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    Raising a Daughter With a Body Like Mine

    I worried that any child of mine could become collateral damage in my eating disorder. Instead, she’s allowed me to see myself through the eyes of a mother.
    by Stephanie H. Murray May 09, 2023 5 minutes
    Source: Illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira / The Atlantic

    Updated at 10:55 a.m. ET on May 9, 2023

    This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

    Long before I had any children, I worried about how my eating disorder would affect them. Anorexia is a greedy disease. It has a way of taking over. It wants to be the organizing principle of your life and the lens through which you see the world. That anorexia would have something to say about my children—what I should feed them (in or ex-utero), how I should think of them—seemed inevitable.

    I was diagnosed when I was 14 years old. I think of that time of my life as the raising of a pendulum that, when dropped, sent me careening between extremes

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