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" When 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&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;t think about the actual implications of what would happen to my insides as the baby passed through.\u200B I&amp;#039;m not really a vagina person. I mean, I read Our Bodies, Ourselves at age 13 and dutifully followed the collective&amp;#039;s instructions to hold up a hand mirror and check my cervix. But I&amp;#039;ll never buy a ticket to an Eve Ensler play or read a book narrated by someone&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;c--t.&amp;quot; So it wasn&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;s head come out\u2014she used her hands to demonstrate a head going through a turtleneck sweater\u2014with less trauma. Unfortunately, the first time it dawned on me that there were two sides of myself\u2014the 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\u2014and 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&amp;#039;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 &amp;quot;just right&amp;quot; before, childbirth does stretch the vagina enough to reduce sexual enjoyment. WTF?! My chest tightened. I was &amp;quot;just right&amp;quot;! 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 &amp;quot;slight increase in roominess.&amp;quot; Yes, mummy tummy, whatever, but I&amp;#039;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 &amp;quot;vaginal rejuvenation,&amp;quot; as it&amp;#039;s so winningly called\u2014I&amp;#039;d sort of assumed they were plastic-surgery-addicted Hollywood wives one could only marvel at for still existing, certainly not average women who&amp;#039;d opted for the operation because they really needed it. Somehow, I managed to repress this new worry for the next three months\u2014kind of amazing, considering how neurotic I am. I&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;m just hysterical about the thing itself. And then I went through the &amp;quot;ring of fire.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s an oft-used metaphor for the final push through the vagina that brings the baby&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;s fairly obvious that I was on some kind of natural-drug trip, because even my brother was in the room\u2014with a camera!\u2014and I didn&amp;#039;t mind. &amp;quot;This baby is so ready to come out!&amp;quot; said the doctor. &amp;quot;Do you want to see the top of its head?&amp;quot; She held up a mirror. &amp;quot;No,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Just give me another push like the last one, but try and keep it going for 10 seconds longer.&amp;quot; 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\u2014at 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&amp;#039;t easier to ride them out than to force the baby through the ring of fire. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not so sure I can do this. Is it okay if I just wait a little while?&amp;quot; I asked. Oddly, I wanted to curl up and go to sleep. &amp;quot;But you&amp;#039;re almost there!&amp;quot; the chorus chimed. I was trapped. I knew I would only be deferring the agony. I had no real choice. My body, which was supposed to make the decision for me, was not doing so. Oh, the injustice of having to consciously wreak my own destruction! In what was the biggest &amp;quot;just get it over with&amp;quot; moment in my life, during the next contraction I used all the pushing methods at once, holding on until the acid drip ignited, I ripped like old sheets, and the (my) baby&amp;#039;s head burst free. I wish I&amp;#039;d known then how much I would love my child now, but such an onslaught of joy probably would have killed me. Instead, the satisfaction and curiosity I felt about this nine-pound baby was tempered by my concern that there was more to come. The placenta that you are also expected to push out, I rudely discovered, is practically as big as the baby. And then the nurse tried to force my legs apart to stitch up my battered womanhood.&amp;quot;No, no more pain,&amp;quot; I begged as she worked her needle\u2014from my vantage point it looked four inches long and hooked\u2014through the skin. Someone kept yelling through the door that another patient needed her attention. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m busy,&amp;quot; she said, sounding distracted and cross. &amp;quot;Leave her alone!&amp;quot; I screamed. I often think back on this moment and wonder if the interruptions had caused her to misstitch me in some fundamental way. After the requisite six weeks, my husband and I had an extended kissing session while the baby slept in the Moses basket next to the bed. His hand crept between my legs and he poked in a tentative finger. Prebaby, this simple gesture was all the foreplay I needed; I would instantly be crazy for &amp;quot;the real thing.&amp;quot; This time, I felt nothing. A void. Shame swept through me. I couldn&amp;#039;t get his hand away fast enough, though I tried to play it cool, hoping he wouldn&amp;#039;t cotton to the real reason my urgent kisses were turning into gentle, &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s just go to sleep&amp;quot; pecks. Even if he didn&amp;#039;t have time to grasp the new dimensions, he must have suspected. He&amp;#039;d been in that birthing room, watching his giant child be grunted out by his cow-wife. The notion of keeping him out in the waiting room with the cigars had crossed my mind before childbirth, but the then-dominant Our Bodies, Ourselves me had pooh-poohed it away. When I went to the doctor for my first postpartum checkup, the examination hurt, but disappointingly it was just the skin that smarted. For the new me, the speculum was practically a formality. The scar, she said, hadn&amp;#039;t healed well and the skin was granulated. I might bleed a bit when making love. If so, I should come back. Granulated skin? Who cared? The whole thing was shot! This was just one more detail. I took a quick look in the shower; what once had been smooth and pale pink was a weird tortured purple. It conjured jellyfish, dead and torn, drying on the sand at the high-tide line, its colorful mesoglea bleeding out of its transparent casing. I became acutely aware of all variations on the expression &amp;quot;tight young pussy.&amp;quot; My husband and I rented the Jiminy Glick movie, and when Glick&amp;#039;s wife for some reason says, gesturing to her obese twins, &amp;quot;Are you kidding? I had them. It&amp;#039;s like a purse in there!&amp;quot; my cheeks burned. Holding me in the kitchen one night while the baby slept upstairs, my husband asked if we&amp;#039;d ever have sex again.  &amp;quot;But it&amp;#039;s not going to be...the same,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;No,&amp;quot; he said matter-of-factly. &amp;quot;It probably won&amp;#039;t.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m befouled!&amp;quot; I cried, ducking out of his arms and fleeing up the stairs. Why couldn&amp;#039;t I talk to him about what I was going through, yet I can write this article, which he&amp;#039;ll probably read? The mistress Shame&amp;#039;s workings are mysterious. I suspect I thought that if I articulated it to him, the magic of us would be gone. He&amp;#039;d suddenly see it all: my bad breath, my blackheads, my proportionately too short legs, my old-lady hands. Our fantastic sex life had created a film over all my imperfections\u2014isn&amp;#039;t that how it works with men?\u2014and if I&amp;#039;d explicitly spelled out the problems, the veil would lift. Five months after the baby was born, we still hadn&amp;#039;t had sex. I did Kegels once in awhile, but with nothing of the prebirth fervor. I&amp;#039;d lost faith that they could possibly put back what the ring of fire had torn asunder. They also reminded me of...down there, which I preferred to pretend simply didn&amp;#039;t exist. You may be wondering how I could be so certain it had stretched. I did have a quasi-scientific theory. During one of my routine prenatal exams, my doctor told me I had very soft stomach muscles. I&amp;#039;d been doing 500 reps of these pilates-like core exercises for months to prepare for the birth and had done plenty of ab work in the past. When I protested her remark and enumerated my good ab habits, she said that it was genetic, so there wasn&amp;#039;t much I could do. Thanks for telling me; how useful! Now, as I looked at the still-wrinkled skin around my belly button and dwelled on the strange postbirth vacancy that registered in my abdomen when I attempted sit-ups, I couldn&amp;#039;t help but suspect that these same genetics determined the resiliency of my vaginal walls. More than anything, though, my ruination was a feeling: pervasive, possibly irrational, amorphous, but unquestionable. I did get some consolation from my mothers&amp;#039; group\u2014even the C-section mothers said that the weight of carrying the baby affected their size. Some were having a harder time, dealing with (the horror!) incontinence. One was going to biofeedback physical therapy to strengthen her muscles. Others snapped back into shape like Barbies. Yet almost all of us were dealing with some post-birth change in our essential, sexual selves that either we weren&amp;#039;t aware would happen prebirth, or that we&amp;#039;d chosen not to dwell on.  What I don&amp;#039;t understand is why none of us ever talked about it. Maybe it was just too scary. (How much can you say about the fact that you might tear apart? And how will you go back to having sex after that?) But I also wonder if it breaks a certain antique taboo, the one that keeps babies and sex in discrete boxes, even though we all know they share the same, er, box. As the Vessel of the Baby you are free, even expected, to iterate every vomiting session, discuss every little cramp, blood spot, varicose vein, kick, and craving. But to voice concern about your sex life might imply that you are thinking of yourself (bad mother), rather than only, only, only the end goal: a healthy baby. If we voice our worries about our bodies or mourn in advance what we might be doing to our sex lives, do we risk enraging some puritanical cosmic force that will take it out on the innocent infant? Or is it just silently, stoically understood that the change in the most essential part of a woman is the only honest reflection of the profound before and after of having a baby? I would still make the choice to have my child, but I wish I had thought more, before, about what it might mean. I investigated vaginal rejuvenation, but then heard from friends and read in posts on the Web that it doesn&amp;#039;t really work. Anyway, the doctors who performed it all seemed to be men. What could they possibly know? If men were facing losing a centimeter of their penises upon the birth of their first child and upon subsequent births suffering slightly less inflated erections, would it be the end of the human race? I wanted to say this to my husband, except I didn&amp;#039;t want him to think too much about that region of our bodies. I hoped he would silently accept this new state in which we were a perfectly functioning parental eunuch team. The hug, I thought; let&amp;#039;s rediscover the hug. About six months after I typed the above sentence, my husband and I began to have sex again. It probably means something that I can&amp;#039;t remember a lot about how we resumed relations. I know it involved my first experience with Astroglide (that&amp;#039;s another story), but we did. However, it&amp;#039;s now two and a half years since our son was born, and I&amp;#039;m still blocked about going to the gynecologist. There is something different about my shape, but after more than a year&amp;#039;s break, I frankly can&amp;#039;t remember what it used to be like. Maybe my husband can&amp;#039;t either. The forced hiatus not only failed to kill us as a couple, it appears to have made our sex life better. I often walk around with thrilling visions in my head of the night before. I&amp;#039;ve been given this secret gift. Who knew that the man I&amp;#039;ve been married to for seven years would (1) wait for his tortured, abstaining wife and (2) give her such bliss? Maybe it&amp;#039;s simply because after a long break, our bodies seemed new to each other. In any event, I don&amp;#039;t want to say too much about it. I&amp;#039;m superstitious about ruining a good thing. And some would argue I&amp;#039;ve said enough already. \u200B\u200BThis piece originally appeared in the March 2013 issue of ELLE magazine. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/life-love/sex-relationships/advice/a9247/the-ring-of-fire-19624/>