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My mother put me on a diet when I was eight years old. She did not call it a diet. She called it "being careful." She started weighing me on Sunday mornings before church, on the bathroom scale, in my underwear. She wrote the numbers in a small notebook she kept in her drawer. She did this for the next nine years. I am 41. I have not stopped being careful. I have not been off the inside of my mother's notebook for a single day of my life. I am writing this on a Tuesday afternoon, at the kitchen table, while my twelve-year-old daughter is at school. I want to write down what my mother says to me when my mother is not in the room. I have been hearing her my whole adult life and I have never put the sentences on paper. I want to see what they look like outside of my body. Here is what my mother says when I pour cereal in the morning. She says: "Are you sure you need that much?" Here is what my mother says when I cut a slice of bread. She says: "That is going to go straight to your hips." Here is what my mother says when a friend offers me dessert at dinner. She says: "You can have a small bite. Do not finish it." Here is what my mother says when I look at myself in the mirror after a shower. She says: "Your stomach has not been the same since the baby. You should have done something about that by now." Here is what my mother says when I get dressed for an event. She says: "That dress is not flattering. People are going to notice." Here is what my mother says when I am served a plate in a restaurant. She says: "Eat half of that. You can take the rest home." Here is what my mother says when I am hungry between meals. She says: "Hungry is not a reason to eat. Hungry is a feeling. Sit with it." Here is what my mother says when I cry. She says: "Whatever it is, eating is not going to fix it." Here is what my mother says when I look at a photograph of myself. She says: "Why did you let them take it from that angle?" Here is what my mother says when I have done a hard week and my husband puts a slice of cake in front of me on a Saturday night. She says: "He is going to think you have given up." That is ten. There are more. My mother is not in this room. My mother is at her own house, thirty minutes away. She has not said any of these things to me out loud in about a decade. She does not need to. She said all of them to me out loud between 1991 and 2003. She said them so many times that my brain wrote them down. The brain has been the one playing them back for the last twenty years, in her exact voice, with her exact timing, at every meal I have eaten as an adult woman. I have not eaten a meal alone with my own thoughts in thirty-three years. My daughter Emma is twelve. She came home from school two Tuesdays ago. She had been crying on the bus. A girl in her class had told her she had thick legs. Emma sat at the kitchen table where I am sitting now, and she put her face in her hands, and she said: "Mom. Are my legs thick?" I had a sentence already in my mouth. The sentence was: "We can do something about that, sweetie." It was queued up in my throat. It was not a sentence I had thought. It was a sentence that lived in me, ready to deploy, the way my mother's sentences had lived in her ready to deploy when I had asked her the same question at nine. I did not say it. I want to write that down because I am not sure I will believe it later. I did not say it. I held the sentence in my mouth for about three seconds. I felt my mother in my body. I felt the sentence on my tongue. I closed my mouth around it. I put my hand on my daughter's hand. I said: "Your legs are perfect. They take you everywhere you need to go. The girl who said that has been told something painful about her own body. I am sorry that happened to you on the bus." Emma cried for a few more minutes. She got up. She went to the kitchen and made herself a piece of toast and ate it. I sat at the table and shook for about twenty minutes. I had been three seconds away from passing it down. The sentence was the sentence my mother had said to me in our kitchen in 1992 when I had come home asking the same question. I had been about to give it to my daughter exactly the way I had received it, twenty-nine years later, on the same kind of Tuesday afternoon. I started a thing about three weeks ago. I had been searching on my phone late at night for "how to stop hearing my mother in my head." I do not know what I had thought I would find. I am 41 and I have a master's degree and I had typed that sentence into a search engine at 2 AM like a person hoping a stranger had written down the answer. I clicked an article. The article mentioned the Liven app. Five minutes a day. Body work. Not therapy. I downloaded it that night. I have been doing it. I am not going to tell you what the five minutes feel like. I am going to tell you that the sentences are not as loud as they were three weeks ago. They are still there. The volume is different. I do not know how to describe it more precisely than that. I made dinner last Friday for Emma and my husband Mark. I made pasta. I made a real plate of pasta, with the sauce my mother would have skimmed. I served Emma a real plate of it. I did not look at her plate. I did not measure her plate against my plate. I did not, in fact, register Emma's plate at all, except as the food on my daughter's plate that my daughter was eating. I had not been to a dinner in twelve years that I had not measured my daughter's plate at. I had been measuring it since she could hold a fork. I had been doing it the way my mother had measured mine for nine years on a bathroom scale and forty-one years in her own head. Mark noticed. He did not say anything. He looked at me across the table for one second. He did not need to say anything. He has been married to me for eighteen years. He knew what he was watching. After dinner Emma asked if there were leftovers because she wanted to take some for lunch the next day. I said yes. I packed her lunch myself. I put a real serving in the container. I did not weigh it. I did not photograph it. I did not, when she walked out of the kitchen, sit at the counter for ten minutes regretting what I had put in. I have been regretting what I have put in plastic containers for thirty-three years. Last Friday I packed a lunch and I went to bed. I am 41. My mother is 68. She is alive. She is going to come over for dinner this Sunday. She is going to comment on my body when she walks in the door. She has commented on my body within the first three minutes of every visit she has made to my house in eighteen years. I do not know yet what I am going to say when she does it on Sunday. I am working on it. I have not figured it out. The sentence is not ready in my mouth the way the wrong sentence had been ready for Emma. What I know is that I am going to make dinner on Sunday and I am going to serve myself a real plate and I am going to eat it in front of my mother. Whatever she says about it. I am 41. The notebook in her drawer in 1991 was the last thing I let her write in. She is not writing in this body anymore.