The details of the third-hand account imprinted into my memory so vividly that the memory of the story feels now almost like my own memory. The helplessness of the woman, her body being altered without her consent by two people she has to trust: her partner, her doctor. The story terrified me, the laughter in particular, signaling some understanding of wrongdoing, some sheepishness in doing it anyway. After the baby was delivered, the doctor said to the woman’s husband, “Don’t worry, I’ll sew her up nice and tight for you,” and the two men laughed while the woman lay between them, covered in her own and her baby’s blood and feces. I was first introduced to the husband stitch in 2014, when a friend in medical school told me about a birth her classmate observed.
Often, one woman admits she cried when she read it, and when I nod and ask why, she says she doesn’t know. The purpose of the extra stitch is to make the vagina tighter than it was before childbirth in order to increase the husband’s pleasure during sex. And yet - ” The title refers to the extra stitch sometimes given to a woman after the area between her vagina and anus is either torn or cut during childbirth. To describe him as evil or wicked or corrupted would be a deep disservice to him. “He is not a bad man, and that, I realize suddenly, is the root of my hurt,” the narrator says. Machado’s narrator tells the story of meeting the young man she knew she would marry, their mutually desirous marriage, the birth and raising of their son, and an inevitable betrayal by her husband whom she loves. There is a truth in the tales that I recognize viscerally but have never been taught. I have that impulse, too, to share it, which is why I have my classes read it. Always, a student says that she sent it to all of her friends. Often, one woman admits she cried when she read it, and when I nod and ask why, she says she doesn’t know. The conversation limps along, uncharacteristically weighted with all the things the students are thinking and not saying. “I’m really having us read it because I love it.” Or maybe they feel like they shouldn’t because it is, among other things, a story about being a woman.
“I don’t quite know how to discuss this story,” I say. I’m not sure if, like me, they don’t know what to say, something I admit before we begin. For one thing, the men in class don’t speak. When I teach Carmen Maria Machado’s story “ The Husband Stitch,” the first in her collection Her Body and Other Parties, to my fiction workshops, it’s unlike teaching any other story. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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