Perhaps it’s just because I live in the land of the Puritans, but I always imagine that when I tell people I’m a love, sex, and relationship coach who specializes in babyloss, they might wonder: why sex? What does sex have to do with grief?
Everything.
What does sex have to do with miscarriage, stillbirth, abortion, infertility, missed-opportunity motherhood, hysterectomy?
Everything.
Sex is the means by which we make a baby — or fail to make a baby. Sex is the touch we give and receive in our most intimate places. This touch can be deeply pleasurable, or deeply traumatic. Most often, in the process of treating infertility or in the process of losing a baby, (heck, even the experience of having a “healthy, normal” birth!) we experience physical trauma to womb, cervix, vagina, or our entire body through our endocrine system. It isn’t so simple as yes vs. no. I absolutely consented to my abortion. And parts of my abortion procedure were extremely hard to submit to.
I’m thinking, especially, of laminaria placement: sterile seaweed sticks inserted into the cervix. Over time, they absorb fluids from the body and swell, dilating the cervix — which is a much gentler, more gradual dilation than other methods, but the sticks must be placed, and that hurts. Iodine-soaked gauze is packed into vagina, to hold the laminaria in place and prevent infection. That hurts, too. I had two days of this treatment. Each appointment was only 10 minutes of my life, but they were not easy minutes. My animal instincts flared and my body would not hold still. My doctor chastised me for squirming — he did not want to injure me by accident. My nurse held my hand and coached my breath and joked close in my year, “Someday we’ll take a bunch of gauze and stuff it up in Dr. Hern. See how he likes it!” Thank god, thank god for that nurse. I survived these minutes, suppressed my body as much as I could for my own safety. But it was hard. My mind and spirit were a “yes,” to this procedure for all the right reasons, I KNEW this was vital to my health and safety and living my deepest values. But my body was still a hard “no!” It didn’t want to be touched like that, to be poked and prodded and stuffed full of gauze. It didn’t want to hurt. It didn’t want to let go of the baby it had worked so hard to nourish. Of course it didn’t. Even if you’ve never been through babyloss, think back to your last pap smear. Can you feel for the yesses and the noes in that? Even in the best of circumstances, living in a female body is full of contradictions. In babyloss, it’s all the usual medical contradictions with an enormous burden of grief on top.
It is the norm, not the exception, to blame the body for a dead or never-was baby. I venture to say it is a universal part of this experience. And where, where in the body does our ire fall the hardest? Breasts. Belly. Womb. Vagina. After all my body went through, I came out of my procedure full of grief, and I blamed my body for building a broken baby. I remember walking down the street and wishing, wishing with all of my soul, that I could unzip my body and just float away. It hurt so much to feel stuck inside the “scene of the crime.”
I was lucky. Part of a minority of women who lean into sexual connection after loss. I think it’s because my husband and I could not talk about Laurel. Could not talk about her for years. We were so stunted in verbal communication that we leaned hard into physical communication, and that was a gift. I’ve met a few other women like me, whose sexuality increased for a while after loss. Far more often, sexuality shuts down completely. It is common to fall into an extended winter of the body, a celibacy that lasts months, even years after babyloss. There are so many reasons for this.
Sex is how we get pregnant (and fail to get pregnant), and pregnancy (and no-pregnancy) maps trauma in the baby-lost body.
Sex touches places that store trauma in the body. It can make us flash back and feel things from the past that overwhelm us with vivid memories we’d rather avoid. It can feel very out-of-control.
Sex can tap deep wells of strong emotion: grief, fear, vulnerability.
Sex can be fraught because relationships are fraught after loss. Trust is difficult. Sex might feel bad or impossible with a partner who feels distant, unknown, at-odds.
Sex can bring pleasure. Many women feel that they deserve pain, not pleasure, after babyloss. Avoidance of sex can be a form of self-punishment.
Very often we can, and do, heal sex through integrating our trauma. But it isn’t a one-way street. Often, the very easiest, quickest way to integrate trauma is by healing sex. We can FEEL our worthiness through our pleasure. We can MEND our relationship connection with touch. We can RELEASE our flashbacks from the flesh and store them as distant memories, where they belong. We can INVITE emotions and use the power of oxytocin to mingle big, scary emotions with love. We can use some really good condoms or explore non-procreative sex to RECLAIM our body and mind from pregnancy obsession. Sexuality work is life-changing. It won’t be the path for everyone, but it’s a healing option to think about — to FEEL about (as the body is, here, wiser than the mind).
What if I turn my self topsy turvy and lead from the root of me?
What if I listen to my gut, my womb, my vulva instead of the voices in my head?
What if sex heals?
