Because I Said So (23 page)

So I stand by my flag of racial awareness—an obstacle to progress some might argue, but perhaps I point the way. In either case, history cannot condemn me because, in the final analysis, I am a mother and I have only the best intentions.

Motherlove

A y e l e t Wa l d m a n

The mothers’ group
is an omnipresent feature of the landscape of contemporary American parenting. Like the baby wipe and the ExerSaucer, it is a fairly recent invention that seems by its very ubiquity to have acquired an institutional authority, even an inevitability, like the yearly Pap smear or attendance at a decent four-year college.

A woman joins a mothers’ group for many reasons—to make friends with other mothers with babies of more or less the same age, to have a reason to get dressed and brush her teeth, to share tales of sleep-deprivation woes. All good and rational motives, and all nonsense. I have been in many mothers’ groups—Mommy and Me, Gymboree, Second-Time Moms—and each time, within three minutes, the conversation invariably comes around to the topic of pri-mary interest: how often mommy feels compelled to put out.

Everyone wants to be reassured that no one else is having sex either.

These are women who, for the most part, are comfortable with their bodies, consider themselves sexual beings, know their way around a clitoris, and, while they may not have ever successfully found it themselves, are willing at least to credit the existence of the G-spot.

These are even women who, by and large, love their husbands or partners.* Still, almost none of them is having any sex at all.

* I live in Berkeley, a place where some people are married, some are not; some people are heterosexual, some are not. Most women in my mothers’ groups are married to men, but others are married to or in long-term relationships
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There is general agreement about the reasons for this bed death. There are the easy answers: they are exhausted; it still hurts, even months after giving birth; they are so physically
available
to their babies—nursing them, carrying them, stroking them, touching them—how could they bear to be physically available to anyone else? But the real reason, or at least the most profound, difficult reason for this lack of sex, is that their passion has been refocused. Instead of concentrating their ardor on their husbands, they concentrate it on their babies. Where once their husbands were the center of their passionate universes, there is now a new sun, a new source of light in whose orbit they revolve. Their desire for this usurper is not carnal, not sexual, but it
is
sensual and lustful, and it has entirely replaced the erotic longing they once felt for their husbands. Libido, as they once knew it, is gone, and in its place is all-consuming maternal desire. There is absolute unanimity on this topic, and instant reassurance.

Except, that is, from me.

I am the only woman in Mommy and Me who is getting laid.

This could give me a sense of smug well-being. I could sit in the room and gloat over my wonderful marriage. I could even use the opportunity to fantasize about my gorgeous husband, whose broad shoulders, long, curly hair, strong back, plump lips, high-arched feet, and full, round bottom still, twelve years after we first met, make my toes curl with desire. I could think about how our sex life—always vital, even torrid—is more exciting and imaginative now than it was when we first met. I could check my watch to see if I have time to stop at Good Vibrations to pick up a tube of lubricant and see if they have any exciting new toys—you can bet I would be the only woman in
that
store pushing a baby stroller. I could even with women. I’m going to go ahead and risk offending people by using the word
husband
in this essay. First of all, it’s too awkward to keep repeating

“husband or partner,” but more important, most of the lesbian couples I know seem not to get as worked up about the lack of sex in their relationships. This isn’t true across the board, but it’s true enough that it makes me think that there is something to the notion that men care more about sex, generally, than women do. Before you, dear reader, set my hair on fire, allow me to put this notion aside and explore it in some other essay.

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gaze pityingly at the other mothers in the group, wishing that they too could experience a love as deep and profound as my own.

But I don’t. I am far too busy worrying about what’s wrong with me. Why, of all the women in the room, am I the only one who has not made the erotic transition a good mother is supposed to make? Why am I the only one incapable of placing her children at the center of her passionate universe? Why am I the only one who does not concentrate her sensual abandon on her babies instead of her husband? What is the matter with me?

When my first daughter
was born my husband held her in his hands, her face peering from underneath a pink acrylic hospital hat, her mouth a round
O
of surprise at having been tugged from the wound of my incised abdomen. His face softened and got all bleary, the way it does when we make love, right after he comes, or when we are driving together in the car and he grabs my hand in his, saying, “Give me the hand,” and kisses my fingers. He turned to me and said, “My God, she’s so beautiful.” Or something like that.

Something tender and loving. Something trite.

I unwrapped the baby from her blankets. She was average sized, with long, thin fingers and a random assortment of toes.

Her eyes were close set and she had her father’s hooked nose. It looked better on him.

She was not beautiful. She was not even especially pretty. She looked like a newborn baby, red and scrawny, blotchy-faced and mewling. I don’t remember what I said to my husband. In fact, I remember very little of my Percocet- and Vicodin-fogged first few days of motherhood. I remember someone calling and squealing,

“Aren’t you just completely in
love
?” and of course I was. Just not with my baby.

I do love her. But I’m not
in love
with her. Nor with her two brothers or sister. Yes, I have four children. Four children with whom I spend a good part of every day—dressing them, bathing them, combing and curling their hair, reading to them, sitting with them while they do their homework, holding them while
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they weep their tragic tears, cheering them on at their soccer games and violin recitals, volunteering at their schools, cleaning up their vomit and changing their diapers, smelling their sour and delicious baby smells and squeezing their soft and pliant, bony and spiky little bodies. But I’m not in love with any of them. I am in love with my husband. It is his face that inspires in me paroxysms of infatuated devotion.
His
is the beauty on which I insist, perhaps as inaccurately as he did on our daughter’s. If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, if a good mother is someone who would sacrifice anyone else to save her child then, unlike those other women in Mommy and Me, I am not a good mother. I am in fact quite the opposite. I am that most abominable thing—a bad mother.

I love my husband more than I love my children.

Perhaps because I am a writer,
perhaps because I am a neurotic Jewish girl, perhaps because I come from a long line of hypochondriacs, I often engage in the amusing pastime known as God Forbid. What if, God forbid, there were another Holocaust, say, and my family and I were forced into cattle cars and sent off to concentration camps? What if, God forbid, my husband were on an airplane blown up by suicide bombers? What if, God forbid, a sexual predator were to snatch one of my children? God forbid. I imagine what it would feel like to lose one or even all of my children. I imagine myself consumed, destroyed by the pain. I would pine for my child, think about nothing else. And yet, in these imaginings, there is always a future beyond the child’s death. Because if I were to lose one of my children, God forbid, even if I lost
all
my children, God forbid, I would still have
him
. I would still have my husband; he is what matters most. But my imagination simply fails me when I try to picture a future beyond my husband’s death. Of course I would have to live. I have four children, a dog, a mortgage, books to write, parents to support in their old age. But my life would be over. I can imagine no joy without my husband. I can imagine no color in a world without
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him. All would be gray and then it would be over.
The world
could show nothing to me,
to quote Brian Wilson,
so what good
would living do me?

I don’t think the other mothers sitting around the circle in Mommy and Me feel this way. I’m sure they would be absolutely devastated if they found themselves widowed; of course they would. But any one of them would sacrifice anything and everything, including their husbands, for their children. Because they are all good mothers.

Why am I the only bad mother in the room?* Can it be my husband’s fault? Perhaps he just inspires more complete adoration than other husbands. He cooks, he cleans, he cares for the children at least 50 percent of the time. If the most erotic form of foreplay to a mother of a small child is, as I’ve heard some women claim, loading the dishwasher or sweeping the floor, then he’s a master of titillation. He is utterly unfazed by spending a day or even a week alone with four children. He buys me lavish, thoughtful presents that are always in the most impeccable taste.

He’s handsome, brilliant, and successful. But he’s also scatter-brained, antisocial, and occasionally arrogant. He is a bad dancer and he knows far too much about Klingon politics and the lyrics to Yes songs. He’s not that much better than other men, at least not enough to cause such a categorical change in my behavior.

The fault must be my own.

I am trying to think back, to remember those first days and weeks after giving birth. I know that my sexual longing for my husband took a while to return. In the period immediately after the babies were born I did not want to make love. I did not want any genital contact. I did not want an orgasm. I did not even want to cuddle. I recall feeling on occasion that if my husband’s hand had accidentally brushed against my breast while reaching for the saltshaker, I would have sawed it off with the butter knife. Even

* Okay, I know I’m probably not the
only
one, but it feels as if I am, and if there are others like me, we’re all so intensely ashamed of ourselves that we’re not making eye contact, let alone confessing our misplaced devotion to the group.

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now I am not always in the mood. I am a working mother. There are many evenings when I am exhausted. By the time the children go to bed, I am as drained as any mother who has spent her day making lunches, driving carpool, building LEGO castles, shopping for the precisely correct soccer cleat, and writing 1,500 words of a novel due at the end of the month. I am also, with consequences potentially fatal to a sex life, a compulsive reader. My only hobby is reading. I would rather read a novel than do most anything else in the entire world. Put together fatigue and bookwormishness, and you could have a situation in which nobody ever gets laid.

Except that when I catch a glimpse of my husband from the corner of my eye—his smooth, round shoulders, his bright blue eyes through the magnification of his reading glasses, the curls of hair on his chest—I fold over the page of my novel.

I think sometimes that I really am alone in this obsession with my spouse. Sometimes I think even my own husband does not feel as I do. He loves the children the way a mother is supposed to love her children. He has put them at the center of his world. He has concentrated his passion, his devotion on them. But he is a man, and thus possesses a strong libido. Having found something to usurp me as the sun of his universe does not mean he wants to make love to me any less. He can revolve around
them
and still fuck
me
every night.

And yet, he says I’m wrong. He says he loves me as I love him.

Every couple of years we escape from the children for a few days and take ecstasy together. We pop the pills, strip off our clothes, and wait for the waves to start washing over us. MDMA is an experience about which it is difficult to write without sounding like a banal disciple of Timothy Leary. A combination truth serum and love potion, it transports us back in time, to the moment we first realized we loved each other, but with all the ease and fluency of mutual experience that a dozen years together bring. For somewhere between four and six hours, my husband and I talk about our love. We talk about the intensity of our devotion, about how much we love each other’s bodies and brains, about the things that make us happy in our marriage. We talk about how exciting it is to work side by side, how eagerly we await each other’s homecomings when
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we are apart. We talk about how remarkable it is that we love the same movies and food, how wonderful it is that our interests and skills are so complementary—I am good at managing the business of the house, he loves to cook and play with the children; I am better at plotting, no one line edits as well as he does. We talk about how lucky we are that we agree on the basic values of parenting and family life.

During the course of these meandering and exhilarating conversations, we touch each other, we start to make love, we stop.

MDMA is a long and languid tangle of lovemaking—physical, mental, and especially verbal. The fucking part is definitely sub-sumed to the talking, but each complements and stimulates the other. Hours later, when the immediate effects of the drug have ebbed away, we are always left with the residue of a metaphor—a ship, a solar system—one we will refer to over the next two years to remind ourselves and one another of the truth we have rediscovered about our relationship.