Issue No. 1: The Body
What does it mean to accept our embodied existence?
I gave birth to a daughter on September 24, 2023 at 1:15 a.m. Was this baby planned? Yes—and no. It happened the way everything else in my marriage has: without warning, with no chance at turning back.
One minute I was just me, 27-year-old freelance writer, and the next, a body was being pulled from my own. Damp as deli meat, that little body appeared on my chest. A pair of eyes blinked up at me. She was a color pink I’d never seen before. A smell I’d never smelled before. A child. My child. I was nauseous, covered in sweat and blood, forever changed; thrust into a different class of existence. Motherhood.
The baby was born two weeks before my husband and I marked our one year wedding anniversary. Contrary to modern advice, we dove into wedlock, getting engaged in three months and standing at the alter shortly after that. We were motivated by an ideology of commitment: agreeing that one steady marriage would be better than a lifetime of exuberant dates, and a lasting relationship would rely upon choices, not feelings. We aspired to what C.S. Lewis described as “a deep unity maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit.” I’ve written again and again about the value of commitment, the beauty of choosing to have something over the optionality of having everything. I was delighted to find a partner who agreed. Neither of us were afraid of parenthood; we ached it, longed for the permanency of a family that would be ours and ours alone.
Then it happened. To me. Specifically, for nine entire months, it happened to me. Startling was the realization that we would be welcoming a child, but even more startling was the realization that I would be carrying it.
This was no longer an intellectual experiment, I realized, no longer just words on a blog post. This was my body. And my body hurt.
I threw up every day of the first trimester. I threw up from being hungry, I threw up from being full. I threw up from eating crackers, I threw up from sucking ginger candies. I threw up outside, inside, down the toilet, and on the rug. If I wasn’t throwing up, I was in bed, asleep, dreaming of throwing up. In the second trimester, my nose bled in the shower. For three days my right foot went numb. I woke one morning with excruciating back spasms; my husband had to carry me to the bathtub to unknot the muscles with hot water. In the third trimester, my baby kicked, rolled, and jabbed me every hour of the day. The insomnia, back pain, and weight gain were table stakes, symptoms that inspired a wry smile from doctors and other women if I complained. That’s just what happens, they said, shrugging.
It didn’t matter if I wanted to wake up early to take a walk, stretch, and listen to a podcast. It didn’t matter if I planned to return from my morning walk clear minded, ready for a cup of coffee and a productive day of writing. My body had plans of its own. Again and again I woke up late, groggy—utterly exhausted. I’d take two bites of a banana and immediately it throw up. I’d wipe down the bathroom floor and consider trying some breakfast again. Toast? Could I try toast? But toast felt insurmountable. So, I’d lay back down. And that would be the most I’d accomplish in a day: No work, no wages, no progress. The sense of failure would smother me back to sleep.
I am a body, I thought to myself for nine months, flattened against the bathroom floor. I am arms and legs and toenails and eyelashes. I am muscle and bacteria and blood. I am flesh. I am bone.
It was the reckoning I’d always avoided, the one yoga teachers offered so casually in fluttering voices: “Out of the mind and into the body.”
But my body was the last place I wanted to be. Why couldn’t I escape it? Why couldn’t I muster up the energy to rise to the occasion, “get over it” and “push through?” The answer was simple: I couldn’t.
For nine months, I had no choice but to accept the limitations of pregnancy. Now on the other side of it, I’m glad for the experience. The body is a limitation for all of us, perhaps our only true limitation. Why? Because every living body eventually dies. To live in a body is to be ultimately feeble; to be mortal, fated to death.
Modern life encourages us to think of ourselves as limitless. It tells us our personality can exist forever, defined by our ideas or our money, the numbers in our bank account, the job title on our resume, the luxury vacations we’ve photographed ourselves enjoying. We conceive of ourselves through our possessions, desires, and hobbies—some mix of our Instagram, Amazon, and Spotify accounts. Life as a concept is much easier than life as a breathing, eating, sleeping, being. Concepts can always be improved: tweaked, optimized, more carefully curated. The future version of a concept is always better than the past. Bodies are the opposite: We’re all moving toward death, one day at a time.
That’s the real trouble: we don’t want to think about this ultimate limitation. “Death is an abstraction to us, something technically true but unimaginable as a personal reality,” Tim Keller wrote in 2021, two years before he died of pancreatic cancer. Tech billionaires may be obsessed with living forever, but the fixations of the human ego aren’t really new. Keller quoted 16th-century theologian John Calvin, writing, “We undertake all things as if we were establishing immortality for ourselves on earth.”
Why do we do that? Why ignore death—the plainest fact of life? Well, because if we have to deal with death, then we have to deal with limits. We have to see ourselves as limited.
This is also a big reason people are afraid to have kids, especially in their 20s and early 30s. Kids require sacrifice, kids require limitation.
But limitations make life precious. Limitations require us to make decisions, choices, commitments. Limitations are what allow us to derive meaning from our lives. We can only walk one path at a time. Tonight I have limited time to write this post—my baby needs to be put down for a nap, my dinner needs to go in the oven. So I’ll be quick.
Philosopher L.M. Sacacas wrote it best: “To forget the body is to forget our dependence, our frailty, our limitations. To forget these is also to forget the value, indeed the necessity, of humility, generosity, care, patience, and mercy.”
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