SEXIS WRONG

Baby Love
Christen Clifford
Before I became a mother, I believed that motherhood would
change me: My maternal instinct would smooth me, balance
me, make me patient, give me a nurturing generosity. I’d become
a better person, but I wouldn’t lose myself. I’d breastfeed
exclusively but still find time to write. I’d make homemade
baby food but still fuck. I had it all figured out.
I bought all the new books on mothering that I read about
in the New York Times and the New Yorker—Bitch in the
House, The Mask of Motherhood, The Myth of Motherhood,
The Price of Motherhood, A Life’s Work, Fresh Milk, and a
book a friend recommended—Fermentation—the only erotic
novel I could find that featured a pregnant woman. But no
one else’s narrative could prepare me for the next stage of
my sexuality.
People always tell you that becoming a parent will change
everything, but what I didn’t count on was that it wouldn’t
change me. The problem is that I’m still the same person, a
sex-obsessed neurotic facing a new reality: My husband and
I love our son more than we love each other. It’s like being
in a permanent threesome, the kind where one person—not
you—gets all the attention.
How do I summarize my sex life before the baby? Well, I had
one. I lost my virginity at fifteen, had four partners by the time I
was seventeen. I considered myself pansexual, theoretically as
open to getting turned on by a coffee table as a person. I had
boyfriends and a few girlfriends, some serial monogamy with
lots of fucking around in between. I reveled in being provocative.
Fueled by alcohol, I instigated group sex at parties. I tried
everything I could think of: oral, anal, BDSM, and beyond.
I confused sex with love most of the time, and sometimes that
was okay and sometimes it wasn’t.
This essay originally appeared—in slightly different form—on Nerve.com.
I met Ken when I was 25 and he was 34. What we had was
probably typical: In the beginning it was all love and lust,
fucking in bathrooms and trains, dancing all night, having sex
all day, experimenting madly, and feeling like we couldn’t
get enough of each other. Eventually, of course, we did get
enough of each other and slowed down. On weekend mornings,
we did nothing but fuck and eat and read the paper.
Then weekend mornings became more and more about reading
the paper.
When I hit 30, we decided we were ready for a baby. Sex
without birth control was hot. I hadn’t fucked without a condom
since I was eighteen, and the skin-on-skin friction was
arousing, but so was the idea of sex as an extension of humanity,
of something bigger than just us. I had one of those
dream pregnancies—I exercised every day, felt great, and
looked fabulous. It suited me, and I reveled in it. I had new tits
that I absolutely adored. A certain type of man paid me a lot
of attention. The hormones were like being on E all the time;
my husband and I had sex every day. At parties I listen-ed
politely to the horror stories of couples who didn’t have sex
for four months after their babies were born and was privately
dismissive: “That’ll never happen to us.”
But we were, in fact, just like everyone else: Our sex life went
down the toilet right away. It started with the birth, which
didn’t go as planned. Felix was premature, so I had him in
a hospital with labor-inducing drugs, not in a hot tub with a
midwife. Still, I refused painkillers because I had this fantasy
that I was gonna be a rock star in there.
I wasn’t. I was in diabolical pain and shat everywhere, including
standing up on the bed while barking at the nurse, “No
I’m not having the baby I’m just taking a shit put something
underneath me now.”
BABY LOVE 43