Childbirth = Birth Control

It's time, once again, to visit the wonderful world of Dear Abby. With her pithy pearls of wisdom, sharp-as-a-tack mid-Western humor, and of course that engaging hairdo, she's an icon, the rock against which many of us lean in times of distress and, apparently, complete insanity.

Abby knows best
I'll admit that I read the Dear Abby column just about every day. Why? Because I'm comforted knowing that there are people in the world whose lives are a bigger mess than mine. If I'm having a bad day at work and I pick up a column where "Lori from Dubuque" is complaining that her stepfather from her mom's third marriage won't be able to walk her down the aisle in her upcoming nuptials because he's been incarcerated for jumping bond, but that doesn't matter because she'd rather have her real father do the honors anyway, which obviously will never work since his current wife is the tramp who broke up the marriage in the first place, well that just warms my heart. I mean, I have occasional popping in my ears. Who am I to complain?

I especially like it when someone asks Abby about sex, which is a lot like asking Michael Vick about pet care. Still, everyone loves to read about other people's dreadful sex lives. In a column not long ago, "Sexless in Atlanta" wondered why, since the birth of her child eighteen months ago, she's had "absolutely no desire for sex." This, she said, has put a strain on her marriage, and despite visits to her gynecologist and a therapist for a solution, she and her husband still argue about it.

No sex is good sex
Abby's advice was, cleverly, that the woman should find a new therapist (Translation: Don't ask me, I haven't had sex since the New Deal, and even then it wasn't so great). But what struck me was the problem. See, it wasn't my wife who had difficulty immediately after our children were born. It was me. And that was because I made the mistake of watching my wife give birth.

Any man who steps into that operating room does so at the peril of his sex drive. Once a man has seen what actually happens during childbirth, he's thinking he'd rather go through life with a nonspecific, weepy rash than go through that again. Sure, babies are cute and cuddly, but at the moment of birth they're covered in body fluids that just seem wrong. And they're huge, at least huge for the places from which they emerge. I'll never again underestimate the elasticity of the human body, but that's neither here nor there. The point is, my wife didn't have to watch it, I did. She was in pain of course, something she casually mentioned in rather colorful terms every fifteen seconds during labor, but she was also on her back. I saw it all, and I'm here to say that seeing it all does not provide the same sort of fantasy world as does, say, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.

Body fluids
Of course, I've never read Dear Abby for her responses. Anyone who believes that a newspaper columnist dispensing advice in one hundred words or less is actually qualified to do so needs, well, some advice. And I'm not going to talk about my sex life publically, I'll leave that to other correspondents. It's enough to say that our youngest is older now and covered in body fluids of his own making, and I can assure Sexless that, sooner or later, her desire will return -- only to be destroyed by the kids bursting through the bedroom door at midnight.

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