I have been to many mothers’ groups and each time, within three minutes, the conversation comes around to the topic of primary interest: how often we feel 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. These are women who, by and large, love their husbands or partners. Still, almost none of them is having any sex.
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, carrying, stroking — how could they bear to be physically available to anyone else?
But the real reason for this lack of sex, the most profound, difficult reason, is that their passion has been refocused. Instead of concentrating their ardour on their husbands, they concentrate it on their babies. Where once their husbands were the centre of their passionate universes, there is now a new sun in whose orbit these women 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 my mothers’ group who is getting laid. This could give me a sense of smug wellbeing. I could sit in the room and gloat over my wonderful marriage. I could even use the opportunity to fantasise about my gorgeous husband, whose broad shoulders, long, curly hair, strong back, plump lips, high-arched feet and full, round bottom still, 12 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.
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 centre of her passionate universe? 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. 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 and mewling. 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. But I’m not in love with any of them. I am in love with my husband.
I sometimes wonder what if, God forbid, a sexual predator were to snatch one of my children? 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, my husband.
My imagination fails me when I try to picture a future beyond his 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 don’t think the other women sitting in the circle at the mothers’ group feel this way. I’m sure they would be devastated if they found themselves widowed. But any one of them would sacrifice anything and everything, including their husbands, for their children.
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.
Sometimes I think I am alone in this obsession with my spouse. Sometimes I think my 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 centre of his world, 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.
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 while we are gone we often talk about our marriage. We talk about the intensity of our devotion and how much we love each other’s bodies and brains. In these conversations, my husband says that we, he and I, are the core of what he cherishes; the children are satellites, beloved, but tangential.
And if my children resent having been moons rather than the sun? If they berate me for not having loved them enough, call me a bad mother? I will tell them I wish for them a love like I have for their father. I will tell them they are my children and deserve both to love and be loved like that.
I will tell them to settle for nothing less than what they saw when they looked at me, looking at him. — Â