of this is good news, its effects clear. This was a confident bunch and I could hear genuine strains of agency in their voices: an ability to think critically about media and culture; an awareness of choice; a basic acceptance of their own intelligence. But there were familiar undertones of anxiety and strain in their voices, too: worries about weight and fat and control; an acknowledgment of the profound link between appearance and self-esteem; anecdotes (everybody seemed to have one) about this bulimic friend and that anorexic one; hints of the pressure—considerably heightened since I was their age—to act and feel sexually mature long before they were ready. Will he hate me if I’m fat? Will he dump me if I won’t sleep with him?—if anything, such questions have grown more tyrannical in our hyper-sexualized, hypervisual culture, the mandates about sexiness and body shape more rigid, the stakes higher. Even this group, who in many ways represent the best, the brightest, and the savviest, is nowhere near immune, and the bright picture of promise they present begins to dim considerably when you move beyond their relatively well-insulated circle.

  A March 1999 study in the journal Child Development reported that boys continue to have higher estimations of their academic abilities than girls do and that girls tend not only to underrate their achievements but also to suffer in greater numbers from poor self-esteem, anxiety, and depression. Eating-disorder statistics continue to climb, with experts in the field treating girls at younger and younger ages. In one study, forty-two percent of girls in grades one through three reported wanting to be thinner; in another, thirty-nine percent of girls in grades five through eight said they were on a diet; of those, thirteen percent had already binged and purged. Thirty-one percent of ten-year-old girls say they’re afraid of being fat; more than fifty percent of adolescent girls think they’re overweight. Sexuality among adolescent girls seems to translate less frequently into personal gratification than into high-risk behavior and hurt: The earlier a girl begins to have intercourse, the less likely she is to use birth control; girls under the age of fifteen in this country are at least five times more likely to give birth than girls of the same age in any other industrialized nation. And even if it’s entered into freely by some, the sexual world is a dangerous place for many others; if current statistics hold true in the future, nearly two out of every five girls will be physically or sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. So for every girl with a liberated, healthy appetite, there’s a girl on a diet, a girl slashing her skin with a piece of glass, a girl having drunken, unprotected sex. The battle to produce girls who feel as strong and entitled as they ought to has hardly been won.

  My new niece is entering what journalist Peggy Orenstein calls “a half-changed world,” a place where appetites may be psychically liberated but socially and institutionally unsupported, and where the social movement that fueled the first half of the change remains in the slumber that first took hold in the 1980s, the fog of forgetting. Feminist momentum ebbs and flows, tending to crest and then recede in cycles of thirty years or so, which means we may be due for a revival. But that forgetfulness worries me, in part because it seems so persistent and in part because progress is so entwined with women’s level of awareness, our political and historical sense of how good or bad our lot has become. Will this new child, my niece, grow up in a world where women are so tired, or so inured to half-changes, that they choose to remain in a slumber? Or will she witness, perhaps participate in, a new tide of agitation? She was born in the midst of what feminist historians call an “open moment,” a period in which women will either forge ahead or stand still, deciding that a half-changed world is insufficient or learning to live within its confines. That choice is far beyond her control, but its outcome could shape her life—her view of herself, her relationship to her body, her capacity to make choices—irrevocably.

  The female bod
y may represent one of feminism’s least-touched frontiers, perhaps one of its final frontiers; a woman’s appetite, and her ability to indulge appetite with freedom and entitlement and joy, is both a mark of progress and a metaphor for it. How hungry are we? How filled? How conflicted? I thought about this, too, as I drove home: I thought about my sister, whose body had just delivered this new life and was now prepared to feed and soothe it, and I thought about women and their bodies in general, about how many of us view the body as an enemy and a locus of shame instead of a blessing or a gift, about the despair and loathing that greets so many of us as we wake to the feel and sight of our own hips and thighs and breasts, about the extent to which the astonishing capacities of those bodies are minimized, forgotten, disregarded, turned into sources of the most cruel contempt.

  The road before me was empty at 2 A.M., the sky black but starlit. I pictured that tiny infant, nursing hungrily at the body that created and sheltered her and will now guide her into the wider world, and I said a prayer for her, I prayed for change. I whispered to the universe, Let her be filled.