Hump

Renaissance: An IntroductionI love the word fuck. I love its force and versatility. When I labored for thirty hours, pushed for four and a half, then had a C-section, my husband, Bill, tells me I was not shy about using my favorite expletive even with my parents and the venerable Dr. Baldwin in the room.During the year or so that our son Lucas was preverbal, I felt little need to refrain. I used fuck liberally. A good angry "Fuck!" or a contemplative "Fuuuck..." here or there satisfied my sudden need to preserve the youth and vitality that diaper bags and nursing bras threatened.One sunny afternoon in the tiny kitchen in our first house in Oakland, though, I was trying to stave off the stultifying tedium that came from ten hours alone with my toddler. I was going to treat myself to an old comfort: a huge bowl of Grape-Nuts with half-and-half and copious spoonfuls of sugar. The bowl slipped. Zillions of Grape-Nuts pinged against tile and appliances and hardwood. Up rose the ugliness of Lucas's truncated nap, Bill's phone call to say he had a dinner meeting, the fact that I hadn't spoken to an adult all day, and the reality of six more hours until bedtime. "FUCK!!!" I yelled.Predictably, cherubic fourteen-month-old Lucas looked up through the rain of cereal and happily echoed, "Fuck!"From my third child this would have been funny. From my impressionable and perfect first, who now numbered fuck among the twenty-two words I kept thinking I should record in his baby book, this was dire.All my life I had assumed that I would mother many children and I would love mothering them and I would mother them well. I had attended an empowering all-girls' high school that convinced an entire generation of us that the hard-driving career, the sensitive husband, the well-adjusted children... all of it would be ours. Some professional or academic pursuit, I was sure, would sit politely on the back burner during the years my children were small. I would revel in self-defining and immensely fulfilling maternity, as had my mother, a successful psychotherapist who put her career on hold to raise four kids. But here I stood, bored and depressed in a Grape-Nuts-strewn kitchen. I was twenty-eight. I was earning a doctoral degree, Bill was working long corporate hours, and motherhood had me blindsided.Fuck dropped out of my vocabulary. Hearing it in my young son's mouth made the responsibility of parenting feel all the more weighty. I found myself profoundly jealous of the fact that Bill worked in an actual office in San Francisco with a room someone else filled with apples and cold cuts and bubbly water and Pop-Tarts. The commute he professed to dread sounded fabulous: a half-hour train ride during which he could sit down and read. During that first year of parenting I would be lonely for Bill all day, then seethe when he walked through the door because he hadn't been the one to battle the never-napping baby or stand for eight minutes in the supermarket checkout line with milk leaking from his breasts. I never slept for more than a few hours at a stretch and became convinced that Bill's long hours were subterfuge for the affair he was having because I had turned into such a bitch (my sage therapist mother assured me otherwise but I wasn't above some histrionic checking-of-shirt-collars-for-lipstick). I got pregnant again just after the Grape-Nuts debacle, and even though the four-child plan I had harbored since I was tiny seemed well on-track, I felt isolated from friends, distanced from my husband, and resentful about having to read esoteric eighteenth-century French plays in the sandbox while my colleagues luxuriated in libraries.But even as the word fuck disappeared from my vocabulary, there was never a shortage of fucking in our miserable little house hold. I love sex. I always have. For me, sex meanFord, Kimberly is the author of 'Hump', published 2008 under ISBN 9780312376826 and ISBN 0312376820.