The Skin Bridge
I lean off the edge of the toilet seat and sniff my underwear, trying to figure out what is leaking from me. I’ve downscaled from the postpartum mattress pads to panty liners I change every few hours, but I don’t have a name for what’s coming out of me now. Not the sharp acidity of urine, not the egg-white mucus of ovulation, its slippery stretch on my fingers. This is a clear and watery substance, with only a slight animal musk. It trickles out of me when I stand up from nursing and when I bend over to pick up a giraffe rattle from the floor. It must be pee, the way it gushes warm, but it comes independent from any sensation of peeing on myself. It flirts with the numbness of my urethra (poor girl stretched to oblivion in birth), so the leak is barely an utterance.
I wish the fluid leaking into my underwear were the only mystery. But there’s also the question of my butthole. Where is it, exactly? In the shower as I swipe my fingers between my cheeks, there’s a new rubbery stretch to the skin there, like a balloon that’s been filled wide with air and then deflates. When I try to wash myself, it takes me a few tries to find the opening. There are two new pockets of skin that I come to think of as fool’s butthole. One pocket, I guess, is swollen veins of hemorrhoids. And the other? Some kind of new flap like a ship’s sail.
At my next postpartum appointment, I try to figure out if there’s a hole between my vagina and my rectum, a fistula. The answer is no. But my doctor gives me a name for the confusing butt flap: a skin bridge. It’s a spot where some extra skin of my butt crack has been incorporated into the suturing of the second-degree tear in my perineum.
~
“The skin bridge!” my friend Morgan exclaimed on the phone as I sat in the purple chair in the nursery. “Oh my god! The skin bridge! My friend Vera had this after her birth.”
“Wait, you know about the skin bridge? This is a thing? Vera had it?” I stood up from my chair and began walking between the changing table and the window. I immediately felt like less of a freak. Vera had a high-powered director job and was the kind of vibrant woman who lowered into a full squat and threw her arms open wide to greet her toddler at daycare. Just knowing that Vera was living her life with a skin bridge in her pants made me feel less like a mutant.
As Morgan talked, my right foot rubbed the shaggy white carpet in the nursery, my toes smoothing the tangled clumps that had become gray with constant foot travel in the last three years of motherhood. Two worn, packed trails diverged at the corner of the rug from the door: one to the changing table and one to the purple nursing glider. The compacted shag told a story of the care of bodies—other bodies.
I called my doula, too.
“I didn’t expect to still have so much healing ahead of me at this point,” I confessed, sitting on my bed now with the phone getting hot on my cheek. “It’s a little confusing because emotionally, the birth left me feeling peaceful and powerful. But physically the recovery has been so long and painful. I already had issues with my sexuality before this, and now I’m worried that sex will always be hard.” The first attempt at sex postpartum had me grasping for words metallic and sharp. Barbed wire. Cheese grater.
“It took a while for me to heal, too,” she said. “This may sound strange, but even though the area was different after, I found I could experience even more pleasure.”
~
Veronica at Pelvic PT gives me a bladder diary to write down everything I eat and drink for five days. I also have a stool scale. There are seven types:
Type 1: Separate hard lumps
Type 2: Lumpy and sausage-like
Type 3: A sausage shape with cracks in the surface
Type 4: Like a smooth, soft banana or snake
Type 5: Soft blobs with clear-cut edges
Type 6: Mushy consistency with ragged edges
Type 7: Liquid consistency with no solid pieces
Veronica takes me to a room in the back where she hooks up a vaginal probe—a white wand with a cord attached to it—and asks me to insert it.
“This will show us how your pelvic floor muscles register on the charts,” she explains. Next, she loads a picture of a blooming rose on the screen.
“Contract your pelvis muscles,” she says. I squeeze, and the petals close inward, as if returning to a bud. Except my petals barely flutter.
“Do they really close?” I ask. Veronica laughs.
“Everyone asks that. Yes, the flower really does close. Take out the wand and squeeze it with your hand to watch how it closes.” I remove the white stick, squeeze, and watch the flower close completely. “You’re only using about ten percent of your pelvic muscle power.”
She gives me an assignment: 90 good Kegels a day. She also encourages me to set the intention for intimacy in order to help prepare emotionally and physically. “For example, you might send him a text that says, ‘Hey, I want to see you in the bedroom tonight [wink].’”
She gives me a white paper bag full of samples of lube. Slippery Stuff, it’s called. I put the bag on the shelf in my bathroom next to a white paper bag my doctor gave me, full of sample tubes of a hemorrhoid gel called Anal Pram.
~
“I am ever so respectfully lusting after you,” Lloyd whispered to me when he passed me in the hallway before bed. Despite my chapped nipples that burned under the shower’s hot water and the slow leak of urine into my panty liner from my prolapsed bladder, I had been feeling surges of desire. More than I’d felt in years. Though penetration had not been an option for months with the painful scar tissue in my vagina, Lloyd and I were making out like teenagers in bed with our underwear on, rubbing and gripping and releasing. When my orgasm crested, milk spilled from me and became a slick warmth between our chests.
No one ever tells you: Masturbate while the baby sleeps. But that winter, my body began to hum with desire. A beehive lived inside my pelvis, and a constant pleasure buzzed through my day. The more I noticed it, the more I looked for it, and the more often it found me. While my kids napped, I lay in bed and rubbed my labia until my orgasms rippled in eight, nine, ten waves, like a stone skipping across the water. For the first time, I noticed the contractions of an orgasm. I felt the way the muscles flared—open and close, open and close—like a flower in fast motion, the way my pelvic floor muscles squeezed the rose at PT.
I discovered that the flat pressure of my palm on the mound of my old C-section scar felt like a subtle tease of my clitoris. Was the webbing of scar tissue from my old C-section somehow pulling on my clitoris? I didn’t understand what was happening in my body and why now, but I pursued it.
~
Each time you leak urine, circle whether you were:
Almost Dry
Damp
Wet
Soaked
Damp
Activity during leak:
Bending over to pick up burp cloth
Was there an urge?
No
~
One day I was nursing in bed, lying on my side, and my baby began tapping his foot like a metronome against my thigh. Tap Tap Tap. A reverberation traveled inward, slipping into the v of my legs. A little tingle traveled up my front and made me shiver. Do I stop his foot from tapping? Am I pedophile if this feels good? I wondered. I’d felt so much pain—the blanched nipples, the barbs of my birth wound. Did the pleasant feeling have to be bad?
Veronica had told me to do my Kegels while sitting, driving, nursing. I could feel my muscles getting stronger, and just doing a few deep vagina squeezes could send a ripple up my spine.
“Wow, that must get you to an almost orgasmic state with the nipple stimulation, too,” my therapist said when I told her about the tingle while nursing. I didn’t ever have an urge to touch my baby inappropriately or act on the sexual feelings, I self-consciously assured her. All I did was imagine my vagina as a tissued hand lifting a blueberry. Or as an elevator traveling slowly up to the top floor and then back down to the ground floor. All I did was close my eyes and write poetry about my vagina:
My vagina is a ripe tomato pulling on the vine. It is the thin skin of a chrysalis when the butterfly starts to stretch its wings.
~
Veronica sits me down by the computer and asks me pages of questions she calls The Sexual Satisfaction Survey:
How often do you have an orgasm?
How strong would you rate your orgasm?
How difficult is it for wetness to occur? And does it last for the entire sexual activity?
What kind of masturbation do you do?
How do you feel about the emotional connection with your partner during sex?
How painful is penetration?
What positions do you use?
Do you guide your partner’s penis in for entry?
How often do you feel aroused?
How satisfied are you with your sexual frequency?
How satisfied is your partner with your sexual frequency?
I tell her things I’ve never told my friends. I tell her things I’ve never told my doctor. I tell her things I’ve never told my husband. Nor myself. We talk for over an hour, until I feel my breasts swelling with my baby’s next meal. We talk until I feel my nipples tingle and my bra dampen. I leave before the milk spills through my shirt.
Veronica sends my vaginal probe home with me to practice easing into penetration. At home I rub Slippery Stuff on the hard white plastic and let it sit inside me for a minute, the bands of metal signaling nowhere. The white cord trails out of me, toward no machine that can measure my strength, curling into a future of undetermined satisfaction.
~
It wasn’t just the baby’s tapping foot. When I shook my butt to music or my backside grazed the edge of the counter, I felt a vibration that traveled to my clitoris. Best I could figure, the skin bridge had created some kind of secret anal-clitoral passage. A slight tap on my butt cheeks made me shiver with pleasure. It was like my birth tear had laid a band of new sensation from my anus up the front of my vulva to my clitoris—some kind of Kintsugi of the flesh, a golden seam over the tissue my baby tore through.
In bed one night, I asked Lloyd to firmly press and tap my butt with a flat palm. “Over here,” I demonstrated with my own hands, like the hollow vibration of thwacking a djembe. Room for reverberation, room for an echo. He tapped over the slit of my butt cheeks, then lower towards my labia folds, to the right and then to the left. Sometimes more staccato and other times a lingering pressure. I didn’t tell him that the baby helped me discover this pleasure. What I said was, There. Harder. And There. Slower. The rose opened, the rose closed. Even more pleasure than before.
Catherine Simone Gray is a writer from Mississippi whose work explores the intersection of motherhood, loverhood, and healing. Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, and her micro-memoirs onherblog Unsilenced Woman have been featured by La Leche League, International Cesarean Network, and ImprovingBirth. She holds a BA in English and French from Millsaps College. She is working on a memoir. You can find her at unsilencedwoman.com and @unsilencedwoman.
On Pleasure: “After the birth of my second child, I couldn’t question my pain tolerance: a 10 and a half pound baby with a 99th percentile head had carved through my vagina. But my pleasure tolerance? I was only beginning to acclimate. My essay ‘The Skin Bridge’ gives a window into this time when pleasure surprised me in the unlikely time of having two children under three, nipples colonized with breastmilk yeast, and a new genital construction.”