Castration Doesn’t Hurt

by Marina J. Neary

Part 6: The Plush Horde

The promise of salvation came from the most unexpected source. The routine twenty-week ultrasound revealed a perfectly formed wiener between the baby’s legs. I saw it even before the technician did. I was going to have a son! From the darkness of his mother’s womb, he was giving me a green light, a permission to drink whiskey and smoke cigars. At last, a chance to reclaim my manhood!

Over the next four and a half months I acquired an impressive collection of tiny football jerseys. I even burned a metal mix on a CD, featuring Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. Hey, you can’t neglect the essentials.

When the baby finally came, it turned out that he was allergic to polyester, which ruled out him wearing any of those cool football jerseys. To say that I was bummed about it would be an understatement. I couldn’t bring myself to just give them away, so I pulled them over the army of teddy bears that we got from relatives.

We arranged the menacing plush horde on a shelf over the six-hundred dollar crib. What the salesperson at Baby Depot did not tell us is that most cribs end up being used for storage space. I don’t think Allen spent a single night there. Rinnie, whisked him off into bed, and he stayed there until the age of five.

There always seemed to be a reason to delay Allen’s transfer into his own sleeping space. For the first year Rinnie was paranoid about SIDS. For the next two years she was paranoid about night terrors. After that, frankly, I think she used our son as natural birth control. In case you didn’t know, having a preschooler in your bed definitely limits your sexual activity.

The only times Rinnie and I had any privacy were the Friday nights when Allen slept over at his grandmother’s house. Those were our official conjugal time slots when we could actually allow ourselves a bit of former naughtiness.

You’ve all heard stories about women experiencing a sudden sexual awakening after giving birth. My wife, who was not known for her bedroom diplomacy even before the baby, turned into a complete dictator between the sheets. Since she couldn’t control when she had sex, she compensated by controlling how we did it.

She had a peculiar way of communicating her desires to me. She would tell me, sparing no details, the horror stories about her previous lovers who had disappointed her.

“Don’t you ever give me a Celine Dion album like my ex-boyfriend Dave did,” she would say. “That Neanderthal was trying to be romantic, so he filled the bathtub with petals but at the same time he forgot to scrub the bottom. When he lowered me into the tub, I felt the grease and the scum from his roommates. And then he lit candles all over the bedroom. I felt like I was in a funeral parlor. Not to mention, I was afraid of setting the whole place on fire.”

Thanks for the pointers. At least I knew what not to do. My wife was kind enough to spare me the ordeal of humiliation.

Before Rinnie and I became parents, we used to take turns going down on each other. All that changed. We had to resort to sixty-nine. It was not the most comfortable position, considering that Rinnie was almost a foot shorter, but it cut our lovemaking time in half. It was like getting two orgasms for the price of one. The five o’clock shadow on my cheeks mirrored the five o’clock shadow between her legs. Imagine two prickly, sweaty surfaces rubbing mindlessly against each other.

Afterwards we would fall asleep in the same ying-yang position. We would not even have the energy to rotate and sleep with our heads pointing in the same direction. Ah, the joys of marital sex!

Proceed to part 7...