Aside from being fruitlessly libidinous, that year in New York City was also the beginning of my long recovery from a decade-long eating disorder—Anorexia Nervosa—that had left me with the emotional make-up of a fourteen-year-old in the body of a twenty-four-year-old. For ten years I had been on a trivial pursuit of thinness that I was suddenly determined to find meaning in, in order to fully recover. And I was starting, to find meaning. I had stopped starving, drinking, drugging and over-exercising, all of which defined my Anorexia at some point. Instead, I practiced yoga and followed a healthy dietician-enforced meal-plan to up my caloric intake (and ate lots of pasta.) I read esoteric books about learning to love myself and did tarot card readings and heart-opening visualizations. I practiced acceptance of the body I had for so long despised, degraded, devalued, deprived and deconstructed both mentally and physically. I was off the beaten path—to healing.

A few months before moving to New York City something inside me shifted. I think it happened in a dark bar after working a twelve-hour "graveyard" shift, as a bartender, drinking gold tequila, shot after shot, on an empty stomach and doing lines of cocaine on the white toilet seat cover in between vomiting and passing out with my head on the seat and my arms wrapped around the bowl. I think it happened then, on one of those nights, that I ran out of stamina. Like an exhausted racehorse, pushed to run too far and too fast for too long, whose heart suddenly explodes. Instead, my "explosion" was a silent collapse of my will power, a giving in, a surrendering.

The word "surrender" subsequently became a chapter heading in the book I went on to write on my return to my home country, South Africa, after my year in New York City. On my return I also began therapy with a psychologist specializing in eating disorders and I joined an eating disorder support group. I started writing this book, my memoir of anorexia, two years into active recovery after a woman in my support group asked me how I had healed. I said I had too much to say and would have to write a book. So I did. Writing the book was an attempt to make sense of the chaos of my disorder. It was a testament to having survived. And it became a commemoration of the person I was (Anorexia/Ana). As I wrote, rewrote, restructured sentences and fleshed out themes, I restructured my life and fleshed out my once emaciated body. The rough drafts began to take shape as a real book as I started to take shape as my real self.

My book took eight years to birth. During the last two years of pushing it out into the world—ike birthing an elephant that now only weighs 11.2 ounces according to Amazon's shipping weight details—and hunting for an agent and a publisher and eventually choosing to publish it independently, I also struggled with infertility. My sister said to me during those times that maybe I needed to birth my first baby, the book, before I could conceive my next baby. She was probably right in that bookish sense that only authors who have mothered or fathered a book, or sisters with sagacious intuition, would know. But I couldn't hear her words. I was too stricken by the unspeakable, and way too busy googling how to control the outcome of my prognosis.

Since I had started recovery eight years before TTC (trying to conceive) and had only had amenorrhea for nine months during my entire Anorexia (a miracle seeing as I was malnourished and underweight), it was doubtful that Anorexia was the cause of my infertility. In fact, an eating disorder fertility specialist confirmed this. So, for 19 months while TTC, I did everything I could think of. I stopped drinking alcohol and started taking prenatal vitamins. I bought books to learn how to chart my fertility according to my ovulation cycles. I took my basal body temperature every morning with a beeping thermometer that nearly cost me my marriage and I fastidiously charted each time my husband and I had perfectly timed sex, after which I lay on my back with my legs up against the wall and my hips raised on pillows hoping to channel his sperm to my egg.

Four months into it (by the way: every single mother I knew had gotten pregnant within a four month window) I started acupuncture and drank nameless, bitter Chinese herbal potions and went for regular needle sessions. And each month that I returned home unfertilized, like an unpollenated flower, the acupuncturist would raise her bowed head and say, "Next month! Baby no wan come to sad mama." Month after month this sad mama hoped and hoped and hoped that this would be the month. It was that hope that kept me going. Until one day I recalled a lesson I had learned from Johnny Depp at age twelve while watching an episode of 21 Jump Street that, "Hope is all that's left when you're too scared to face reality."

The reality was that a year had gone by and my husband and I were still TTC. The reality was that according to the medical literature I was now officially: infertile. The reality was my worst nightmare come true. And it made me even more obsessed with getting pregnant. I avoided parks and malls, which seem to be sticky hives for pregnant women. I emailed every mother I knew to ask exactly how they got pregnant. I even called up a birthing center for an interview, just in case, only to be told that I had to first actually be pregnant before interviewing. Months later, disappointed with Eastern medicine, I booked an appointment for my husband and I at a conventional fertility treatment clinic.

Six months and three thousand dollars later, after having blood tests, urine samples taken, cameras inserted through my cervix that navigated my uterus like microscopic submarines, pregnant women's urine injected into my buttocks to stimulate egg production, a diagnosis of low-ovarian reserve and two failed intra-uterine inseminations (IUI's), I finally lost all hope. The next step was for us to either keep on trying with monthly IUI's or to move on to $20,000 IVF treatment. The day I was supposed to start my third round of fertility medication, I got drunk instead. Then I booked my husband and I a follow-up appointment with the fertility specialist to "discuss our options." She could see I was burnt out and told me to take a break from it all for a few months. To discard the thermometer, stop the timed sex and take it easy. And when I left her office that day something in me shifted in the same way that it had ten years before at the bar. Like an exhausted racehorse, I surrendered.

One month later, we found out I was pregnant.

I attribute this blessing in part to having substituted the word "hope", that was my daily mantra, for the word "faith." Hope led to disappointment and unrealistic expectations; it was the cause of my pain. Faith was a far more powerful, immediate, active and alive force. Hope focused on the future, whereas faith on the moment. Hope was pitiful whereas faith was strength. I made the decision that day in her office to have faith that in time I would get pregnant, only I would have to give up trying to make it happen, just the same as years before I had to give up trying to fight my Anorexia in order to begin recovery. So, when hope was all that was left when I was too scared to face my reality, I found Faith and with it, the miracle of motherhood.