The male reproductive system fascinates me. I’ll never forget the first time I saw an actual penis in real life; it was scary as shit. How do men walk around with a thing attached to them that they can only marginally control the hardening of? How mortifying would it be to get an erection at a seriously awkward place and time? YIKES FOREVER.
In my youth, penises were a novelty that I couldn’t get enough of, because I have a vagina and my vagina likes penises. I was amazed watching them transform from a sad little worm to a rock hard dick with just a slight brush of my hand. I never minded a penis sidling up to me; so long as it was a penis I was familiar with, I was game.
Then, I got married.
To be clear, I love my husband and I love his man parts. I really, really do. It’s just that I don’t understand why our sex life has to revolve around it. Maybe this is what happens when a woman gives birth repeatedly and approaches middle age, but my fascination with the penis somehow morphed from mild annoyance, followed by repulsion, and back to a mild indifference.
At the beginning of our marriage, it seemed like every time I turned around there it was: my husband’s dick. I didn’t mind, because we were young and able to sleep in late and it was a lot of fun … but those were the days before my left boob routinely began getting trapped under me when I rolled over. Even still, I refused to allow the pregnancy to interfere with my mojo. “I’ll never be THAT wife,” I said proudly and regularly, until the day I threw up all over my husband’s torso during intercourse.
It was pregnancy hormones – not repulsion – that tripped me up that time. But I distinctly recall knowing in that moment that this was the beginning of a different relationship with the penis. My husband wasn’t physically affected by our baby. His body was still trucking along, reacting in all the ways it always had, and the day I felt morning wood against my back and an actual human being moving inside of me at the exact same time, that was it. I was no longer down. I was the opposite of down – I was UP and OUT.
Over the years, my four pregnancies ended up creating a whole lot of penis repulsion, which is really ironic, right? The penis causes the pregnancy which causes the nausea which causes me to yell “GET THAT THING AWAY FROM ME.” And yet, we still kept doing it. I’d get over my repulsion just long enough to get knocked up and start the process all over again, because humans are very advanced and intelligent creatures.
Now that our youngest child is in elementary school, I’ve managed to mash whatever is left of my body back together and resume some semblance of a “normal” existence. I’m using wrinkle cream and I’ve invested in new shapewear and I’m working on throwing out all of my clothes from 2008.
I am no longer grossed out by my husband’s hard dick – in fact, I’d like to see it more often – but sadly, just when I’m ready to get it on regularly, like we did in the good old days, we are suddenly older and tired all the damn time and his penis just isn’t as youthful as it once was or some shit. Whenever the stars align and his dick happens to be hard at the same time that I’m fully awake and coherent, it feels a lot like Christmas.
Basically? A rock hard penis is once again a novelty – we’ve come full circle, it seems.
