The Tension of Desire: Parenting and a Femme Erotic
My most profound experience of physical intimacy was with my daughter in her first year. The tenderness I felt towards her was a revelation: an erotic experience that gathered and channeled my entire self into relationship with this new human being. I pushed her out of me like turning myself inside out. I sweated through the sheets the night my milk came in, breasts feeling heavy and splintered as riverwood. But the pleasure of meeting her needs came easy. The physical release of her tiny mouth catching to my nipple, the way her eyebrows lifted momentarily in appreciation. The weight of her asleep on my chest, a small limp anchor in the dark. My heart was like a hundred tiny silver fish, flickering tightly against her.
Audre Lorde reclaimed the erotic from the sphere of sex alone in her essay “Uses of the Erotic” in Sister Outsider. She rejected how “we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our life,” and defined the erotic as a way of making meaning as sensual beings.
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feeling. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”
I knew infancy would be short, so I held the baby most of the time, melting myself like a candle to feed her. When I was apart from her for more than a couple hours, a physical urgency would well up and shorten my breath until I could hold her again. I was surrendered when I was with her: I felt porous and patient and slowed to her. As a new parent, I was warned that this connection needed to be organized, facilitated, rationed. I should not hold her too much; I should teach her independence; I should not let her fall asleep on my breast, or in my arms, or next to me. But it felt good to give myself over to the bigness of the relationship and to feel my way through without strategy, even when many times I felt overtaken by the sheer physical labor of nurturing. I was surprised by and relished the feeling of deep pleasure I felt nuzzling against the baby, inhaling her fresh tortilla smell, holding her small feet in my hands.
Parenting did not feel like a new identity as much as a new embodiment of myself. The power of the erotic, in this new role, was to ground me firmly in my body, in my intuition. It was radically different from previous erotic experiences but the pull was the same: to trust desire. It felt familiar, at home with a queer femme politic that had shaped my life over the decade before. Coming into my sexual self as a teenager, I experienced a constant pressure to limit and apologize for my way of being. The messages I got then were similar to those I got as a new mother: desire should be strategically employed, and tempered. I was always a little too much, always risked making myself awkwardly vulnerable if I revealed something so big and hungry inside me.
“We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered.”
The promise of queerness, as a femme, was to reject an ethos of scarcity, a practiced feminine insecurity. And instead to embrace a politic of desire that was both sovereign and generous, and that affirmed the erotic in my life. I was in my early twenties, sitting on a light-filled twin size bed in a rented room, when I read S/he by Minnie Bruce Pratt. She wrote: “In one continuous motion, my idea of myself and who I am turns inside out, like a pond that flips upside down in the spring, when the cold winter water slips under, and the earth-warmed bottom water rises. The underlife comes to the surface.” Queerness has offered that aliveness, in the ability to give full expression to desire, to want all and give all and not apologize. To be femme is to exist in the tension of a suspect femininity: the access that assigned femaleness/socialized femininity allows, and the violence with which it is policed. Lorde argues for a femme politic, in stating that claiming pleasure and our experience of it makes us expect more agency in our lives.
“Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”
Coming into parenthood, I found grace in the erotic. The experience was overwhelmingly corporal, but there was something that expanded me beyond what I knew I was capable of. That shored me up and made me trust myself. When the baby was born, my body was constant generosity, but felt in shock: my pussy was a wound, my breasts food, the memory of birthing her stayed deep in the muscles of my thighs. In the season of her infancy, I was the floating planet of her need-meeting. But as she grew older, I had to start giving her something to push against — to reaffirm myself so that she could begin relating to me as a separate human being. Catching up to this new requirement was not graceful. Instead of night sweats, it was physical fights with a three-year old, grabbing tightly the tiny arm that shot out to grab a fistful of my hair. Picking up that little body that I had picked up a thousand times, wanting to shake it and slam it and fold myself over it and hold it and hold it and hold it close. I mourned the time where it felt easy to surrender to her every need. That porousness to her, that easy lack of boundary between where I ended and she began, was what made me volatile. I had to begin exercising awareness of my own needs and boundaries, and requiring recognition of them in consistent, small ways.
I made a practice of drinking more water, knowing that I would then have to respond to my own need of getting up, out of work or storytime or bed, to pee it back out. A physical mantra of need recognized, need fulfilled, need recognized, need fulfilled. This came along with other practices of somatic awareness, becoming more familiar with how emotions were physically felt in my body, and what these sensations were telling me. I had to start spending time alone. Asking the question: what ways of being can I grow into if I am more deeply aware of myself? If I treat my own needs as important, before I have simply had enough? Its easy to not require water, until someone strikes a match and every unmet need and unacknowledged hurt is a dry pine needle craving flame. In Lorde’s description, the practice of feeling “is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. And understanding is a handmaiden which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply born. The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.” As a new parent, my experience was animal; as the parent of a toddler, it had to become both relational and self-responsive.
Now the baby is four, and her brother is two. They are like tumbling pups, wanting constant chase and wrestle. Throwing themselves at me, hanging on my neck, little feet on the tops of mine, dragging the thin skin there like it will tear. I imagine myself as the snappy wolf, who bares her teeth at her pups too wild too close to her. I like making things with them, feeding their messy little bird mouths, hands full of baby fat thighs, admiring coltish little legs as they run by. I give myself over to the pleasure of them, holding them tight on either side of me asleep, in a dark tent with huge obsidian ants making their way along the edges of our sandy blankets. But I don’t submerge myself: I sit down at the dinner table and don’t get up until I have been able to eat; I take long showers before a date, sugar and oil coarse against my skin with their voices down the hall, muffled by the steam. I try to hold both their tender truths and my own. And in this spaciousness, my body is theirs still, and my own again.
My experience of femme desire buoyed me into motherhood, but it has shifted as I have grown into parenting. I have learned to appreciate autonomy as a practice of mutuality; that the generosity of self must be balanced with requirements of care. Parenting a baby is a one-way street; it’s a sacred reminder of physical pleasure as the foundation of emotional intimacy. Parenting a child is not the same as having a lover; but both require clarity of self and being seen. The erotic is a guide, and its big enough to hold both sovereignty and deep connection.
