THIS FLESH HAS CHANGED MEANING

Jennifer Cross

 

 

 

 

 

It’s forever since we had sex. Okay, a couple months. Still, even that feels like an eternity for a couple who were regularly getting it on even right up through my last month of pregnancy: My clit, labia and breasts got so sensitive that I can hardly believe either of us got any work done. As soon as you walked in the door at night, I was all over you, pulling you into the bedroom or living room for further explorations of this unfathomably changed thing that was my body. And you—you couldn’t get enough of me, hands wrapped constantly around the bulbous swelling that was the evidence of our soon-to-be son. Some women, they talk about working right up to birth, no bed rest. There was no bed rest for me, either. I was too busy getting busy. You kept me up all night, inhabiting my inhabited body.

Of course, though he caused a very few hiccups in our sex life while still in the womb, now our routine is all shot to hell: If I’m not nursing, one of us is struggling to soothe or ease back into sleep our colicky child. My body feels like emptied baggage—a utensil that’s served its purpose and been discarded. You soothe me, nights, with hands doused in arnica or geranium oil, and if we’re blessed with a handful of minutes of silence, then we make use of it by sleeping rather than getting frisky.

When I met you, you came into my heart and body like an unfurled dream, and revealed all your passion and honest desire slowly, over time, as you figured I could stand it. And it turned out I could. I was intrigued with your idea of children and family—you, this big butch dyke who never considered giving birth yet wanted the fact of it, the work of home and hearth, the experience of delivering to a child what you never had for yourself. And over our own time, something lodged itself in my flesh: a desire, not unlike hunger, not unlike lust, to hold children—yours/mine/ours—in my body.

And now, what else could our bodies possibly mean? Our hearts pound in service of another. My breasts aren’t for my pleasure alone anymore; they serve a purpose even I think of as greater (and I’ve been in the business of deifying every taboo in the pursuit of erotic joy)—the delivery of sustenance to a child. It feels almost unsafe to contemplate fucking: not bodily, really—all my birth wounds are healed. And today, again, I get the go-ahead from my doctor. Not just the go-ahead but the straight-out urging. “Get back into bed,” she instructs me, desperately trying to get me fucking—that is, get me moving back toward my old routine. She thinks it would be good for my mental health and my mothering. But suddenly, or not so suddenly, really, everything’s been destabilized. My sense of myself has gone through a revolutionary transformation, and it all feels too fragile to fuck with, so to speak: Now I’m a mother. Do mothers even do the kinds of things I did with you before this child was born of my body—things I was doing practically at the onset of labor?

After the ob/gyn appointment, I was out for another half hour, trying to write. But all I could do was stare at the people having conversations about something other than poop consistency and the pros and cons of booster shots.

When I get home, the baby is asleep, and you have your eyes closed, head laid back on the couch, with unfolded laundry—onesies and spit-up napkins and diapers—spread across your lap, on the couch, on the floor at your feet. It’s late afternoon, and the evening light has begun to cast a yellow shadow across the room, heating everything up. The light feels thick, tangible, somehow slowed. I just want to sit and watch you for a while, share this quiet space, the sunset, the peace. But the laundry needs to get put away, and anyway there’s dinner to make and lord knows the baby won’t sleep long—he’ll be hungry, too.

I reach down for the diaper in your hand. The room smells of the child’s skin, of our desperate terror and horrific wondrous love, of milk and laundry soap and fabric softener. You open your eyes when you feel me tug at the cloth. But before I can get anything folded, you ease me off balance, bring me into your lap, and, smoothing my bangs away from the corner of my mouth with your sun-warmed hands, pull me to you with both of your hands—those strong appendages that once just seemed the instruments of my pleasure, but now I have seen them cradle my child, our child, at the moment of his birth, and I know they are so much more.

You pull me to you with hands so gentle they were able to soothe a terrified child’s entry into this new atmosphere, this existence—those hands that seem to be meant now only for a tiny person’s well-being. You soothe them strong across my shoulders, gripping my face and pulling me in for a kiss, eyes searching mine wonderingly, wondrously. We cannot speak, because there’s no language for this moment. You press your lips meant for the top of a child’s head to my lips meant now also for the top of a child’s head, and we are kissing, eyes closed after affirming one another’s deep need.

My hands, meant to cradle a nursing infant, meant to bathe, to count fingers, to wipe clean, are soft on your cheek, are tangled in the soft naps of your hair, and we are lovers now again, my body transitioning back. My cunt, which last shuddered so after releasing the child’s placenta, begins to swell and pulse. This flesh has changed meaning, become a different sort of portal, become the thing that allowed this new life.

Now I inhabit the varieties, the multiplicities of being, cradled by you here on this couch, surrounded by baby infant things, dykes reduced or held up to motherhood. Your hands transmit their magic to my thighs, hard and fast, so immediate, the longing fast and urgent, and I rotate myself around, quiet, the child still sleeping—a miracle. My legs split and straddle the berth of your lap that’s become a cradle. I lean down, press hot lips to yours, my hair falling against your cheeks and neck. You urge me up, help me up slightly, and release from the confines of your jeans your preparation for my return home.

I wonder if you worked extra hard to get him to sleep. It doesn’t matter. I’ve got a skirt on, miracle of miracles (I forget how you suggested it), and you slide your cock against, then move aside, utilitarian panties. You feel the promise there for you, feel the glistening juice, feel the body of me aching for the body of you. We barely gasp, struggling to share ourselves in silence. I realize we will need to get a babysitter for ourselves soon, a night off, a night for noise and need. For now, it’s minutes that we’ve got, maybe, and I bury my face in your shoulder while you bury your cock slow and gentle, careful, so unlike the usual, that immediate and hard thrust to meet my need. Your delicacy brings out the tears, and then we aren’t coming but fucking, yes, fucking hard against each other, into our selves.

I gasp when you stroke my nipple, and the child shifts. We freeze, but he doesn’t wake up. Our time is cut short, we know, and you grip me hard to your hip, tongue wrapping around one still over-sized nipple, reminding me of what these breasts used to be for. You grind into me, against me, while I, hand shoved down between us, stroke my clit fast and faster. I have to bite down when I come, and it’s you who groans, finally, just too loud. The child, across the hall, whimpers. I continue to shudder and lean against you, whimpering myself, recovering, while you whisper your love in my ear. I press myself against you, your body fully under my body, for as much of this adult-to-adult, lover-to-lover contact as I can get before the rebirth, reemergence of our motherhood.