We drove up and down the main drag looking for parking. The side streets were lit up with the sun, front porches and old-fashioned windows and bright colors. I knew I loved Dustin still, even though I was unhappy. I knew we had been very happy once, and I had staked my life on the blind belief we would stay that way.
Dustin and I met when he was working a closing shift at my neighborhood bookstore. He knew who I was because the store was carrying an anthology about sex I’d recently edited, Coming and Crying. He wrote a small post on his blog about my essay, referring to me as O’Connell and praising my writing. Small detail: The piece was about the time I had sex with someone in the bathroom stall of a bar. I guess you could say that set a tone.
I did miss, if not the sex itself, then the camaraderie that came with it, the giggling run to the bathroom after, with messy hair, to pee. I knew he was right, in theory, that we needed the tension to break between us every now and then, to help us feel like allies again, at least for a few hours. I wanted to feel the way I used to, that sex was where we best loved each other, that it was the why, the how.
I wanted to want to have sex. Does that count for anything? I knew that I’d enjoyed it once. The first few weeks Dustin and I were together, we had sex like I imagine any new couple does: right when we came in the door, again before bed, and then sometimes in the middle of the night, one of us waking up and reaching over and then, wordlessly, off we went. In the minutes before one of us was supposed to be out the door and on the way to work, we’d be tearing off the clothes we’d just put on and fucking on the edge of the bed. We’d met in September. He’d left the bookstore with me that night and I don’t think we got a full night’s sleep until we parted ways for Christmas.
Even before I met Dustin, I’d spent years pursuing sex, obsessing over it, thinking of intimacy as the main reason to be alive or the surest way to feel alive. I suspected it was the key to understanding everything about people, all our shame and desire and hurt and joy. Now “a healthy sex life” seemed like an aspiration I should have but felt no connection to. Sex struck me as not just repugnant but quaint—the province of naive people who had too much time on their hands. People who didn’t have children.
We finally found a parking spot and climbed out of the car on a backstreet. Dustin strapped the baby into the carrier on his chest, mumbled something, then took off walking in the other direction. Okay, then. I trailed behind them for a few blocks, lagging in mild protest, then finally gave in and asked him where we were going.
“Huh?”
“Where are we going?”
“Oh. Here,” he said to me as he headed toward the door of what I now saw, with no small amount of horror, was our local progressive sex-toy shop. I want to say I laughed at this, one of those Isn’t that rich? laughs, but in fact I viscerally recoiled, then nodded, quietly accepting my fate. As much as I didn’t want to go in, I didn’t want to talk about why I didn’t want to go in even more. I dragged my tired body down the sidewalk in the sun, squinting at the door, which was tastefully lined with white craft paper to prevent any innocent passersby from catching sight of people like us rifling through heaps of dildos.
I cursed Dustin in my head as we approached the door, but my stream of Fuck yous was replaced by the sound of angels singing when I made out a sign Scotch-taped to the window: NO MINORS ALLOWED. My deus ex machina. I spun around, victorious.
The baby was strapped to his father’s chest, his little socked feet kicking in the air, his arms waving. At eight months, he was at what I liked to call peak baby, the image you hold in your head when you hear the word baby. A minor, indisputably.
“No minors allowed!” I shouted, trying not to grin.
“Oh, it’s fine,” Dustin said, barreling past me.
I stood there frozen on the sidewalk, choking on words like a cowardly cartoon character at the mouth of a cave. That is to say, the sensible one. “No way! Hey! Dustin! No. We can’t go in there with him!”
Dustin just shook his head without looking at me and flung open the door, swaying his hips, holding the baby’s feet and jostling him around in defiance. He was so clearly the mother I’d never be; everything came naturally. I followed, head low. What choice did I have?
The store was full of people even though it was the middle of the afternoon on a weekday. Everyone looked up—sex toy in hand—to gape at us when we came through the door. I shut down in that specific shopping way, the one where you walk in circles around the store, touching nothing and feeling hollow.
Dustin wagged vibrators under my nose like they were smelling salts, blue and pink and purple. They all seemed small and sad and snailish. I turned them all away. “What’s wrong with it?” he said, holding something sleek and egg-shaped.
There was a time when I loved vibrators, maybe too much. When I was single, when I was virginal, when I was working from home all day. I ordered a waterproof vibrator, the Blue Dolphin, as an undergrad and would make a show of putting it into my shower caddie and walking down the hallway with it to the communal showers. I buzzed myself on random afternoons in the room I shared with two other women, hiding behind our three bureaus in case either of them came home unannounced.
But now I had the real thing, and that was problem enough. Postpartum knife dick is the term women in my Facebook-moms group coined to describe the shooting pain some of us got when we tried to do it. It was as if my body were sticking up for itself when my mind couldn’t be trusted. The parenting websites warned about it, referencing vaginal dryness (someone should really come up with a better term for this) brought on by the drop in estrogen that comes when you give birth. They said that breastfeeding would prolong this state of being literally and figuratively sucked dry. I believed this information, found it comforting, even, but I also couldn’t help but feel betrayed that my own body had succumbed to it. I was surprised to discover how much pride I had felt about something as involuntary as vaginal lubrication, that moment when a man is taken aback, whispering, “You’re so wet,” in the dark.
I wanted my body to do the talking for me. I wanted to carry around a printout explaining the hormonal makeup of a postpartum, breastfeeding woman. I wanted a valid excuse, a scientific one. It’s like menopause, hormonally. I wanted a counternarrative to the finger-wagging keep-the-spark-alive message I’d internalized so deeply.
The parenting books, at least, were understanding. They said you were tired. That you were worried the baby might start crying as soon as you were, against all odds, about to come. They said you might be “adjusting to your new body” or actively denying the reality of it. You might be tensing up as you waited for him to touch your C-section scar and the surrounding area, which was, in a way that made you feel short of breath, still numb and might always be. You might feel “touched out,” they said, as if a sentient sack of potatoes were always, somehow, right on top of you. You might feel, even when the baby was asleep in his crib, like some part of you could not, might never, fully relax again. To lose yourself in the way that good sex required felt dangerous or impossible when you were so inextricably entwined with someone else. Who was not your partner.
I also spent enough time reading baby forums and Facebook-mom groups to know that I wasn’t alone. I knew other parents let sex disappear from their lives, telling themselves they were simply too busy or too tired. Some people claimed they didn’t feel bad about it; they just figured they’d get around to fucking each other again eventually. Other women, under the cloak of anonymity, were more righteous: “I gave him a child. The least he can do is jerk it in the shower and not complain.” I tried reading a post like this out loud to Dustin once, passive-aggressively, but it blew up in my face when he told me it would be “so hot” if I told him to go jerk off.
As much as I resented the pressure, I wasn’t ready to embrace a sexless relationship. Part of me worried that if I gave up on summoning sexual desire now, at this seemingly critical juncture, it would never come back. What if my body forgot? What if I
lost the thread entirely? What if I woke up a few years from now and I was a Diane Keaton character in a turtleneck, screaming because my husband saw me naked? It didn’t seem that far off, honestly.
Another camp seemed to treat sex-after-kids as a sort of solemn duty. Women who took this approach believed sex to be a vital part of a romantic relationship and tended to be horrified by anyone who neglected it. All it took was a few minutes of obligation, of joyless effort, to keep him pleased, they argued. Wasn’t this sort of sexual compromise worth it in the long run? I’m sure Dustin would have agreed. He used to claim that his worst nightmare was me letting him fuck me but secretly checking out in my head, unable to communicate that I didn’t want to keep going. But that was before we had the baby.
Maybe the duty-sex women were onto something; maybe an obligatory hand job every couple of nights could have kept us connected. But something about that never sat quite right with me. Wasn’t it hard enough, as a woman, to remember your own desire? I worried that if I took wanting it out of the equation, I’d slip into some default feminine mode and lose any ground I’d gained. I imagined myself faking orgasms, dissociating from my body, ignoring what I actually wanted for so long that I’d no longer be able to remember wanting to have sex for its own sake.
Either approach seemed like a betrayal of self at a time when I didn’t have much self to spare. I said no to sex because it was something I could still say no to, because how I felt was so new and complex, I needed to figure it out. I knew that if I didn’t, I would start layering obfuscations over it until I couldn’t go back. So I claimed my body for myself whenever I could. I guarded against all intruders, even if the intruder was the man I lived with, a man who loved me in all my complexity. I was all he wanted, he told me. And I just couldn’t give myself to him.
I followed Dustin around the sex-toy store, doing a bad impression of someone being a good sport. A supportive partner. I let him hand me cartoonish dildos and held them and tried to look amused even though I wanted to throw them in his face. I felt like I was in the wrong room at a party, like I’d accidentally wandered into the host’s bedroom. I was afraid to sound unreasonable. I was afraid I was being unreasonable. I didn’t know yet that a willingness to share your unreasonable feelings was part of what love was. Communication and all that crap. We used to tell each other everything, back when everything was good.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
I thought about how I should probably tell him that sometimes when he was looming over me in missionary position and I was staring up at the ceiling, flat on my back, enduring it, I got flashbacks to childbirth. To being immobile, fight-or-flight adrenaline rushing through my body but numb from the chest down, my abdomen sliced open.
I couldn’t tell him because I wasn’t sure I would ever really come back from it or from the feeling that these experiences were related, that they both felt, or made me feel, essentially female.
I knew that fucking was a shortcut to that allied feeling we were missing so acutely as we went about our zero-sum workdays, but even on the nights when I thought, Okay, I would be open to sex, I’d still rebuff him when he reached out to me, feeling like I didn’t have the wherewithal to face down all the possible outcomes. Would I get the knife dick? If I managed to relax physically, would my fear of it still manage to ruin the moment because I was just waiting for the pain? Would I lie there trying to remember what it was like before, when I hated my body less (but, let’s be real, still hated it), when at least my pussy was in working order, a source of pleasure, function, confidence. Would he notice I was in my head and then stop and ask me if I was okay, and would I then cry? If I cried, would I try to hide it, bury my head in his shoulder and hope he didn’t notice? If he did notice, would he stop abruptly and lie next to me and ask what was wrong, and would I turn my back to him and stare at the wall, unable to explain?
I stood, listless, before a display rack of cock rings. “Hey,” I said, pointing at them. “These are cheap.” Dustin walked over to me holding a vibrator with Bluetooth capability in one hand.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Do you want to get one?”
I shrugged. No, I didn’t want to get one. But if we had to get something, I didn’t want to spend more than $8.99. I looked up to see the baby reaching down with his chubby baby fingers to touch the tip of the vibrator Dustin was holding, and horror passed over my body in a wave. That was it. I snatched it (the vibrator) from him, lay it down on the display case, and, without saying a word, turned and fled, flinging open the paper-lined door and catching my breath outside in the cold air and sun. I took off down the block but had only a moment or two to myself before Dustin was beside me, irate, asking me what my problem was.
I kept walking away from him, shaking my head. This is a move I managed only on occasion but always found invigorating. A failure of maturity, even character, yes. A result of my inability to say how I feel, of stuffing it down and down until I couldn’t keep it in anymore and off I went, moving purposefully, finally, and without looking back. I’d make it a block or two in whatever direction was away from Dustin and then, having broken free, I could feel my pulse slow.
When he caught up to me this time, I stood there frozen, trying not to laugh at the baby, who was happy as ever, not yet able to pick up on all the rage between us. I hoped.
“What’s going on,” Dustin said sharply, fed up.
“Sorry,” I blurted. “But being in there…it’s like you’re rubbing it in my face.”
“Rubbing what in your face?”
“Uh, the fact that I have no sex drive? That breastfeeding has dried me up, left me with nothing? That I don’t even recognize my body anymore, and it’s terrifying, and you have no idea what it’s like? And instead of asking me how I am, you just bug me and pout about how you’re not getting laid. How would you feel if you lost your sex drive?”
Dustin looked at me, confused.
“What?” I said, crying, trying to get out of the way of people walking by us on the sidewalk.
“I didn’t know you didn’t have a sex drive. You didn’t tell me that.” He was choked up, almost whispering. Stricken. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or yell. What? I thought I was telling him every time I rolled away from him in bed, every time I flinched when he reached out to me, when he slipped his hand down my pants or up my shirt.
“It’s a thing that happens to a lot of people, you know! It’s totally normal, but no one tells you!” I was like a lawyer building her case.
“I didn’t know!” he said. Both of us were incredulous.
“Well, then, what did you think was going on?” I said.
“I dunno, I just thought you didn’t want me.”
“What?” I said. I got a sinking feeling in my stomach, seeing the past nine months of our life tick by as if in a movie montage, moments where I thought he knew what I was thinking. Wouldn’t he have noticed if he weren’t so stuck in his own fuckless story? Shouldn’t he have known? Apparently not.
“So you really didn’t know?”
He shrugged, clearly hurt. “You never told me.” Throughout this conversation, he was bouncing the baby.
I wanted to lie down right there, in front of the Japanese stationery shop, and never get up. Why had I never told him? When did life get so delicate, I wondered—both too tenuous and too cherished—for me to say certain things out loud? The stakes were higher, the thoughts were darker, and our relationship was weaker than it had ever been.
Didn’t I used to say whatever was on my mind? What’s the worst thing that could happen? I would ask myself. We break up? We’re sad? I have to find a new apartment?
Now Dustin still felt familiar but not quite safe to confide in, like he was too invested in my feelings for me to be honest with him. When all your thoughts are shitty and even you don’t trust them, why communicate them to the person you are supposed to love the most? Or so went the argument in my head. My feelings felt dangerous. Potentia
lly destructive. I’d spent almost a year waiting for him to understand, to grant me a dispensation, to recognize that our dry spell was just one part of a bigger, scarier paradigm shift. I wanted him to see that I was scared, too, that we wanted the same thing, real intimacy. But first I wanted him to leave me alone. I didn’t want to have to tell him.
Maybe I had been too ashamed to say anything. I tried to imagine a parallel universe, one that was kinder and more forgiving. One where I was kinder and more forgiving. Where a dry spell after kids was seen not as some moral failure, a reproductive bait-and-switch for men to groan and joke darkly about, as if we women had trapped our partners and now had no more use for them. A universe where I wasn’t paralyzed, afraid to face what I had interpreted as “a bad sign,” a failure (mine) of imagination or nerve. A failure to connect.
But I hadn’t told him anything. I’d just turned my back to him in bed.
“Let’s just go to the car,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, and we headed off into the sunset, defeated. We rode home not-talking to each other, which was easy to do with the baby there.
If only I could have seen into the future then, by some act of grace, and known for sure that things would be okay. I could have sat Dustin down and told him to wait for me on the other side. Let’s let the dust settle and accept that I’m a nursing mammal and everything’s in flux and we’re scared but know that in a year or so, everything will be different. One day the baby will nap for three hours every day and on the weekend, after we both go to our respective corners and stare at our phones long enough to regain a sense of equilibrium, one of us—okay, it’ll still be you—you will creep down to whatever room I’m in and I’ll be happy to see you. Know that I won’t jump at your touch, that I won’t turn my back to you, that eventually I will feel an almost adolescent reawakening of desire, that of course it’s always you I wanted, and want, that logistics and baggage and pressure and getting too into my own head will always be part of the equation, but someday, thank Jesus, I’ll be genuinely horny again.
And Now We Have Everything_On Motherhood Before I Was Ready Page 14
