Chapter 13 Gwen #2
Gwen felt her face flush. She was embarrassed that she was so embarrassed to talk about sex.
What was she, a fifth grader? Then again, she barely knew Leigh.
Leigh might be the kind of person to tell any joe on the street about her desire for a threesome with a social media momfluencer, but Gwen was not that kind of person.
Leigh sighed dramatically. Belle pulled off her nipple again, and Leigh switched her to the other boob.
“Nathan would love to return to regularly scheduled programming, but I am not there yet.”
Gwen didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until she finally let it go.
“I’m so relieved it’s not just me.”
Leigh looked at her, disbelieving. “Of course it’s not just you. No new mom wants to have sex with her husband.”
“I bet Angeni Luna does.”
“That woman is not normal,” Leigh said. “She is some ethereal goddess being, not of this world. I’m sure they have the hottest sex.”
“Jeff and I . . . we tried for the first time since I had June. It was so bad.”
“Painful, right?”
Gwen wanted to hug this woman, to hold on for dear life.
“Yes. Why didn’t anyone tell me about that?”
“Like you’re being stabbed in your vagina with a switchblade, right?”
Gwen felt her eyes well up with tears.
“Are you crying?” Leigh asked, astonished.
Gwen was crying. Weeping.
“Happy tears,” she said, using her free hand to wipe her eyes. “It’s just nice to talk to someone.”
Leigh reached over, placed a hand on Gwen’s shoulder. It was the simplest touch, but it made Gwen weep more.
“I didn’t even have a vaginal delivery, so I don’t know why sex hurts so much,” she said.
“It’s the hormones,” Leigh said, removing her hand from Gwen’s shoulder and placing it back on Belle. “As long as you’re breastfeeding, you’ll be dry as the Sahara down there. That’s what makes it hurt.”
This felt like something Gwen should have known, but it was news to her.
“Oh, is that it?”
Leigh nodded. “Yep. It’s like Mother Nature telling you not to have any pleasure when you should be completely focused on feeding your infant. What a cunt, right?”
Gwen laughed again.
“Lube helps. Try lube,” Leigh said.
Gwen nodded.
“I only know this because I have a friend in Santa Cruz who has four kids and she tells me everything,” Leigh said.
“Four? Wow. That’s . . . ambitious.”
“She loves chaos. Like, thrives on it.”
“I wish I loved chaos. Seems like that would come in handy at this stage of life.”
“I just read this article about these luxury postpartum hotels in Taiwan,” said Leigh. “Like, you go there for a full month after you give birth and relax while people pamper you and take care of your baby.”
“That sounds like a dream.”
“Right? Although the woman who wrote it said it was kind of a shock to then go home and have to do everything herself.”
“It’s always a shock to go home after having a baby, isn’t it? Better to delay it by a month, I’d say.”
“Agree,” Leigh said. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure Nathan and I will be a one-and-done family. I used to think I’d want two kids, but I don’t know. It’s so much.”
Gwen felt her grief overhead like a cloud, slowly descending upon her. She wished the couch would just swallow her whole.
“Yeah,” she said.
She knew what question was coming next.
“Do you guys want more kids?”
When Gwen swallowed, it felt like an enormous walnut was lodged in her throat. Her eyes prickled with tears again, these not of the happy variety.
“We can’t have more,” she said.
“Oh,” Leigh said, her eyes scanning Gwen’s face, trying to understand. She could almost read Leigh’s thoughts: Could they not have more for financial reasons? Was it an IVF situation, where they only had the one embryo? Were they getting divorced?
“I had a C-section. It was an emergency thing,” Gwen said.
She hadn’t told anyone about what had happened. She knew that the support group was the appropriate venue for sharing this, but she couldn’t imagine telling that room of strangers these intimate details. It still felt like admitting to a colossal failure.
“Oh, sweetie, that’s traumatic,” Leigh said, again taking the hand that had been cradling Belle and placing it on Gwen’s shoulder for a quick, comforting moment.
Leigh thought that was the entirety of it—Gwen had had a frightening ordeal with the C-section and did not want to go through that again.
“There was a lot of bleeding. Jeff says I almost died,” she said. She had to phrase it that way—Jeff says. As if it were his opinion and not a terrifying fact.
Leigh looked stricken. “Oh my god. That’s so scary.”
Gwen swallowed again, another walnut in her throat.
“They had to do a hysterectomy,” she said. She stared at June’s sweet, soft face as she said it, willing herself to be grateful for what she had instead of lamenting what she’d lost.
“Oh, Gwen. My god.”
She couldn’t meet Leigh’s eyes, but she heard her sniffle and knew she was crying.
“Yeah,” Gwen said. “I haven’t, like, dealt with it well.”
“Who the fuck would deal with that well?” Leigh said.
Gwen started weeping again.
Leigh stood from the couch, her nursing bra unclasped, her huge breasts exposed.
Belle’s little mouth finally released the nipple she’d been using as a pacifier.
Leigh set her on a lounger on the floor, very similar to the lounger Gwen had at home.
Belle opened her eyes in confusion, and there was a moment when it appeared she might start wailing, but she closed her eyes again and drifted off.
Leigh re-dressed herself and sat on the couch again, this time closer to Gwen, so that they shared one of the giant cushions and the couch threatened to swallow them together. She put an arm around Gwen’s body, pulling her into her side.
“I’m so sorry,” Leigh said.
And Gwen felt it—Leigh’s sorrow on her behalf. She didn’t think she had felt this from anyone. Not even Jeff.
“Thank you,” Gwen said. “That means a lot.”
She expected Leigh to release her hug, but she didn’t. She continued holding Gwen, pulling her into her side.
June started to stir, as if sensing an unexpected loving presence and wanting to check it out. She opened her eyes and looked up at Gwen, then at Leigh, their two faces so close together.
“She’s such a beautiful baby,” Leigh said.
“She is, isn’t she?”
“Just gorgeous. She has your eyes.”
Leigh stroked June’s cheek with her index finger, and June smiled her gummy smile.
“Yes, sweet girl, we’re talking about you and what a beauty you are,” Leigh said in the same singsong voice that Gwen used when talking to June.
“It hurts, sometimes, to look at her,” Gwen said as they both continued staring at June. “Like, I love her so much it scares me. Losing her . . . it would kill me. I almost can’t handle how huge it is, the love. Is that normal?”
“I don’t know what’s normal, but I feel that too. And you’ve been through so much. The fear of loss is, like, ingrained in you now.”
That was it, Gwen thought. That was exactly it.
“I try to remember how lucky I am,” Gwen said.
“Gratitude doesn’t cancel out the fact that what happened sucks. You know that, right?”
Did she know that? Logically, yes, but in her bones?
“You can be lucky and devastated,” Leigh said. “That’s what I’m saying.”
“You should be a therapist,” Gwen said, feeling the need to make a little joke instead of bursting into additional tears.
“That was actually the plan,” Leigh said, dead serious.
She leaned away from Gwen and moved to her own cushion, and Gwen felt a pang of sadness at the abrupt separation of their bodies. Leigh slid off the couch to be on the ground next to Belle in her lounger. She placed a hand on Belle’s little belly as it rose and fell with each of her breaths.
Gwen decided to join her on the floor. The hardwood was covered in a plush shag rug that looked like it’d be plenty comfortable for June. She laid June on her back. Her eyes were wide open as she took in her new surroundings, her tiny fingers grabbing at the burnt orange threads of the rug.
“You really wanted to be a therapist?” Gwen asked. She immediately regretted the surprise in her voice that made it sound as if Leigh’s career aspirations were absurd.
“I had just finished my clinical hours when I found out I was pregnant with Belle,” Leigh said.
“Told myself that was good. I’d done the hard part.
I could take a break, have Belle, and then get started with my own practice.
We’d moved from Santa Cruz. Seattle is a great market for therapists.
So dreary, lots of depressed people. I had it all planned out. ”
This would have all sounded perfectly reasonable to Gwen before she became a mother. Now, though, she understood why Leigh spoke with a kind of grief. Embarking on a new career with an infant seemed impossible. Gwen wasn’t even sure she could reembark on her already-established career.
“I just don’t know how it could happen now,” Leigh said with a wistful sigh. “Nathan says to give it time, but the more time I give it, the more my former career ambitions seem completely unrealistic.”
“I get it,” Gwen said.
“I feel like a bad feminist, you know? Giving up on my career or whatever. But it feels like the alternative is being a bad mom.”
Gwen nodded. “I know. I mean, even just breastfeeding. Pretty much everyone agrees that’s best, right? But when I go back to work, I don’t see how I’m going to be able to do that.”
Leigh looked her dead in the eyes. “You won’t be able to. That’s just the truth.”
“I can pump. I know it’s not the same, but—”
“It’s not the same,” Leigh said, interjecting a surprising amount of adamance. “Your baby still gets milk, but not the touch, not the closeness.”
Gwen felt herself get teary eyed again. How was she possibly going to return to work?
“Oh, sweetie, it’s okay,” Leigh said, taking her hand off Belle’s belly and putting it on Gwen’s back. She moved her hand up and down over the bumpy landscape of Gwen’s vertebrae.
“It’s not, though,” Gwen said, her voice catching.
“Yeah, I know. It’s not.”