It’s easy to be body-positive when you’re, by all accounts, thin.

My aunt was, at her heaviest, well over 400 pounds.

She didn’t get there quickly. She got there over years. Every year ending with her a little heavier than when it’d started.

She once told us the story of how she lost a bar of soap under her own boob and didn’t find it until the next time she took a bath.

She was funny. She owned her body, but she didn’t love it. She felt it grew around her without her explicit permission.

Then she decided to have a gastric bypass. A miracle surgery. Weight loss without diets or exercise.

She was excited and nervous. She thought it would mean she and her husband would have sex again (they hadn’t in a very long time). She thought it would mean the end to her body hatred and discomfort.

But it didn’t.

She lost weight, a hell of a lot in a short amount of time. Her excess skin hung off her. She could stretch it a couple of feet off her. She still had a good sense of humor about it, but anyone could tell she was hurting.

She hoped to save up for another surgery, one where they’d excise all that excess skin, but she passed before she could have it done. She ended up in the hospital with complications and died of a staph infection.

I’ve always been of “normal” weight (according to a BMI calculator). I’ve spent most of my life between 130 and 140 pounds at 5’4. I’ve never even struggled much at losing weight when I’ve gained some extra.

I didn’t realize until recently though that I fear being overweight, that my aunt’s story might be my subconscious’s cautionary tale.

I’m not of “normal” weight right now. At six weeks postpartum, I’m 165 pounds, over 20 pounds heavier than when I got pregnant with my daughter. Officially overweight with a BMI of 28.32 (a BMI of 25–29.9 is considered overweight).

“I’m fat,” I told my husband, breaking my rule of never talking disdainfully of my body or someone else’s.

“You’re not fat. You just had a baby. It’s going to take time for your body to return to normal,” he told me.

I wanted to argue. Tell him, “I AM fat.” Get him to agree, but I didn’t know why I wanted to accomplish that, so I let it go.

When our baby went to bed earlier than expected and we could have had sex, I didn’t make a move and he didn’t either.

There’s nothing good in the tale of my aunt. If you’re fat, your husband will stop having sex with you, you’ll go to extreme lengths to fix it, and then you’ll die.

I’ve always believed things happen for a reason, even the shittiest of things, but I don’t know why that happened to my poor dead aunt. I don’t know why I also feel so badly about my own body when I’ve always prided myself on being body-positive.

But it’s easy to be body-positive when you’re, by all accounts, thin, when your body looks and does as you and the rest of society believe it should.

Maybe the moral lesson of my aunt’s story is to check your gluttony, your excess. Maybe it’s to not be vain, or that there are no shortcuts or quick fixes.

But I don’t know if lives are meant to have wrapped-up-in-a-bow moral lessons. Every story can have a happy ending if you end it at the right spot.

I just know I loved my aunt very much, and now she’s dead.

I just know that my body brought actual life into this world, but I keep wanting to scold it, like it’s an unruly teen that I just caught smoking in the backyard, like it needs to get its grades up before the end of the semester or I’ll ground it.

I just know that my stomach has a pooch. My back hurts. My legs swell at the kneecaps.

I just know that I worry my husband won’t have sex with me again. I want to have sex with him, but I’m not sure he wants to have sex with me.

I wonder if this is how it started with my aunt. She stopped believing she deserved pleasure, so instead of loving her new body and letting her husband love her new body, she turned away from him. Her body became the barrier instead of a conduit to pleasure.

There isn’t a happy ending to this story yet. My happy ending would be this extra 20 pounds miraculously gone. Your happy ending might be that I love the skin I’m in.

Right now, I just feel warned. There’s something I’m supposed to make of this time, this moment, this body, that I haven’t learned yet.