A Womb with a Pew

Before the vasectomy, sex with Joe was never my favorite pastime. After the vasectomy, his blanks shot me full of anger. Forgiving my self-sterilized husband didn’t end at seventy times seven. Every act reminded me he’d snipped off future babies, amputated our daughter’s siblings, lopped branches off the family tree I was made for. The longer I refused, the angrier he got. When he thumped around the house upright, thin-lipped, and grim, it was impossible to lie down with him. Even the dogs avoided him. But Joe worked long hours and otherwise tried to be an unimpeachable Catholic husband. I felt guilty, ungrateful. I wondered if I were frigid.

Joe decided I was frigid.

I went to a counselor. She said, “Think of having sex with your husband as baking him a chocolate cake.”

I said, “I’d rather pick it up at the Safeway.”

Videos of our only child captured the beginning and the ending of motherhood at once—the first-and-last first steps, the first-and-last first birthday, the first-and-last first bike ride, the first-and-last first day of school. To rub salt into all those first-and-last firsts, my friends who said they’d never have a baby had one. Then they said they’d never have another one, and they had another one. My own sister had three, the last a happy accident. One day my sister-in-law smiled saucily, swatted one of my husband’s five brothers—the one she’d married—and said, “Fertile Myrtle here keeps getting me pregnant.” And, lo, she had another baby. One of my friends got her tubes tied after her third son. A month later, she called me. “Just my luck,” she said. “An egg must’ve squeaked through.” Eight months later, she had her fourth son.

That’s when the recurring dreams about Fertile Myrtle began. He pumped me so full of super-semen I woke up thinking I was six months pregnant. At work, tall, lean, curly-haired men started gassing the cubicles with their pheromones. Worried they could hear my ovaries yowl, I couldn’t talk to them or even meet their gazes, but as I scurried home, their long, pale, male bodies sprawled nude on the furniture in my mind.

Once in a while, someone asked when we were going to have another child.

“It’s up to God,” I lied. I was too ashamed of the truth to tell it. I was also lying to myself, telling myself something went wrong in the delivery room—my uterus hopped away slippery like a wet toad, and the doctors couldn’t catch it, so now I was barren. That had to be my story. Otherwise, I might murder Joe.

________

I took my lustful heart to confession. The priest told me to confess to my husband, so I did. I even admitted I was cuckolding him in my dreams. “I don’t want to cheat,” I told Joe through earnest tears. “I want another child.”

“The vasectomy was a mistake,” he admitted. “You were robbed.”

He was making good money, and we had a peaceful home. I wanted to adopt a foster child, someone who’d lost her family and needed us.

He said, “I don’t want other people’s problems in my house.”

He might have been born and raised Catholic, but he went to Mass for the same reason he mowed the front lawn—people saw it. “If you were a real Catholic,” I said, “you’d show a little charity to an orphan or two.”

He agreed to speak to a priest, but only someone in another town, not our priest, the one who supposedly sanctioned a twenty-eight-year-old first-time father’s vasectomy in the first place. I made the appointment, and we drove to another town. We sat in the cleric’s office in separate chairs, clutching our own hands. The priest put his listening face on, and I confessed our self-inflicted infertility, my longing for another child, my aversion to sex...