Vagina Habitus
The vagina is lined by stratified squamous epithelium which has no glands.
—Jorma Paavonen
The first time I had a miscarriage, I tried visualizing the little critter that had been inside me, but I couldn’t. I shut my eyes and saw a limp, amorphous blob. I felt like a dead planet.
The second time I had a miscarriage, I studied the unmoving kidney bean on an ultrasound screen. The fetus’ heart could not figure out rhythm. My mind understood; my body was slow to comprehend.
A few days later, my cervix woke from its state of post-coital bliss and thundered into action, expelling not just a dead fetus but all the hopes and dreams I piled onto it.
My uterus contracted. Genetic material bubbled inside me, a thunderous bowl of cosmic soup. I hobbled to my bathroom, ripped off my pants, clambered to the toilet. Blood started chugging out of me. A massive clot, larger than a French éclair, dropped from between my legs, splattered onto white tile, a supernova.
***
Inside the human skull and suspended in cerebrospinal fluid, the brain weighs less than the hunk of meat it really is. According to a Malaysian neuroscientist, Zamzuri Idris, this suspended state is similar to astronauts drifting in space, tethered to spaceships; similar to fetuses floating upside down in early gestation; similar to tadpoles in a pond, floating weightless before crawling up from primordial sludge, so much life under a carpet of green.
***
The female reproductive system is shaped kind of like a black hole, my husband tells me, when I describe this essay I’m writing.
The black hole becomes denser and denser the more objects that it pulls inside of it, until it becomes so compacted, it explodes.
***
Having never been an avid wrestler or even a very good tumbler, when I first started having sex with people other than myself, rolling around with another human felt complicated, a dance I hadn’t yet learned. And safe sex felt like arming for battle: condoms, the pill, an occasional spermicidal gel. There were so many measures to take for protection—protection! I was prepared against the unwanted invaders: sperm cells.
I was so concerned with the logistics of sex—not getting pregnant (birth control, rubbers and pills); not chafing (insert lubes, slippery and scented); not knowing how to allure (where should the mirrors go?)—that I couldn’t feel, I couldn’t orgasm. I went to an apothecary, found tinctures for increased blood flow, dropped them under my tongue, wondered why I couldn’t feel. How far removed from ecstasy was all my dread? Could I feel both at the same time?
Sometimes questioning feels like falling, and falling is a weightless state.
***
“The facts of clitoral anatomy,” according to Dr. Mark Blechner, a psychologist and psychoanalyst, “have been repeatedly discovered, forgotten, and rediscovered, at least since 1844, when the German anatomist Kobelt made accurate drawings.”
***
Twenty years into our relationship, my husband and I have married sex. There is no dance. There is a roll in the dark when one of us feels energetic on a Tuesday night. I grab his warm body, close my eyes, and endorphins launch through my body. I kiss the lines on his forehead. He clasps my stretch-marked backside. My blood flows hot and cold, my muscles soften, my thoughts clear, my consciousness unfurls.
Under my eyelids, I am weightless. I see clusters of stars, nebular dust.
***
Fuck, Fuck, Fuck / Mother Mother Fuck Mother Mother Fuck Fuck / Mother Fuck, Mother Fuck. / Noische, Noische, Noische
—Jason Mewes
***
After I married my husband, my grandmother was sure to let me know I was wasting my childbearing years: You have babies before I die. She felt an urgency I didn’t. Not having grandchildren smacked of her own mortality. For her, twenty-five was a perfect age to create children; for me, twenty-five was a perfect age for grad school. I wanted more time to read books and write poems, a different kind of creation.
I think of my once pregnant belly, sloshing left to right.
***
“It is enough that gravity really exists…and is sufficient to explain all the motions of the heavenly bodies and of our sea,” Sir Isaac Newton wrote.
***
I was high on my own biology, a magical pressure cooker maddened from my nerve endings firing with precision. My daughter—a mix of genetic material, atmosphere, and cosmic dust—pressed down on a biological button I didn’t know existed.
I cried out, and she emerged, a little red person with tufts of black hair. The midwife brought her to me. It is true, what people say. I forgot the pain once I held her, but more than that, I felt like I could do anything.
I could get pregnant again, I said.
My husband nodded. Before our newborn suckled and her brown eyes locked on mine, all I wanted was to be done feeling like an Orca whale, water-logged salty flesh, my gut a pond. I don’t think he understood—if my body was able, if he was willing, I wanted to do it all again.
No one warned me about this in childbirth classes. No one said, Don’t be afraid when you feel hornier than you ever have in your whole life after pushing out an eight pound baby. Just know it’s nature, the beauty of life, the biological urge to reproduce, and you do not have to heed it. The yearning to do it all again stayed with me for years, even though the world is over-populated, even though we can’t afford more children.
While our child snuffled and squirmed on top of my chest, I didn’t feel the pain of my outstretched hips, my sore back, my swollen labia, or my dilated cervix. In fact, I felt like an explorer, and the song “Ring of Fire” had new meaning for me. It was a human skull squeezing through a dilated cervix, shifting my perineum into a flesh and blood waterslide, and I emerged from the experience not just okay, but transformed.
I wanted to have sex, and I could do it again, I thought to myself, from coitus to birth. I wouldn’t even want or need to put my child down, her newborn fingers clasped into fists, her mouth latched onto my breast, her brown eyes searching mine.
I could get pregnant again tonight.
Works Cited
Blechner, Mark. “The Clitoris: Anatomical and Psychological Issues.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2017, vol. 18, pp. 190-200.
Idris, Zamzuri. "Searching for the Origin through Central Nervous System: A Review and Thought Which Related to Microgravity, Evolution, Big Bang Theory and Universes, Soul and Brainwaves, Greater Limbic System and Seat of the Soul." Malaysian Journal of Medical Sciences, vol. 21, no. 4, Jul/Aug2014, pp. 4-11. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=98622754&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Mewes, Jason, actor. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Directed by Kevin Smith, Miramax Films, 2001.
Paavonen, J. “Physiology and Ecology of the Vagina.” Scandinavian Journal of Infectious Diseases,” vol. 40, 1983, pp. 31-5. Accessed 02 May 2018, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6582587.
Shapiro, Alan E. "Newton's ‘Experimental Philosophy’." Early Science & Medicine, vol. 9, no. 3, Aug. 2004, pp. 185-217. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1163/1573382042176254.
Jennifer Jordán Schaller is a writer and English teacher from New Mexico. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction; NPR’s This American Life; Sonora Review; Brain, Child; New Mexico English Journal; Ascent (this essay was nominated for a Pushcart Prize); and elsewhere. You can find more of her work at jenniferjordanschaller.com or follow her on Twitter @jenniferjschall