Sugar in My Bowl Read Free

and celebrated our mutual love and understanding by getting naked.
    We’re not an overly contentious pair, though I have been known, for no good reason, to stir shit up on occasion. It’s the way things go with us: I am damaged and have issues (see also: “you don’t care about me”), he is well adjusted and forbearing (isolated “fuck yous” aside). No, that’s not quite right. He has his issues too, but maybe because he’s a guy or maybe because his parents aren’t divorced or maybe because he’s a few years older than I, he keeps things more or less together. Whereas I, often, do not keep things more or less together. Regardless, he is wise and funny and good and humble and steadfast, with twinkly eyes and the body of a swim team captain. His hands are strong, he keeps everything in perspective, he is musical, and he has an enormous vocabulary. Which is to say: I can hardly believe it most of the time—my luck, this ridiculous bounty!—but he is mine . When my depressive neuroses bump up against his strong-silent-type stoicism, I am invariably convinced he is going to leave me. When he declines to leave me, much nude rejoicing is in order.
    Weeks went by before I knew I was with child (“ Embarazada! ” read the results from the local hospital after I finally realized my irregular period was actually a no-show, went to the farmacia for a pee stick, and set out in search of further confirmation), but hindsight is potent, so that night in Toledo has taken on a magical cast.
    I know how that sounds. Procreative sex is the height of normative sexual activity, the glory of professional, amateur, religious sexists the world over, and the scourge of the radical feminism that comprised my adolescent imagination. Freedom from it is fundamental to the possibility that a woman can do as she pleases with her life, body, self. It’s taken eons to liberate us from reproductive sex, from the notion that sex can only be a means to an end (the end being a baby, of course; not an orgasm ).
    I’ve enjoyed my fair share of unhealthy sexual encounters; there are several last names I can’t recall. Suffice it to say that, like the all-too imitable Carrie Bradshaw, I’ve probably slept with more men than Princess Di but fewer than Madonna. What could be less transgressive than loving consensual heterosexual sex within a committed relationship leading to the exalted birth of a beautiful baby boy? And what fun is sex if it’s not at least a little transgressive? But wow: Getting pregnant at that particular moment in time, with that particularly beautiful man, after a stupid quarrel in Toledo, was a fucking miracle. So to speak.
    Normally fertile couples have only a 25 percent chance of conceiving at the peak of the cycle. And we—a forty-three-year-old man and a twenty-nine-year-old woman with polycystic ovarian syndrome who’d been fairly malnourished in vegetarian hell—can’t really qualify as a normally fertile couple. At fifteen I was matter-of-factly informed by a prick endocrinologist that I’d likely never be able to have children, and I spent the following fifteen years grief-stricken by imagined barrenness, babies the altarpiece of my longing. I screwed my way through my twenties with impunity, using condoms until I knew my partner well enough to eschew them, braced for who-knew-what kind of IVF nightmares. It’s chilling to think, now, about all that unprotected sex. I used to joke ruefully about it. The upside of infertility: no worries! If I couldn’t be an effortless earth mother, I’d be a husky, world-weary, glamorous sex object instead: forgoing birth control, never staying the night, dragging on a cigarette, beholden only to myself, unfettered by the concerns of regular copulaters. Perhaps I’d shed a lone, picturesque tear for my never-to-be offspring on the subway ride home. Fun was had by all, make no mistake, but I’m blazingly lucky I never found myself facing single motherhood or abortion or