Risk Assessments

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Risk Assessments” by Karin Jones. Karin practices street medicine and writes about later life sex, motherhood and menopause. She’s received the International Amy MacRae Award for memoir writing. Her New York Times “Modern Love” essay, “What Sleeping with Married Men Taught Me About Infidelity” was one of the most controversial ever published. Her work has also appeared in The Delacorte Review, Times of London, and Herstry among others. She lives with a cheeky son and two cats in northwest Washington and authors the Savvy Love newsletter on Substack.

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It’s morning, and his limbs are coiled around me as though I’m the fly and he’s the trap. This giant man is dead asleep and I’m wide awake, conflicted about shifting, feeling captured but also protected. He is, if you add three inches for personality, a foot taller than the average man. I, on the other hand, am unremarkable in height with the thick limbs of my squat and fleshy parents. There’s a comfort in feeling contained.

Recently, I have become a bit crazed. I am in the clutches of an encroaching menopause and feeling oddly powerful as my hormones pivot, a welcome change from decades spent drained by the menstrual cycle. At 50, I am more opinionated, more driven. I speak louder and tell more jokes. I slap my thigh and point a finger for emphasis. I am overwhelmed by a shifted sexuality. It has become the driver of my day, and I’m a little drunk behind the wheel. No one has told me the run up to menopause can feel like being a teenage boy.

I spend hours in the gym as my periods wither. All those retained red blood cells are channeled into kettlebell swings and spin classes. I watch the once shy muscles of my shoulders peek through, contract, announce themselves: We’re here! I heft barbells backwards to discourage bat wings. There’s a genetic bias in the women of my family to have upper arms that fan out like the mouth of a river. I have a body now I never dared develop when I was younger and shyness kept me flaccid. Now that I’m in bed with a man not remotely like my former husband, this muscle is pulsing to be challenged.

I stir, and he stirs. I shift to face him, my nose against his clavicle, and he rolls to his back.  I swing a bent thigh across his waist and heave myself astride his prostrate body. If ever there was a time to carry out my fantasy, this is it, before he’s fully awake. My thighs create a biting vice against his hips, and I pin his arms against the mattress, my weight bearing down below the joints of his elbows.

“Wrestle me,” I whisper, before his eyes have even opened.

+++

On our first date, his physicality arrested me; the bald head tapering to a square chin, permanent parentheticals etched into his face, a habit of pausing with an open mouth before responding, his tongue pacing between the inside of his cheeks like a caged animal. His online persona was fixed within the fringes of a subterranean existence; all strobe lights and costumes, glittering jewelry draped between the piercings of his face. But he had shown up unadorned. We spent three hours talking about life’s reinventions now that we lived within the antechamber between youth and old age. We’d each taken risks and had adventures. His involved guns and deserts and women who paid him to make them feel alive. I was hesitant to admit that decades of eating street food in hot countries couldn’t compare to the adventure of becoming a mother after forty.  

He visited my apartment later that night, barreling through a rainstorm on his motorcycle. The next day he texted, Going down on you is like a shortcut to your soul. I was astonished by his fascination with someone so unlike himself. The second time we had sex, he held me as though cleaving to a rooted object tethering him to the earth. The incongruity of his history against the tenderness of his embrace disarmed me.

I asked why he wanted to date suburban me, as vanilla as soft serve. My reasons seemed obvious: satiate my body hunger with men who rejected convention. He’d had multiple lovers, none for very long, and often at the same time.

He replied, “I want to try monogamy.”

The evening before I challenged him to wrestle, he asked, after dinner, if I wanted to see his puppies. I had been in his house for hours without evidence of any other living creature, not even a plant. Were these puppies his childhood relics, stuffed with cotton, adorned with nylon whiskers and plastic eyes? Or were they something more sinister, the pickled or taxidermized dogs of an earlier century?  My perverse images were inspired by his creepy bedroom embellishments; a featureless mannequin wrapped in a pink feather boa, spiked leather cuffs around her fiberglass wrists; a six-foot gilded mirror propped in the corner near the bed that would have been at home in a Tudor boudoir; a collection of mid-calf boots lining the wall that could kick shit from an armored vehicle.

“Sure,” I said, because I craved his unveiling.

He retrieved his phone and pecked and scrolled until his finger slowed and he turned the screen to face me. He stood at the center of the frame, upper body bare and hairless, his neck wrapped with a black choker pierced with bolts. His low riding pants were shiny vinyl the color of space, threaded with a thick leather belt of O-rings. Attached to the rings were the trigger snap hooks of several leashes, swooping down from his body in a slack curve, each attached to a harness. And there they were. His puppies.

They were on hands and knees, five of them, heads banded with fabric floppy ears, black matte snouts affixed to their faces, tails visible between bare thighs. Their breasts hung free from the grid of straps that wrapped their torsos. All eyes looked squarely at the camera, as though Richard Avedon were asking them to stop breathing and penetrate his lens.

“Huh,” I offered, wanting to laugh but careful not to offend the man who had cooked for me and spent the better part of our time together bowed down between my legs.  I stared at the photo and imagined him doing it doggy style with each of them while they panted or yipped. 

+++

His eyes open and I grin, say it again.

“Wrestle me,” I whisper more loudly.

My muscles tense and jaw clenches. I channel an Avenger, believing I can contain him. His eyes go dark, and I see he’s taking this challenge seriously without a whiff of a smirk. A bolt of anxiety hits. I want him to be playful, to disarm me with tickles, but he is going a different direction. I heave my body down, attempt to engulf him with my limbs, like a koala gripping a tree. He flips me so quickly it feels as though I’ve traveled through a time warp. He’s on top of me now. I can hardly wiggle a finger. Then he heaves my body upright, twists us both to face the mirror and presses his crowbar forearm against my neck. It doesn’t hurt, but I can’t breathe. Not one bit. His Special Forces training is a muscle memory. I’m suspended in a moment that isn’t moving and I can’t find a response.

In the mirror, he stares at me, and I stare at him. Wispy strands of silver hair rest against my pinkening cheeks. I wear a face of pure astonishment, suspended within the heartbeat moment before a response is formed. What will be mine? Fury fueling an injection of strength or the stupor of a neurological shutdown? Then I clock the stupid fact that no one knows where I am, not the people who love me or those who would expect to see me at school pickup. No one I know has seen me clinging to the man with the roving tongue as he banks and dips through the dark streets of Camden on his motorcycle. They did not see me smile and accept the offer of dinner at his house in a part of the city I know nothing about.

My eyebrows furrow. My mouth opens and closes. I look like a fish on land, gulping, wondering why she can’t pull oxygen into her lungs. I take in my naked body in front of his. I am on my knees, hands squeezing his forearm which is not budging. My eyes move from my breasts down to the wishbone indent at the base of my ribs, to my recessed belly button. They come to rest at the line just above the carefully waxed strip of pubic hair. The horizontal scar there is white, about four inches in length. It’s the place where my son was pulled from my body.

His arm relaxes. I feel a rush of air enter my chest. My eyes are now locked onto his, still looking at me. Then he raises his free hand and strokes my hair. Like I’m his puppy.

+++

Before I told my husband I didn’t want to be married any longer, I would sit in our living room at 2 a.m., wondering if I could do it, break up the family, survive on my own after 23 years together. The night I looked for solace in the poems of Mary Oliver, it became clear what I would do.

Listen, whatever it is you try

to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you

like the dreams of your body.

A decade earlier my body dreamed of bearing a child. We spent years and many thousands of dollars turning that dream into a baby. When our son was five, the dreams of my body began to wander into fantasy landscapes of other men as different from my husband as I could imagine. My body said to me, You are aching with sadness. There is so much more to discover. As I inched towards 50, the discontent within my marriage turned to a heat inside the body I no longer wanted to share with my husband. We packed up the house and introduced our son to his new rooms.

Dating apps on our phones were still new. I put my photos there and plunged into a sea of midlife men, double degreed and down to fuck. I wanted what I’d denied my body when I was younger, too afraid of a bad reputation or becoming a woman nice men wouldn’t want to marry.

My craving to be with new men was every bit as urgent as my drive to become a mother, as though a biological alarm clock had gone off in me to screw or die. Call it hormonal, emotionally wounded, or a well-deserved crack at a midlife Rumspringa, I couldn’t stay away from them; the brooding, zestful he-wolves of our species. Their hair was black or absent. They posed with motorcycles or dressed for Burning Man. Their personal statements suggested they’d take sex to a higher level of intensity, ecstatic or excruciating, depending on my preference. I was helpless to the blind yearning for men the same way I couldn’t talk myself out of wanting to have a baby. The Special Forces man was as enchanting to me as my son, whose every expression was like opening the book to an undiscovered story. I was mesmerized by them both.

+++

According to statistics from World Population Review, 0.6 women per 100,000 are murdered every year in the U.K., where my family is living when my marriage ends. In the U.S., 2.9 women per 100,000 are killed by homicide. In the U.K., 53 per 100,000 women report being a victim of sexual assault. In the U.S. it’s 42, though data collectors suggest the U.S. is underreporting. The definition of sexual assault also varies by country. Sweden’s rate is 89 per 100,000 largely due to that country’s broader interpretation of what comprises sexual assault. When Sweden’s numbers are calculated using the German definition of sexual assault, Sweden’s rate falls to 15 per 100,000.  One thing is not variable: the vast majority of sexual assaults, over 70% globally, are committed by a person known to the victim.

Given I’d had consensual sex twice before the man who wants monogamy puts me in a headlock, I’d say we are well acquainted. But did I assault him first by challenging him to a naked brawl while he was still half asleep? What I do understand, staring at a forearm across my neck the size of my calf, is that wrestling gone awry will only hurt one of us.

+++

When he releases me completely, I smooth down my hair then pivot from my knees on the bed to my feet on the floor. I dress quickly, in silence. I feel a mix of rage and shame because I couldn’t contain him and he failed to smile. And yet, because I can see the overgrown child he is, one who has shown me tenderness, I don’t feel fear. Adrenaline, yes, boiling through me from the surprise of it, an impulse to kick his mirror or topple the mannequin. The fizz shudders through my blood, and I move purposefully to control the shake, avoiding his face. Was this shock or survival mode, like the time my son was choking and I performed a blow to his back as calmly as I would swat a fly?

I descend the stairs slowly, as though going to make coffee in a muddled state. The kitchen seems drained of the affection I held for him the night before. He had blanched the asparagus, then tossed them with mushrooms in a sizzling pan. He’d salted the water generously, held my chin with his fingers and fed me the fusilli. Is it ready? he asked. My neck tingled as I chewed while he ran his long thumb across my cheek to the lobe of my ear. So ready! I sighed, wanting to spill over in the thrill of it. I was finally the adored woman in my own romantic fantasy.

I sit on the arm of the living room couch to pull on my boots, gather my jacket and purse, and have my hand on the front doorknob when I sense his presence. He grabs my hair and tugs. I stagger to regain balance, still refusing to look at him, as though I am avoiding eye contact with a bristling dog. His lips press against the side of my neck. But I am disgusted now, repulsed. Fear would only crumple me, and I need to leave.

I wait patiently for him to let go, and when he does, I open the door and walk away. My hips swing these weak-kneed legs forward, feet thudding the sidewalk, like a train gathering steam. Once I’m far enough away that I know he cannot see me, I check my phone for the nearest train station.

It hits me: I am everything at 50 I was not at 20. A risk taker, a rule breaker, a memory maker. I begin to stomp along the pavement, like a petulant kid whose missteps have gotten her in trouble but she’s determined to keep doing as she pleases. And yet I seem to have forgotten, during the week when my son is with his dad, that I am a mother, as though in his absence I’m free to be whoever I like. My child is only six. My cheeks burn thinking I could leave him motherless while in service to my wild desire to dabble in sex with near strangers.

Heading north through the spinach green countryside toward home, I chastise myself for not establishing a safety plan. I’m a graduate of a mountaineering course and hike with the Ten Essentials but have somehow failed to recognize the vagaries of 21^st century dating to be as precarious as walking into the wilderness unprepared for mishaps. I have generally rejected my culture’s paranoid focus on the bad news, the horror stories, as though child abductions and women being murdered by their lovers are common. They are not. I reject catastrophic thinking and find no statistics for the degree of danger a woman over 50 assumes dating men who circulate within the realm of fetish and kink. I will modify the plan but accept the risk. Just as I did when labor stalled, and I let a surgeon cut my son from my body.

+++

The odds of dying in a train accident are about 1 in 19 million. The odds of dying in a plane crash are 1 in 45 million. Hopping in my car for a quick trip to the grocery puts my odds of dying at about 1 in 105 over a lifetime. Why are we not terrified of getting behind the wheel of a car? Because 1 in 105 is still less than one percent.

Am I risking a different kind of death if I give up on an erotic life as a mother? I’ve already survived my child’s birth. Maternal mortality in the U.S. is 24 per 100,000, by far the highest of any other developed country, only slightly less risky than having a baby in Iran. What’s more shocking is that for women like me, who delivered their babies after the age of 40, the rate of death due to pregnancy and childbirth is over 138 per 100,000.  

Who of us will reject the clawing need to have a child because the risk is too high? Some of us will develop conditions that make pregnancy a dangerous endeavor. Barring that, we assume the risk, modify the things that might harm us or our baby, and accept the hazards inherent to both the banal (driving a car) and profound (reproducing).

Right there between the two lies the risk of being bold in the world with the dreams of our bodies.

+++

I step off the train and push my fists into my coat pocket, walk the mile back to my flat through our beautiful city, established by Romans, defended by the warrior queen Boudica, consecrated by a martyred saint’s rolling head. I pass the auto repair shop, the newly renovated art deco cinema, and the school where my son is completing workbooks on penmanship and English history. It is not so early in the day that people seeing me on the sidewalk will think I am returning home from a date gone sideways.

I walk the way we do getting off a plane after turbulence, after bumping and lurching through the sky thinking maybe our time’s up, a little weak in the knees but amused in hindsight by the idea we were in any real danger. He wasn’t really going to hurt me, right? Menopause feels a lot like puberty; you think you’ve got it all figured out and are invincible. At 15, this is stupid talk. At 50 it’s a mindset based on earned confidence and experience. Risk seems negligible from the perspective of a teenager and a menopausal woman. But for mothers, the stakes are higher.

I consider again that I came through a pregnancy at 43 even though my chances of dying were much higher than a younger woman’s, in fact five times higher than being sexually assaulted and 197 times higher than being murdered. In addition, the number of women sexually assaulted over the age of 50 is at least a quarter of those who are preyed upon at a younger age. I blanch with the uncomfortable justification that age makes it less likely I will be harmed by a man when so many women have already been hurt by men they trusted.

I shower, pull on corduroys and a sweater, and make a cup of tea. The man, the moment, begins to fade. I feel disappointed, sad even, that I’ve left someone who might have been my guide in a subterranean night club, because I have never danced in a subterranean night club and I like to dance. I have tired of dancing to “It’s Raining Tacos” with my son in the living room.

I am tempted to call the man who wants monogamy to hear his thoughts on what just went down. But I have one child already. Menopause will also do that, make us turn away from what is not our concern, reject anyone who would try to define us. We are not on the end of a leash.

I will still seek the men who carry an air of audacity, who challenge me physically, who show me previously unknown ways their bodies can please mine. They are a catalyst for the kind of change I want after years of being a wife. In many ways, they have made me the mother my son has now; brave and curious, relentless with her questions and her hugs. I hold his hand to cross against the light and tell him it’s ok to break the rules at times if no one is harmed.

The man I wrestle next will need to smile more, let me win the game before he envelops me with tickles and giggles. I want to go through the everyday risks of living, of loving, of and relationship building with more humor. Before a man clings to me, please let him laugh when the plane is going down.

+++

When I collect my son from school the next day, he is wearing sunglasses and a fuzzy cat hat with ear flap paws that drape past his neck. He looks both radiant and cocky, pulling me towards the crumbling ruins of the nunnery down the street from the school. It’s where the parents socialize while our kids carouse behind hedges and jagged stone walls. They race each other across the scuffed ground then duck into a warren of paths to become creatures of their imaginations.

My son is exuberant in his body, testing its strength with his friends; grappling, throwing, running, challenging himself to discover his capabilities. Each movement is a full throttle explosion of energy, executed without self-consciousness or fear. Occasionally he looks at his body as though to reassure himself he’s still intact, appears satisfied, pauses for a breath then takes another leap.

I press a hand to my chest and vow to do the same.