Don Farrall/Getty ImagesAdvertisement - Continue Reading BelowWhen I got pregnant, there were many things I worried about: contributing to overpopulation, getting fat, losing my inner life, being a badly dressed mother. But one thing I managed not to take into account, though this now seems unfathomable, was my vagina. That's not precise enough. From a certain perspective, you could say I gave it more than adequate consideration. Like many other women fixed in the belief that Western doctors overmedicalize childbirth, I wanted neither an epidural (the injecting of anesthetic into the spinal column during labor) nor an episiotomy (the surgical incision made in the perineum to create a larger opening through which the baby's head can pass). The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has issued a statement saying that episiotomies may lead to anal sphincter damage, severe tearing, and future painful sex, yet many doctors still make the cut. I'd amassed all the troublesome details of the natural-tear versus incision debate so that I would have ammunition should any Sweeney Todd doctor get too close. But somehow, I didn't think about the actual implications of what would happen to my insides as the baby passed through.
More from Best Sex Writing10 articles On Swearing Off Sex My Mother Taught Me the Art of Seduction Sex in the Computer Age Are You Faithful, Darling? I'm not really a vagina person. I mean, I read Our Bodies, Ourselves at age 13 and dutifully followed the collective's instructions to hold up a hand mirror and check my cervix. But I'll never buy a ticket to an Eve Ensler play or read a book narrated by someone's "c--t." So it wasn't my vagina I was thinking about when I fired my ob-gyn upon learning her episiotomy rates (90 percent for first-time mothers) or when I tried to do at least a third of the daily recommended 300 Kegel exercises to tone my pelvic floor muscles. I wasn't doing them to protect my sex life, but because my maternal-fitness teacher assured me it would help for a smoother birth, as in, help the baby's head come out—she used her hands to demonstrate a head going through a turtleneck sweater—with less trauma.
Unfortunately, the first time it dawned on me that there were two sides of myself—the me who has known the difference between the vulva and the labia since she was 12, and the me who has only been able to have an orgasm through penetration—and that there was only one vagina serving them both, which I was perhaps about to irrevocably damage, I was already six months pregnant. The lightbulb moment occurred while reading the evil What to Expect When You're Expecting. Here is the passage:
Most women find the slight increase in roominess they experience post-partum is imperceptible and does not interfere with sexual enjoyment. For those who were unusually small before conception it can be a real plus, as intercourse may become more pleasurable. Very occasionally, however, in a woman who was "just right" before, childbirth does stretch the vagina enough to reduce sexual enjoyment.
WTF?! My chest tightened. I was "just right"! No one, not a single one of my friends who had already given birth, not my mother, not a doctor, not another book, no one had told me that there would be a permanent "slight increase in roominess." Yes, mummy tummy, whatever, but I'd never heard of gapey sex forever after. People have multiple children...they must enjoy making them, right?
Enraged that I had once again let this book, with its cloying cover and tsk-tsking approach, raise my ire, I put it back in the place where my husband had hidden it from me.
Looking back, it now seems impossible that none of this had occurred to me when I decided to have a baby. All those women signing up for "vaginal rejuvenation," as it's so winningly called—I'd sort of assumed they were plastic-surgery-addicted Hollywood wives one could only marvel at for still existing, certainly not average women who'd opted for the operation because they really needed it.
Somehow, I managed to repress this new worry for the next three months—kind of amazing, considering how neurotic I am. I'm one of those unfortunate hysterics who has never had the pleasure of repressing the bad only to watch it surface in other novel and unexpected ways, like going blind whenever Father enters the room. I'm just hysterical about the thing itself.
And then I went through the "ring of fire." That's an oft-used metaphor for the final push through the vagina that brings the baby's relatively humongous head outside the mother once and for all. The rest of the little newborn body easily corkscrews out (again, relatively).
It was just before this momentous event, as I was in full-on labor, that the repressed thought returned, as clear as the vodka I'd been avoiding for nine months. I was on all fours on the bed, and every time I looked behind me, I saw the expectant and slightly anxious faces of my doctor, my husband, and the young nurse (who, I noted, had cute Princess Leia buns on either side of her head) unnervingly close to my bum. I had successfully resisted the epidural and was in agony, now sure that the painkilling hormones the natural- birth proponents promised my body would produce were a myth. But in retrospect, it's fairly obvious that I was on some kind of natural-drug trip, because even my brother was in the room—with a camera!—and I didn't mind.
"This baby is so ready to come out!" said the doctor. "Do you want to see the top of its head?" She held up a mirror.
"No," I said.
"Just give me another push like the last one, but try and keep it going for 10 seconds longer."
The baby and the external world were separated by one thing: the ring of fire. Every time I pushed, I could feel it waiting, a steel band of resistance that seemed to excrete pure, burning acid. Terrified, I urged what I would soon know was a him back in. In this state of clarity I saw the either-or, him or me—at least, the just-right-vagina me. After about two hours, each pushing contraction felt about the same as the last one: urgent, but not so urgent that it wasn't easier to ride them out than to force the baby through the ring of fire.
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