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just one of about ten that the doctors had coming from my<br />
bed. Due to my baby’s unusual breech position, I had a complicated<br />
birth that finally ended in an emergency Cesarean.<br />
But I had a great labor.<br />
My friend Barbara confessed to me after her first child that<br />
she had never been so turned on in her life. When the baby’s<br />
head was crowning, she called out to her hus band over and<br />
over, “I want to come, touch me, please touch me!”—and he<br />
thought she was hysterical.<br />
We are utterly unaccustomed to seeing birthing as a sexual<br />
experience. A lot of us think of childbirth as some thing close<br />
to death; at least, that’s what I was afraid of.<br />
I heard women screaming in the rooms next to<br />
me at the hospital, and I knew those screams<br />
weren’t exclusively from physical pain but<br />
from wild, wild fear. It’s terribly frightening<br />
when you don’t know what your body is doing<br />
and when your sexuality is divorced from this incredible<br />
process. Being afraid makes the pain much worse and makes<br />
your stamina unknowable.<br />
There was a traffic jam of births at the city hospitals the week<br />
I had my daughter. It was about nine months after the big<br />
earthquake hit San Francisco, and apparently staying home<br />
had been a fertile pastime during that other wise sobering period.<br />
The other women who had children the day and night I<br />
was in the hospital did not appear to have husbands at their<br />
sides. It was easy for me to imagine their stories: They were<br />
single; they were lesbian; they had husbands who didn’t want<br />
to see them that way; they had husbands who had left them<br />
earlier in their pregnancies; they had husbands in the service<br />
and far away.<br />
I didn’t read a single parenting book that reflected any of<br />
these lives, although they are as commonplace as concep tion<br />
itself. The fractured fairy tale (“Mommy and Daddy love each<br />
other very much....”) is only resonant in the sense that parents<br />
need to be loved and nurtured, because they are about<br />
to give of themselves in a way that they never dreamed possible<br />
before.<br />
If the mother doesn’t receive tenderness and passion during<br />
her nine months, the bitterness she develops lasts well beyond<br />
childbirth—her kids will know all about it. Perhaps I could<br />
encourage childbirth professionals to ad vocate good sex during<br />
pregnancy as a key to psychologi cally healthy children.<br />
After the birth, you will get doctor’s instructions to abs tain<br />
from sex for the next six weeks. We’ve all heard the woman<br />
who says, “I don’t care if I don’t have sex for the next six<br />
years.” But if her pussy is so sore, why can’t she enjoy oral<br />
sex? Her breasts are leaking colostrum, ready to start expressing<br />
milk, and they need to be sucked by someone who<br />
knows about sucking breasts—babies don’t always get the<br />
hang of it instantly, or at mom’s command.<br />
The truth is, this six-weeks rule is arbitrary, and it’s based on<br />
the fear of an infection resulting from a man ejaculating inside<br />
the vagina. There is a lot more to “sex” than this. Nothing<br />
magic happens at the end of six weeks. Not everyone’s os<br />
and vaginal passageway are in the same condition after birth.<br />
Having had a Cesarean, mine had not been through a fullblown<br />
vaginal birth. Without know ing exactly what risk I was<br />
taking, but knowing that the doctor didn’t know what he was<br />
I have a great photograph of me<br />
in the delivery room, dilated to six<br />
centimeters, with a blissful look<br />
on my face and my vibrator nestled<br />
against my pubic bone.<br />
talking about either, I came home from the hospital and made<br />
love on the sixth day after my daughter was born.<br />
I’ve spoken with many women who admitted the same. “My<br />
husband and I had waited so long for this child,” said my<br />
nurse practitioner/midwife, who had a child after she was 40,<br />
“that we had to be intimate right away.” I ap preciated her using<br />
the word intimate, because I don’t think it’s the case that<br />
you just have this wild hare to get it on once the baby is born.<br />
You want a closeness, a release, and a celebration that you<br />
haven’t necessarily experienced during labor.<br />
My midwife also told me that she started asking her patients<br />
how soon after childbirth they had resumed inter course. Lots<br />
of people break the rules, as you can imagine, and she found<br />
that women who had intercourse earlier on also resumed periods<br />
much sooner than those who waited. This little discovery—from<br />
a professional who wouldn’t ordinarily tell me such<br />
things—reminded me again how little we know because no<br />
one shares taboo information.<br />
Nursing is another source of mixed feelings, erotic and otherwise.<br />
One woman winces in pain from chapped and bleeding<br />
nipples, while another has orgasms from her baby’s suckling.<br />
Again, if these things were brought out in the open, a lot of<br />
nipple soreness would disappear. Breast-feeding does not<br />
come instinctively, and it helps to have someone show you,<br />
as well as tell you, how to nurse comfort ably.<br />
I was satisfied just to nurse my baby competently. My erotic<br />
feelings came not so much from my baby’s sucking as from<br />
feeling my breasts express themselves at other times. Sexual<br />
arousal will make your breasts leak when you’re lactating, another<br />
important fact missing in most parent handbooks. As<br />
much as I have lectured on G-spot orgasms, I had never had<br />
EGG SEX 41
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