Meghan O’Connell has a piece in the Guardian today about sex postpartum, and so much about it—starting from the question she poses, “when do you stop being postpartum? Or are you that way forever?” hits close to home.
Sex is the topic of the piece, but it’s tied in to bigger questions: How do you learn to relate to your own body again, and to show love for others, when your entire life has been overtaken and you feel like there is nothing left to spare? “What was it like, to do a nice thing for someone that wasn’t obligatory? I could remember the gestures, even remember how nice they felt, but I could no longer relate to the impulse.”
O’Connell reads parenting books and online forums in which new mothers commiserate about low libidos. Some put sex aside until some hazy future date; others have sex without really wanting to, for their partners’ sake. O’Connell says, “Either approach seemed like a betrayal of self at a time when I didn’t have much self to spare.” This goes far beyond sex. Caring for an infant is so demanding, physically and emotionally, that it takes a toll on almost every relationship in one’s life.
O’Connell writes, “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.”
This strikes at the core of my experience of motherhood, or perhaps of womanhood, or perhaps just adulthood. The realization, again and again, that I am not in the universe I want, not in the universe where I could thrive without tremendous and unremitting effort, where I would be set up for success and support instead of facing barriers and criticism at every turn. And the awareness cresting, again and again, that I must move onward anyway. How?
I remember being in labor with my first son. How during a contraction I was wrenched by pain unlike any other, not only in degree but in kind, for unlike other kinds of pain it could disappear completely in seconds, leaving me free to eat or sleep or laugh before the next round came.
I see, now, how my son experiences pain or frustration in a similar way. They take him over entirely; he is consumed by suffering to a degree that I never am. He loses himself in despair. And then, after two or five or ten minutes, he emerges, limp and sniffling, takes a deep breath, and throws himself into movement again, already smiling. He does not feel wronged. He does not feel dread.
Our situations are not the same. My problems are bigger than a skinned knee or a snack not granted, just as the pain of labor is not analogous to the pain inflicted by patriarchy. And yet there is something to be learned from laboring, from watching my son move fluidly through tantrums back into easy absorption. This dilemma, perhaps, carries within itself the key to its own resolution. The mother must learn to let the struggle wash over her, to succumb but endure, to suffer without being destroyed, to be transformed.