Lost

The first time I had sex after a misscarriage.

by Lisa Carver

April 24, 2006

Two weeks after the miscarriage, it was okay to have sex again. I had read that sex would be different at first — tentative, guilty, worried. I gather that sex can be tentative, guilty, worried in general, and it never had been for me; I didn't foresee it turning into something so complicated now.
    Still, I was a mess of lingering cramps, jilted hormones and the confusion of secretiveness: uncharacteristically, I'd told almost no one I was pregnant. Yet when I looked at him, I felt just the plain old desire to do it. It was the one thing I didn't have to make sense of.
    I loved the father. I loved the way he looked when he was asleep; I loved the way he looked when he was awake. I especially loved his flaws, because he is very handsome and throughout this relationship I was, for the first time, insecure. Something about him made me feel safe, made me want to let him take care of me. That was new for me, and I didn't want another girl stealing it from me. He had gotten a little fat, and I wanted to keep him that way so no one else would want him. But of course plenty of girls will want a slightly fat man. But some don't. And when insecurities come a-clawing, it's somewhat less awful to feel the need to fight off a hundred hypothetical local girls rather than a thousand.
    I realize I'm talking about him and not the baby. I can't think about the baby, and so I don't. But I felt it, or I felt it not there, between us when he reached for me and he was hard and I knew that it would be going up me, going up the place the baby came down, dead.
    We hadn't talked about losing the baby. We never did talk very much. It was one of the things I liked about him — that he could stop me talking. I talk too much. I could just sit with him. Sex was quiet, too. I'd gotten with other men to where we'd chat it up from beginning to end, exchanging fantasies, and that was hot. This was hotter — this silent, breathy, Old West pure movement. I'd been alone in my pregnancy. I was alone in losing the baby. Old West guys don't really give a lot of emotional support. But now, I sensed, at last we would share our grief, in bed.
    He was gentle. He kissed my neck and my everywhere, hands and mouth on my breasts — where the baby would have been nursing, I thought, then shoved the thought away. I was grateful for his desire. I felt it too. But I felt also the shape between us, a sort of a gingerbread man cookie cutter shape. The space the baby had occupied and now did not. And then blame rushed in, filling it: If I hadn't been so stressed out, if you'd taken care of me instead of yelling at me and staying in bed depressed fifieen hours a day for the last month, getting up only in the rare excitement of yelling at me some more,

I am a building being demolished, finally turning to dust and falling.

I wouldn't have this empty space in my body right now.
    I glared at him in the half-light and saw that he was looking at me with just love. I was the only hateful one here. All the accusations drained out of me. It was me who lost your baby, I admitted silently, staring up at him. It was me who became so demanding the instant I became pregnant. I drove you into that bed under the covers. There was no other escape from my demands. You had to yell at me. It was the only way to stop me. I would have destroyed you.
    My body was responding in the normal way, as if nothing had changed, but I felt like I was drowning. Shame filled my nostrils, my throat, my lungs. I already have two children, who you take care of, but this one would have been all yours, I thought. No other man's claim could never supercede yours. I was able to give those men children, even though neither one loved me half as much as you do. It was only you I was unable to forgive. It was my unforgiveness that killed your baby.
    And then came greed, wiping out everything else. I wanted him to want me, want me, want me. I still had a paunch as if I were pregnant. My identity was in the same confused condition as my stomach. Only he could fill the space the baby had left, and make me back into a woman, a just-plain person. His acceptance, in the shape of a stiff, full cock that wanted me and couldn't lie about wanting me, would cure me, make the thoughts stop. Sperm like Neosporin. If he was able to come from my vagina, from me, then I would know that he didn't blame me, that I wasn't a barren, dried-up, non-mother.
    I came; he came. I watched his eyes and mouth tighten, then his entire body seize up, then the whole thing unwound from his eyes down, like a row of dominos collapsing. When I had come, right before him, it was like him happening in me, his collapse. I always come feeling like I'm him, or at least no longer myself. I am a building being demolished, finally turning to dust and falling. Then I was me again, and the need shot through me to be again demolished. But he only kissed me again and fell asleep. I stayed awake. It was not normal for him to want to do it only once, especially given that we hadn't had sex in over two weeks.
     I pushed against him in his sleep like a cat that wants under the covers. That usually works. This time, he flopped an arm around me and muttered about how tired he was because he hadn't eaten much this last week. Then I could only picture him in shorts, a row of girls dangling their legs off a wall, watching his new svelte figure traipse by, and all of them falling instantly in love. I did the cat thing again. "Mmph, okay," he relented, "but you have to get me hard; I'm really very tired." I never had to get him hard before. It was this new person I was that would have to "get" a man hard — this dead-baby person.
    I recognized that my thoughts were spiraling crazily and I took my dangerous self away. I went downstairs and watched a show about a female preacher who comes to town and she had a child out of wedlock from long ago, and recently attended a bachelorette party where a man popped out of a cake. One of the congregation discovers this and outs her, right there in church in front of everyone, and the good-bad preacher gets driven out of town. Then came the news, which was even more dire.
    It took everything not to go up there and tell him how bad I felt and ask or demand that he want me. But it's not his job to fix me every time I'm broken. Or so I kept reminding myself. Yet I wanted to beg for his mercy — only his mercy would do, no one else's. How could he possibly win, with that much riding on him? Even if he did make it better, even if he said loving things and fucked me again and again, easy and tender instead of in his usual porn-star way, I would think he was doing it just because I demanded it. I may have thought I wanted to go to him for love, but deep down I knew that if I went to him, in the end I would find a way to make him pay.
    I think I've never been in love before. I really can't say this, because I'm a lot less smart about romance than I am about most other things. But this is what causes me to think I

"You've never been like this before," he said.

love this man the most, and maybe even have loved only him: I never wanted a man's mercy before. Had one of my girlfriends expressed that kind of need, I would have been incredulous. I would have thought she was stupid, though I would not have said it out loud.
    But I wanted his mercy. I didn't know how to ask for it, so I didn't. And I hated him for not guessing, for not jerking awake and taking the steps three at a time to rush downstairs and save me. I hated him because my father left me when I was six and didn't come back when I begged him to, and I've never been able to ask anyone for anything since. I hated him because, when my stake-out was complete and it was finally late morning, he was still under the covers despite having slept for eleven hours. He was escaping me and my unspoken demands. It felt like he was leaving me, again and again. I felt so sad it just burned itself out, and I was nothing. If I was nothing, I had no history. My father never left me, and I had no bias against begging. So I did. I went to him and I begged him to love me.
    "You've never been like this before," he said, "all girly. It's cute."
    He opened his arms and I crawled in, and we were like two raw things rubbing against each other, two oozing skinned knees. It was his mother who left him when he was six, not his father. He's been punishing me, he's been scared, he hasn't known what he was doing. We were two children having sex in a horribly messy, dirty room, sad and angry and gleeful all at once, open eyes and greedy hands, very careful to not accidentally touch the little lump of dead space between us. n°