Sugar in My Bowl (3 page)

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.)

Worst Sex

Gail Collins

W
hen I was a sophomore in high school, a girl in my class got pregnant and had to get married. There were two things about this that puzzled me. One was that her boyfriend, a student at the Catholic boys high school next door to our Catholic girls high school, was the head of a club called “The Beadniks,” which was dedicated to finding hip ways to encourage young people to say the daily rosary. Saying the rosary involved fifty-six separate prayers, and even in 1962 we knew there was no hip way to do it.

I decided that the whole make-the-rosary-cool idea had been hatched by a teacher without any student input whatsoever, and that the father-to-be had simply been dragooned into posing as president for the yearbook photo. That sort of thing happened all the time. A nun at my school once decided we needed a club called Students for Decent Styles, whose members would go into department stores, try on dresses with spaghetti straps, and then flounce out of the dressing room while announcing loudly that no decent girl would wear such immodest clothing. I never heard that anybody actually undertook such an expedition; in fact it seemed unlikely that Students for Decent Styles had ever had a meeting. Yet there it was in the yearbook, with a picture of a couple of alleged officers admiring a dress with a very high neckline.

But the really inconceivable part of the Beadniks story was that a girl in my class had been having sex. I was possibly one of the least sophisticated teenagers in the United States outside of Amish country, and although I knew the mechanics of how babies were made, I had not yet really come around to imagining that people actually did that kind of thing voluntarily. (This was at about the same time that the entire universe was talking about the fact that Elizabeth Taylor had ditched her husband to run off with Richard Burton. I told myself that it must all have been a terrible misunderstanding.)

I don’t think I was all that untypical, given the time (the prudish early 1960s) and the place (a Catholic high school in Cincinnati). My classmates didn’t seem much more savvy. My mother was the kind of parent who would answer any question, and my friends frequently sent me home with queries about sex, which I tossed her way while we were doing the dishes after supper. Many of them, I remember, centered on homosexuality, since we could absolutely not figure out how that worked at all.

This is supposed to be a book about great sexual experiences, and I am very proud that my generation facilitated quite a few such moments during the “sexual revolution” that began later in the decade. But out of pure contrariness I am going to tell you about the staging ground from which we sprang into rebellion, which in my case not only involved no sex whatsoever, but also a long, ferocious campaign on the part of our teachers to keep girls from ever having carnal relations with anyone except our future husbands. Unless of course we chose to join the convent and dedicate ourselves to perpetual chastity.

Really, it’s a wonder that we are even functioning, let alone talking about orgasms.

Until I went off to college, I was taught almost entirely by nuns. This story is going to make them sound a little nuts, but they were in many ways wonderful. They were always enthusiastic, interested in everything we did, and extremely energetic. It was absolutely nothing for them to have classes with forty, fifty, even sixty kids. In grade school, there were so many of us that we were once put on half-day sessions until the parish could throw up a new building to accommodate the early products of the baby boom. My teacher instructed two completely different fourth grades of forty to fifty students, in a room set up in the back of the church. It was a miracle we learned anything at all, but we actually picked up quite a lot. I don’t know how strong we were in the specialized areas like geography, where we used a map of the world in which the nations were colored either red (Communist), pink (could fall at any minute), or white (free—for now). Only the United States and Ireland were white. But we got a very good grounding in the basics. The grade school nuns were particularly strong on English grammar. We diagrammed enormous, paragraph-size sentences, conjugated verbs, and separated participles from gerunds with the skill of cowboys moving a balky herd into the proper corrals.

The first school I went to was named after St. Ursula, who went on a pilgrimage with eleven thousand virgins who were set upon by Huns. The way we were told the story, the women were given the choice between surrendering their chastity and being beheaded, and every single one opted for martyrdom. At that point, most of us thought virginity was the same thing as not being married, so I worked up a vague vision of all those Huns rushing toward St. Ursula’s pilgrimage swinging swords and brandishing engagement rings.

When my family joined the march to the suburbs, I transferred to St. Antoninus, whose patron was a bishop of Florence in the Middle Ages. He was very learned and had no interesting stories whatsoever. We had an hour’s worth of religious instruction every morning, and although it often involved the lives of the saints, Antoninus never came up. Instead, we learned about St. Agnes, who died for the faith when she was only twelve, and St. Catherine of Siena, who was in a hospital tending poor lepers when a mystical vision of Christ so overwhelmed her that she drank the bowl of pus she was carrying. And then there was St. Apollonia, who was the patron saint of dentists because her persecutors yanked out all her teeth before burning her to death. There were, of course, a lot of male saints, too. But except for St. Francis of Assisi (cute animals) and St. Sebastian, whose pictures show his martyred body riddled with so many arrows he could have been a porcupine, the stories I still remember are about the women, most of whom had achieved what the nuns assured us was the highest title a Catholic girl could ever aspire to: Virgin and Martyr.

In high school, we talked much less about martyrs and much more about near occasions of sin, all of which seemed to involve sex.

When I was a freshman, our math teacher had us write letters to Maidenform bra, protesting its “I Dreamed I . . .” ad campaign, in which women were pictured fighting bulls and conducting orchestras, wearing nothing but their bras on top. The problem with the ads, the nuns said, was that they gave boys dirty thoughts. In our letters we avoided discussion of anything so vile, and just claimed that they were an insult to American womanhood, even though the bras in question were serious feats of foundation engineering that covered much more territory than your modern sundress.

That was the same year I went on my first annual retreat, in which a visiting priest urged us to envision Jesus dying on the cross, gazing out into the future, and seeing “you, sinning in the backseat of a car.” After that, there were many, many class discussions about how far you could go with a boy before you fell into sin. Non-Catholic boys, we heard, believed that Catholic girls were easy because they could always go to confession and have whatever happened in the backseat forgiven. This was a total misreading of the situation, since I had heard many, many stories about how, on the way home from a tryst at lover’s lane, it was possible to be killed in a car crash or murdered by an escaped fiend with a hook for a hand, and be sent directly to hell.

One religion teacher told us that as soon as you started to get sexually excited, it was a mortal sin. This totally undid one of my best friends, who started racing to confession every time she felt nervous or entertained a “bad thought.” Eventually her mother sent her to a psychologist, in what was my only experience with a parent interfering in the school lesson plan.

If sinning took place, it was definitely going to be our responsibility. Boys were not much more than little sex robots, and they could not be held responsible for their actions. Once, we were all called to assembly to hear Charles Keating, the head of the Citizens for Decent Literature (and future star of a huge savings-and-loan scandal), who told us the story of a young mother who went walking down the road with her two small children while she was wearing shorts. The sight of her naked legs so overwhelmed a passing motorist that he swerved off the road and killed both the kids. And it was all their mother’s fault. We were then asked to sign a pledge never to wear any kind of shorts, including the long Bermuda ones.

There was virtually nothing that happened in the outside world that didn’t carry with it some kind of antisex message. When Clark Gable died, our English teacher explained that the reason he had been so successful as an actor was that God, who could see the future, knew Clark would be going to hell for having been married five times. (Since the nuns did not recognize divorce, this meant he had committed adultery with wives two through five.) But he had done some good things in his life, too, and so God in his mercy had given him happiness on this mortal coil to make up for the eternity of torment that was to come. This was my own particular crazy-making moment, and for years afterward every time I got an undeserved A or some other windfall, I fell into a fit of despair over my prospects for eternal damnation.

And so it went. This would be the time for me to recount the moment when I rose up in rebellion, or fell down in the thralls of temptation, but my friends and I really did pretty much stick with the program. I think we were particularly credulous because we were raised in such a sheltered environment—first-generation suburbanites who watched first-generation television programs in which husbands and wives always slept in twin beds. Even my younger sisters, who went to the same schools as I did a decade later, had an entirely different experience. They knew more about sex when they left grammar school than I did when I went off to college.

There are, of course, still Catholic schools today, and I hope the kids who go to them are still diagramming sentences. But otherwise, I doubt they have all that much in common with the ones where I was educated. The girls may wear uniforms, but they certainly aren’t required to kneel on the floor each morning so their teachers can make sure the skirts are modest enough so that their hems touch the floor.

I’m sure younger nuns have a much more nuanced view of life and morality than the ones who taught me, but these days there aren’t many nuns to begin with. My friends and I were part of the last batch of American women to spend their adolescence being constantly lectured about sex by women who had never had any. My high school had only a handful of lay teachers, all but one of whom were female. The lone male was our drama teacher, who arrived full of plans to produce Shakespeare with an all-girl cast the way the Bard himself did with all men. It broke his heart when he was informed that the school’s big annual production was not going to be one of the classics but
The Song of Mary,
which depicted the stories of the best-known recent apparitions of the Blessed Virgin. I was an officer in the drama club, and I got to choose my own part. I picked the girl who kicked St. Bernadette while she was on the ground recovering from her vision.