Planting Dandelions (11 page)

At this moment, or at any other given hour of any given day, one of my sons' hands is likely wrapped around a rock. I find rocks in their pockets, in their backpacks, and in their beds. There are caches of them hidden all over our house and yard. My oldest son, who also happens to be the gentlest, is the most obsessive about them. A naturalist in the Victorian manner, he hoards rocks the way dragons hoard gold. I've been at the losing end of many an emotional standoff when I've tried to keep him from bringing a new specimen home. “What's so special about this one?” I say, exasperated, as he weeps over an ordinary-looking chunk of sandstone. To me it looks the same as the twenty or thirty at home just like it, but he knows each one individually. Something in his steady nature relates to geology. He and the rocks share a language I can't understand, a language of sequence and persistence, the syntax of time.

His brothers may not share the intensity of his obsession, but rocks are a principal preoccupation of theirs, too. They pile them up, move them around, and break them down. Where there is adequate space and supply, they throw them. And when they do, I see it for the joyous act it is, a release of energy that's been bound up in sediment and minerals for millions of years. “Yippee!” I imagine the rock singing, as it finally gets to fly.

Living with boys has changed the way I see men. I used to love them in spite of themselves. I've come to love them because of themselves. Collectively, they can be assholes. But so can women, given the same chance. Anyone who thinks estrogen is the antidote for brutality has neither paid much attention to history nor taken an eighth-grade girls' gym class. Men may have sins against female kind to atone for, but being born male is not one of them.

If acceptance of my destiny came in a single moment, it came one day as the children were gleefully catapulting off the sofa. I was trying to do something in the other room that would best be accomplished unaccompanied by the sounds of squeaky springs and crashing bodies. I stormed in.

“I have HAD it with jumping off the furniture!” I shouted. “From now on, there will be NO MORE JUMPING OFF THE FURNITURE.” As I stood there raving, reason left my body and observed me with calm bemusement from the side.
Are you crazy?
it asked.
You have three boys. There will
always
be jumping off the furniture.

Always, until they grow up and move out, and I am sent back to civilization, unable to remember anymore if the toilet seat belongs up or down, lonely for the sound of stampeding sneakers and armpit farts, a strange old woman who gestures for you to sit on her sagging couch, presses a rock into your palm, and says, Now. Let me tell you about my years among boys.

A
bout three months after our third child was born, my husband and I had sex. We had sex, not out of an explosion of pent-up desire, or a gradual rekindling of attraction, or even out of generic horniness, but because it was going on three months, and it was getting a little embarrassing.

In a rare confluence of events, the children were all asleep early and in their own beds, there was nothing on television, and there was no good reason to not have sex. In short, we did it because we had to. The preliminaries went something like this:

“You wanna?”

“I guess.”

A few minutes later we were lying in bed on our backs, covers drawn up to our chins like two shy virgins about to consummate an arranged marriage. We knew what we were supposed to be doing—we just had no idea how to get started. More verbal foreplay:

“Do we have condoms?”

“In the sock drawer? Wait, did you run the dishwasher?”

Oh baby.

We actually own a book of scripted lovemaking, called
101 Nights of Great Sex
, to help with the failures of erotic imagination that kick in somewhere around the thousandth diaper-change mark. The book has tear-out pages with detailed instructions for getting it on more creatively. I bought it after our second son turned a year old. We thought the baby years were mostly behind us and that it might be safe to get back in the water. We have been frugal with it, like survivors on a lifeboat with the last tin of rations. By my reckoning, ninety-five nights of great sex are still up for grabs. At this rate, I figure we can look forward to one or two a year well into our retirement.

In the meantime, there we were, having to improvise. My husband, having decided that someone should
do
something, lunged toward second base. “Not the breasts!” I hissed, blocking him with my elbows. Any contact with them would set the baby off like a car alarm. Breast-fed babies have a biometric feature that enables them to detect mammary trespass through walls. Their heads will detonate by remote if anyone else so much as breathes near their mother's nipples. All infants are exquisitely sensitive to ambient sexual activity, or for that matter, sexual thoughts. A three-month-old will reliably sleep for several hours at a stretch with one parent staring vacantly into a computer and the other watching infomercials in a neighboring room. But a mere neck-nuzzle on the way to refill the chip bowl releases sex pheromones that travel through the baby monitor, into the nursery, where they scald the baby, who wakes up enraged like the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk.”

My husband, deflected, but committed now, changed tactics and dove headfirst under the covers. I thought at first he'd lost a sock or something.

When I realized what he was up to, it was shocking and kind of sordid, as in, you want to do
what?
It doesn't seem possible to forget about something like oral sex, but a few weeks before that I forgot to pick up my kindergartner from school, so chalk another one up to chronic sleep deprivation.

Sex after children is like live theater. The longer you go without it, the less you miss it. It strikes you as a silly thing for people to do. Stacked next to an early bedtime with a good book or TV, there's no contest. But when you finally go, by the end of the first act, you're thinking,
Why don't we have season tickets?
I was the rube in the front row, exclaiming, “Gee, this is
great!
” I thought about calling some friends, in case they had misplaced their clitorises, too.

“It was under the duvet cover all this time!”

It was a bit like finding a needle in the haystack. With three children under six, personal grooming concerns got reprioritized. What was maintained depended solely on who was likely to see it anytime soon. Teeth? School principal, playgroup moms, bug man. Brush them. Bikini area? Not unless I had a gynecological exam that week.

I was still hugely pregnant when my toddler got in the tub with me one evening, and backed up against something fuzzy. He turned around, saucer-eyed, pointing a quivering finger.

“What's
that?
”

I brought my thighs together as best as I could, and adopted a reassuring tone, as if narrating a wildlife documentary for children's television. “It's Mommy's vagina,” I explained.

There was an aghast pause, as he considered how to deal with this . . . unpleasantness. He decided to be blunt.

“I think you need to get out of the bathtub,” he suggested with thin civility. Madam, I said
good day.

Three months postpartum, my vagina was less out there, but I was still self-conscious about it. I couldn't help but worry it was unsettling for my husband, who has, after all, seen heads come out of it. In between pregnancies, it was trim, tame, and kittenish. Then it swelled up and exploded—a gooey purplish creature emerging with a howl, like in a sci-fi movie. I'm sure in the back of his mind Patrick wondered if it was really safe to approach.

Back in the saddle, the ride was beginning to feel a little less bumpy. I was on the verge of really forgetting myself, when my husband, also forgetting himself, went back for the breasts. It must be said that the baby and I were together on the breastfondling prohibition. Once an erogenous zone, they had become the no-fly zone. There were times I felt like punching Patrick for just looking at them. The cruel irony for him was that they never looked better. I was an A-cup when we met, and he was perfectly fine with that, especially since bras are optional in Canada, and I never wore one. But he must have felt a little cheated when I jumped to a 36D for the babies, like I'd been hoarding the really good ones all that time.

I was like Growing Up Skipper, Barbie's teenybopper cousin in the seventies, whose chest expanded when you cranked her arm. Overnight, I had porn-star boobs. I might have taken some pleasure in the novelty and spectacle, but it was counterweighted by the droopiness of everything else. There is something a little kinky about the nursing bra, like crotchless panties for your chest. But the leaking and spraying milk, the sodden cotton pads bunched up in the bra cups, and the dairy farm rhythm of the electric breast pump soon banished all non-nutritional associations. Controversy over nursing in public was baffling to me. Unbuttoning a blouse had all the eroticism of whipping out a sippy cup. The idea of incorporating my breasts into the act of sex was as much a turnoff as if Patrick suggested bringing some diapers into play. They were ogled, groped, and suckled enough as it was. In between feedings, they were on lockdown.

I intercepted my lover's wandering hands, thinking I could slide them elsewhere without his noticing. But where? Not onto the sad and wrinkled balloon that was my stomach. It has housed three children, and none of them were fashionably compact baby bumps. Just reading the pee-stick with the last one caused my abdominal muscles to bulge out. At full term, I measured four feet around the middle. I am only five feet, four inches tall, and I looked like a beanbag chair. Take the beans out, and you've got a big empty bag. Supine, it lay more or less flat, but that meant sticking to the missionary position, and staying very still. The intersection between looking good and feeling good in the act was increasingly elusive. In a marriage workshop we attended at church, open-eyed lovemaking was recommended as an aid to deeper intimacy. A lovely older couple pointed out that it was important to balance the openness of the eyes with the dimness of the lighting. But that only helps with the visual aspect. The tactile truth is harder to disguise. The breasts were off-limits, and everything else was too squishy, so I continued to hold both my husband's hands tightly in what I hoped would seem like an act of passion.

Before we had kids there would have been no acting about it. Patrick and I were physically combustible from the first moment we got within a hundred feet of each other. We made love indoors and out, in closets, in cars, on the floor, against walls. Once in an underground World War II bunker while tourists wandered overhead. When passion wasn't at a rolling boil, it was on constant simmer. Having three children in five years had the effect of putting the pot into deep freeze for weeks at a time, then trying to thaw and reheat it before anyone woke up and wandered into the kitchen looking for a drink of water. There was hardly time to break the ice, let alone get steamy. We needed more than a moment's notice.

When you are young, childless, and endlessly hot for each other, scheduled sex sounds like a fate worse than celibacy. You vow to drive off a cliff together before it comes to that. Like the man sang, “Better to burn out than fade away.” Then you are there, peering down into the chasm of no sex at all, and spontaneity seems like a picky thing to get hung up on, really. It's not like you've got anything
better
to do on Saturday nights. I prefer to call it “premeditated,” rather than “planned” because then it sounds less like an appointment, and more like a rendezvous. In theory, you could spin the whole concept as an elaborate fantasy, but if we had time or energy for role-playing, we wouldn't need to premeditate. I'll shoot it to you straight: There's nothing very arousing about a proposition that can be answered with, “Saturday works.” But it helps get your head in the game.

In essence, a date for sex with your spouse is not all that different from unmarried dating, except you've both already agreed at the outset how the night will end. It's the children who supply the missing element of suspense. In some contexts, the threat of interruptus lends an erotic urgency to coitus. Back in the day, we enjoyed our share of breathless moments in semiprivate settings. The heart-pounding suspension of sound and motion while you listened for footsteps was a way of prolonging the sweet agony. When the footsteps are little, it's just agony. Nothing kills the mood like an abrupt reminder that the person you are urging your partner to defile harder is somebody's mommy.

The difficulty in getting your freak back on as a mom is as much about finding the headspace as it is scraping together the time, privacy, and energy to do the deed. At the instinctual level, motherhood is essentially conservative in nature. Mother's prime directive is safety and stability, and she for sure does not want a noisy slut in your bedroom while the kids are sleeping down the hall. Accessing the parts of myself that involve risk and self-seeking—my sexuality, my creativity, and my spirituality—means going through, and sometimes around, the mothering part of me. She is the guardian, the keeper of keys, standing between me and my wild side. If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody getting
any.