Elisa Albert
I can’t say for certain, but I think it happened in Toledo. Late April, and the weather was glorious. As per usual in Spain, the vegetarian lunch offerings left much to be desired.
“I hate this,” I said, eating my umpteenth olive, eyeing yet another piece of Manchego, dipping still more white bread in olive oil. For weeks I’d been subsisting on little else, and I was homesick for health food stores, tempeh, vegan bakeries, pleather, like-minded friends. My beloved tried to ignore me and enjoy his fried squid. Ham hocks lined the windows and hung from the ceiling, complete with small plastic cups for carcass-juice runoff.
His silence profoundly bugged me: you love a vegetarian, you at least fake outrage at vegetarian roadblocks, right?
“Do we really have to have this conversation again?” he wondered aloud, soaking up fish juice with a crust of bread and eyeing the jamón longingly. To his credit, he had abstained from the pig and listened to my complaints for weeks.
“Should I just pretend I’m psyched about my third bread-and-cheese meal of the day? My pants don’t fit, and I’m not even enjoying the ride.”
He sighed.
I might have learned my lesson with my college boyfriend, a midwestern defensive lineman. “I can’t believe you expect me to kiss you after you eat that,” I once mused, watching him masticate a juicy cheeseburger. He threw the burger away and didn’t speak to me for the rest of the night. Why am I fated to love carnivores?
Admittedly, I was being a pain in the ass. Pouting my way out onto the street I went for it, relationship jugular: “You don’t care about me.”
He stood in silence for a moment before throwing up his hands and stomping away, turning around only briefly.
“Fuck you.” This from a man so generally kind and even-keeled that the worst I’ve otherwise heard from him in the way of withering commentary goes something like “S/he means well, but . . .”
I burst into tears, and we spent the rest of the afternoon locked in argument, sitting miserably on a stone path by the side of a church. Clusters of tourists tried not to stare.
Later that night, in our room at the Parador overlooking the city, we made amends. And—wonder of wonders—a baby.
It could, of course, just as well have been a few days later in Madrid, after an afternoon at the Prado, our feet aching. Or a couple of days earlier in Sevilla, flamenco in a tiled courtyard with ivy snaked around the balconies. Or back home in Teruel the following week, in the now-romantic-seeming basement apartment where we spent the spring. Those were busy, amorous weeks, so I’ll never know for sure. But I like to think it happened in Toledo. Weary from conflict, overlooking the famous city wherein Jews and Christians and Muslims once enjoyed a golden age of peaceful, productive coexistence, we had ourselves a nice, mature talk and celebrated our mutual love and understanding by getting naked.
We’re not an overly contentious pair, though I have been known, for no good reason, to stir shit up on occasion. It’s the way things go with us: I am damaged and have issues (see also: “you don’t care about me”), he is well adjusted and forbearing (isolated “fuck yous” aside). No, that’s not quite right. He has his issues too, but maybe because he’s a guy or maybe because his parents aren’t divorced or maybe because he’s a few years older than I, he keeps things more or less together. Whereas I, often, do not keep things more or less together. Regardless, he is wise and funny and good and humble and steadfast, with twinkly eyes and the body of a swim team captain. His hands are strong, he keeps everything in perspective, he is musical, and he has an enormous vocabulary. Which is to say: I can hardly believe it most of the time—my luck, this ridiculous bounty!—but he is mine. When my depressive neuroses bump up against his strong-silent-type stoicism, I am invariably convinced he is going to leave me. When he declines to leave me, much nude rejoicing is in order.
Weeks went by before I knew I was with child (“Embarazada!” read the results from the local hospital after I finally realized my irregular period was actually a no-show, went to the farmacia for a pee stick, and set out in search of further confirmation), but hindsight is potent, so that night in Toledo has taken on a magical cast.
I know how that sounds. Procreative sex is the height of normative sexual activity, the glory of professional, amateur, religious sexists the world over, and the scourge of the radical feminism that comprised my adolescent imagination. Freedom from it is fundamental to the possibility that a woman can do as she pleases with her life, body, self. It’s taken eons to liberate us from reproductive sex, from the notion that sex can only be a means to an end (the end being a baby, of course; not an orgasm).
I’ve enjoyed my fair share of unhealthy sexual encounters; there are several last names I can’t recall. Suffice it to say that, like the all-too imitable Carrie Bradshaw, I’ve probably slept with more men than Princess Di but fewer than Madonna. What could be less transgressive than loving consensual heterosexual sex within a committed relationship leading to the exalted birth of a beautiful baby boy? And what fun is sex if it’s not at least a little transgressive? But wow: Getting pregnant at that particular moment in time, with that particularly beautiful man, after a stupid quarrel in Toledo, was a fucking miracle. So to speak.
Normally fertile couples have only a 25 percent chance of conceiving at the peak of the cycle. And we—a forty-three-year-old man and a twenty-nine-year-old woman with polycystic ovarian syndrome who’d been fairly malnourished in vegetarian hell—can’t really qualify as a normally fertile couple. At fifteen I was matter-of-factly informed by a prick endocrinologist that I’d likely never be able to have children, and I spent the following fifteen years grief-stricken by imagined barrenness, babies the altarpiece of my longing. I screwed my way through my twenties with impunity, using condoms until I knew my partner well enough to eschew them, braced for who-knew-what kind of IVF nightmares. It’s chilling to think, now, about all that unprotected sex. I used to joke ruefully about it. The upside of infertility: no worries! If I couldn’t be an effortless earth mother, I’d be a husky, world-weary, glamorous sex object instead: forgoing birth control, never staying the night, dragging on a cigarette, beholden only to myself, unfettered by the concerns of regular copulaters. Perhaps I’d shed a lone, picturesque tear for my never-to-be offspring on the subway ride home. Fun was had by all, make no mistake, but I’m blazingly lucky I never found myself facing single motherhood or abortion or STD. I was married for a minute in my early twenties, and the possibility that I might have gotten knocked up then haunts me still: a near miss, stark skid marks in the rearview mirror.
General fertility wisdom holds that a woman is more likely to get pregnant when she’s had an orgasm. More blood flow supposedly makes for happier, healthier spermatozoa and egg. And, more to the point, why would nature want us reproducing with a partner who can’t make us come? So assuredly we had a good good time reaffirming our mutual adoration in Toledo.
We had talked about kids, about when we’d like to start “trying” to have them (code, I imagined, for stressful, routine sex). We thought we might “think about” starting to “think about it” in the months to come. I worried about what “thinking” about “trying” might entail, anticipating a long, hellish road to nowhere. Did we really want to go down that road? Where would that road end? My body wouldn’t work properly. Crushing disappointment was inevitable. This narrative became part of my identity, the way I envisioned the trajectory of my existence. I lived with its vaguely sad hum. But fine: I wanted to accept it and move on, preserve our dignity and hormonal imbalances and become one of those fabulous world-traveler couples, resigned to childlessness, nurturing all our nieces and nephews and friends’ offspring with joy. Maybe there was an upside to parenting only ourselves, remaining relatively well rested and well ironed. Children were not going to magically appear in my uterus.
We went home to Teruel, the spring wore on, my pants continued not to fit, and I chalked it up to too much bread and cheese, not enough kale and quinoa. It didn’t cross my mind that I might be pregnant. I, after all, could not get pregnant.
It was early June when I emerged from the bathroom in the basement apartment with the pee stick in my shaking hand. “I’m pregnant,” I said, grinning like a lunatic. Then I repeated it, elated and terrified. “I’m pregnant,” the word a shimmering new planet: glowing, marvelous, and whole, a thing to behold, there all the while. Then he was grinning too, and laughing, and saying “Really?”, and we sat on ugly rattan barstools staring at each other, just looking at each other like that, grinning, for I don’t know how long.
Astonishingly, unbelievably, there was no “trying,” no fertility ordeal, no crushing disappointment. Just a good old-fashioned romp with my lover after a quarrel, and now I’m typing one handed while bouncing my sleeping boy in his bouncy chair, singing him a ridiculous song that goes “this is the way we bouncy-bounce, this is the way we bouncy-bounce, this is the way we bouncy-bounce, all the livelong day.”
I wanted to give birth at home, under the care of a midwife, away from hospitals and doctors and synthetic narcotics and all the well-documented havoc the above-mentioned are well known to wreak on healthy women birthing healthy babies. I wanted to feel it, to be present, to fulfill the amazing capacity of my amazing body, to experience what giving birth actually is, or can be. I wanted, to quote the documentary, an Orgasmic Birth.
It. Was. Not. Like. That. Orgasmic, I mean. It was natural, at home, under the care of a midwife, etc. And it was also excruciating and terrifying and lonely and intense and wonderful and awful and amazing and incredible and harrowing. I can’t do this, I said, over and over again. And: How does anyone do this? And: I understand why people don’t want to do this. This: grow a human being inside your body for the better part of a year and then suffer your uterus contracting to push him out through your sex organ.
No orgasm was had. But childbirth is like sex, in a way. Or maybe like a hallucinogenic experience, which one can imagine and project and invent endlessly but which, ultimately, can only be experienced as it actually is. There is no imagining, no pretending, and no real understanding to be had after the fact. It is a dream, another world, and then it’s over.
With new-mom friends I whisper and giggle about sex, the possibility of sex, like nervous adolescent virgins: Have you done it yet? How was it? How did it feel? What’s it like? Can I do it? Will it be okay? For me? For him??
Sex is new, and scary, and different, and interesting, and strange. My body has been . . . reorganized. As the amazing Ina May Gaskin, godmother of the modern American midwifery movement, observes: “Men take it for granted that their sexual organs can greatly increase in size and then become small again without being ruined. . . . But obstetricians of earlier generations planted the idea (which is still widely held) that nature cheated women when it came to the tissues of the vagina and perineum (give it one good stretch and it’s done for, like a cheap girdle), and a lot of women have bought into the idea that their crotches are made of shoddy goods.”
Still, the cliché about how clichés are clichés for good reason is true! This beautiful baby boy is bouncing in his bouncy chair and he fills my mind and heart and arms. Soon he’ll be hungry and this brief window for contemplating his conception and birth will be over for now. All I can think is: Love. Love, love, love.
We literally made love, a term that until recently I did not like. We made, from pieces of our bodies, from the love we share, a new human being—a love—whose gummy crooked smile and clutching hands and soft skin and shining intent gaze and drunk old man chuckle daily redefine for us the very concept.
I’m glad we’re connected in this way: flesh and blood, down to the bone. It’s more than married. It’s permanent: We were here, this new person is here. There was, is, and will always be a lot of love between us.
My bounty doubled that night in Toledo. (Or Sevilla. Or Madrid. Or Teruel.)