From 1971 to 2000, Wendy Sanford was a founding coauthor and editor of Our Bodies, Ourselves, a classic resource on women’s health and sexuality published by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Her essay “Pecans” won honorable mention in the 2005 Gulf Coast Nonfiction Contest. That essay and the one published here are from her memoir in progress, White People Swimming. A graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing Program, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Polly Attwood, her partner of twenty-seven years. Sanford is an active Quaker and grandmother to three girls.
Jeff and I spread into a whole house in Cambridge, just the two of us, vacationed in his family’s waterfront home on the Cape, drank quantities of wine at dinner parties I cooked for all day. We built a twenty-foot sailboat in our backyard, aggravating our neighbors with the chemicals but feeling diligent and content in our project. I remember agreeing with a friend over tea that we were the two happiest wives we knew. Beyond the affluent bubble of Jeff’s and my life, sometimes just blocks away, activists tackled civil rights, poverty, and the Vietnam War, but outside news found its way into our home mainly via the Beatles. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band arrived at the Harvard Co-op the day I turned twenty-three. That night, friends dressed me in a bright orange jumpsuit they’d lettered across the back: “Housewife 23-plus.”
After the publishing house turned me down, I reasoned that we’d want a family sooner or later, so why not get started now? I say reasoned. Reason was probably the least active ingredient in the pot I stirred in my new kitchen day after day, trying to cook up a future for myself. Jeff’s mother had announced in her straightforward, practical way that it was time for me to start a family. My mother, I knew, longed for a grandchild. Ambition was a spice I’d never tasted. No surprise, then, that the soup I served up was motherhood. Jeff, finishing up his training as an architect, tasted hesitantly, wasn’t sure he liked it, but finally said that we could have a baby if I wanted to—since, he said, I’d do most of the work.
Maybe because Jeff really wanted to say “not yet,” maybe because he resented the contortions that conceiving required of our sex life (“It’s time!” I’d say, holding the basal thermometer aloft), when I finally did get pregnant he treated the news as more mine than ours. When I ventured out to natural childbirth classes, he stayed home. In the middle-of-the-night labor room, while I breathed and panted through the pains as I’d been taught, he fell asleep. After orderlies wheeled me away for spinal anesthesia, after the doctor pulled our nine-pound son out with forceps, after a nurse laid a bundled infant in my trembling arms, the doctor studied my face. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Aren’t you happy?” I hadn’t expected to feel so alone.
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