Free Area Woman Blows Gasket by Patricia Pearson

desirous or lustful, and it wouldn't have been rocket science.
     But here in the altered state of consciousness called motherhood, male attention inspires a slow-motion double take. I think
     it has to do with defining myself in the eyes of my children. My face could be a boiled ham, as far as they're concerned.
     Therefore, wondering if I look sexy is irrelevant, not to mention hopeless and entirely beside the point.
    My sexuality has gone AWOL.
    I cannot find it under the couch with the stray puzzle pieces and empty formula bottles. I cannot find it in the bathtub among
     the spouting whales and duckies. It isn't in the bedroom, which is knee-deep in Barbie shoes and crackers. Sometimes I wonder:
     Is my sexuality behind the garden gate in Geoffrey's lift-the-flap book? No, but there's Spot the dog and Tom, the green alligator,
     playing ball, yay! Is it in the refrigerator? No, but there are some crinkly grapes in there.
    Surprisingly, I am married. This used to have a romantic connotation. I keep assuring myself, as Ambrose does, that all will
     be romantic again just as soon as we can reach for each other in a bed and not bump into two children, a Groovy Girl doll,
     the TV remote, our dog, a pacifier, and Goodnight Moon.
    Wishing to be guaranteed of this eventuality, I recently attended a conference on motherhood, sex, and sexuality. The conference
     was organized by ARM, the Association for Research on Mothering, together with the Center for Feminist Research. Much of the
     conversation centered on society's discomfort with maternal sexuality, but that attitude has actually grown more ambivalent
     of late. If we used to divide neatly into madonnas and whores and crones and virgins, what of the pop star Madonna, sauntering
     about on her book tours looking gorgeous in her forties with two children in tow?
    She rather confounds the categories. But she works at it. Women are generally becoming mothers later now, in their thirties,
     when their sexual ambitions have played out a bit, seeds have been sown, blocks have been run around. We were whores, so to speak, and now too many of us are behaving like madonnas with chronic fatigue syndrome.
    There's something the matter with that, which has to do with yielding to the loss of sexual vitality without a fight, as if
     it doesn't matter as much as it does. But maybe one of the reasons that we yield to the shift from sexy hottie to frumpy hen
     is that we derive a great deal of sensual nourishment from our small children.
    This subject was explored rather intriguingly by one Pamela Courtney-Hall, a professor at the University of British Columbia.
     She proposed that many parents derive an erotic pleasure from their children that calls for a new vocabulary of sexuality
     or Eros, for it isn't sexual in the orthodox sense but deeply intimate and physically sustaining.
    We declare child care to be an "Eros-neutral domain," Courtney-Hall said, "but caregivers report connections to their children
     that are rapturous . . . and rooted in intimate bodily contact." They are not sexual, however, not dirty and self-pleasuring,
     not pedophiliac. "The language we have inherited," she noted, "is inadequate to the lived experience."
    Thus, mothers who unexpectedly find breastfeeding to be sensually enthralling are suspected of sexual abuse, while mothers
     who find their children's bodies beguiling, like the photographer Sally Mann, are accused of taking pornographic pictures.
    This same point, about the unspoken "tender-erotic" connection between parents and children, as CourtneyHall calls it, is
     raised in a book by American writer Noelle Oxenhandler, The Eros of Parenthood: Explorations in Light and Dark. Oxenhandler tries to promote an invisible but uncrossable line between parental passion and pedophiliac lust, sensual joy
     and sexual exploitation. It's tricky and fraught, like playing with a conceptual hand grenade. I think most parents intuitively
     understand what's being spoken