Southern Lady Code: Essays(5)

I wasn’t brave enough to use tampons until I was a high school junior. I was even less brave about walking over the train tracks to the Harco drugstore and buying them. I called Mama at her law office and asked her to “pick me up some supplies” on her way home. After a few minutes of back and forth, she figured out I didn’t mean No. 2 pencils. She came home with a blue box in a brown paper bag. The Tampax how-to diagram of the female anatomy looked like the illustration of sink pipes on a bottle of Liquid-Plumr. I was supposed to raise a knee? It took me a few tries, but I figured it out.

When I decided to have sex as a college sophomore, I made sure it would be on my terms: I had to be in love, be in a committed relationship, and have rendered my reproductive system as infertile as a carburetor. Plus, I required a clean bill of health. As a result of coming of age in the eighties, every man I’ve chosen to have sex with, including my husband, had to take an AIDS test and have his doctor fax me his negative results. And use a condom.

To get a prescription for the pill, Mama made an appointment for me to have my first gynecologist appointment with her OB/GYN. But it was my grandmother, my father’s mother, who drove me to the doctor’s office.

Grandmother sat in the waiting room, wearing white gloves and holding her Kelly bag on top of her lap the same way she used to sit on a bench and wait for me to come out of the snake house at the Birmingham Zoo. The ultimate example of a Southern lady, Grandmother—prim and proper with a perm-and-set—stood by in support of all of my alternative choices.

When I came out of the exam room I was crying. The doctor had put his hands on me in an unprofessional way and lectured me about the sin of premarital sex. He’d said, “I’d never let my daughter go on the pill.”

Grandmother got the prescription from the doctor and took me to the pharmacy. Mama got a new gynecologist. I found out that sex was for good girls, but heartbreak was bad. I was devastated when my boyfriend left me a year later, but I kept taking the pill.

I stayed on the pill for no zits and big tits.

I married for love.

I went off the pill because I considered getting pregnant.

I was in my early thirties, and my husband and I had been married for years. There’d been a lot of reasons—nothing you haven’t heard before—for why we had been “waiting to try.” “Trying” is Southern Lady Code for telling everyone and your mother that you’re having intercourse to conceive. “Waiting” is actively not doing what other people are waiting for you to do.

I heard: When are you going to have kids? How many kids are you going to have? You’re so good with kids. You should have kids; you’d make such a great mom.

But I was scared of pregnancy. A friend of mine got gestational diabetes. A friend of a friend developed some sort of temporary paralysis. Another friend got a dark line over her lip that looked like Steve Harvey’s moustache. Not to mention puking and walking around with a human being treading your uterus like a gerbil ball.

I was also scared of giving birth. I am the kind of woman who gets frustrated when crushed ice gets stuck in my straw. A friend of mine broke her tailbone pushing. A friend’s friend separated her pelvis. There’s something called “the ring of fire” that ain’t a Johnny Cash song. And, once the baby’s out, your vagina looks like—as one friend’s husband so eloquently described it—“A raw steak torn in half.”

But most of all, I was scared of cesareans. The cesarean rate on the Upper East Side is like one in three. It’s easier to get your stomach sliced in half than get a prescription for Sudafed. And the baby’s not pulled out like Baby Jessica from that well. Your doctor takes out your uterus and whatever else is attached, cuts out the baby, and then stuffs all your stuff back into your torso like she’s on the run in a made-for-Lifetime movie and is packing an escape bag.

But some women love cesareans.

A friend said, “I carried twins for nine months, I wasn’t going to push.”

Me, I wasn’t going to push my husband.

And by my mid-thirties, the way I understood how things worked in a marriage was that it was the wife’s job to push to get pregnant.

I don’t know any married woman who did not orchestrate her own pregnancy. Whether she went off birth control or was never on it to begin with, she had unprotected sex and she got pregnant. That’s how you get pregnant. The only household accidents I believe in are Crock-Pot fires and tub slip-and-falls. I know women who poked pinholes in condom wrappers. I know women who got their husbands drunk, but not drunk enough to not get it up. Some women took their temperature to track ovulation. Some women bought apps for that. Sex was scheduled. Sex was abstained from and then scheduled.

I didn’t do any of this. And by thirty-eight, I’d never been pregnant.

I heard: You won’t know what real love is until you have kids. Why get married if you’re not going to have kids? Married women who don’t have kids are selfish. Women who don’t want to have their husband’s babies don’t really love their husbands. You don’t WANT kids? Why don’t you want kids? You don’t LIKE kids? You think your cats are your kids?

My answer to all of this was: “If it happens, it happens.”

My husband agreed.

My gynecologist said, “I can get you pregnant in your forties, but it’s going to take a lot of work.”