“Are you sure you can do this?” she asks again. Most wives, she’s told me, refuse to lift wheelchairs, insisting their husbands are lazy and should walk.

David cannot even make it to the mailbox.

I practice manipulating the wheelchair, which is a handsome dark purple. I break it down, heft it to and from the car, reassemble it. The chair is 211 pounds assembled; apart, the heaviest piece is about 80. Satisfied, Theresa turns to David.

“Ready?”

My husband sits and rolls around the parking lot. He is 29 years old.

“Outrun your wife!” Theresa yells gleefully. The other therapists laugh and applaud. Slowly I back into the shadows of the garage, attempting to compose my expression, myself. I manage a cheerful façade.

Outrun your wife!

It was my 31st birthday.

I always knew David would end up in a wheelchair. I viewed this fact like the knowledge of mortality: unavoidable, but far in the future, beyond my control and therefore not worth dwelling on. As his strength waned, my workload in taking care of him slowly increased. I devoted little thought to this until he needed the chair and our relationship tipped precariously into “me nurse, you patient.” The lines between caretaking, loving, and retaining my personhood vanished. So did my libido.

Welcome to caretaking’s dirty secret: you don’t want to fuck someone you’ve just picked up off the floor.

Our sex life dwindled. A week, two weeks, sometimes three passed before my guilt overwhelmed me and I smeared his dick with lube, climbed atop him, fucked him with a few quick strokes, and rolled off, dry, disinterested, guiltier than before. David, always a quiet man, grew quieter. He felt responsible for the turn our lives had taken and did not pressure me for sex. Instead, he handled the sickening trip into a wheelchair with uncomplaining dignity. Despite our problems, I encouraged him to express his feelings.

“I had hoped,” he said one late night, “I would make it to 30 before I needed a wheelchair.”

The next 18 months were a nightmare. My physical and mental health broke. Doctors prescribed steroids and tranquilizers to no avail. Therapists “actively listened,” offering me a smorgasbord of antidepressants. I refused, repeatedly pointing out that my problem wasn’t a skip in neurotransmitters, that happiness in the face of my lover’s illness would be an inappropriate response.

I also brought my sexual dysfunction to every medical professional I saw. The ones who didn’t avert their eyes and dismiss me outright were simply sorry.

I didn’t have the energy to be enraged.

Throughout this sexual drought, David and I talked openly, often before intercourse, now relegated to Sunday afternoons after I’d done all the laundry, snuck in a nap, and was nominally rested. I remained jumpy, often drinking to calm down and crying while we talked, trying to hash out some way around the imbalanced mess we were in. Predictably, our problems revolved around money.

The disabled represent a captive audience. Attendants, wheelchairs, breathing equipment, modified vehicles, and shower bars come at enormous costs. Nobody wants to pay, even when they’re supposed to, leaving the patient, or in this case, the patient’s wife, to wage battle. I fought our HMO for the aforementioned wheelchair, then engaged in a two-year fight with the state government for assistance with a modified van. Stress left me pulling handfuls of my hair from the shower drain.

A few months ago, I met a young man whose sister was shot and paralyzed from the neck down. He left college, moving in with his mother to help care for his sister. He was kind, intelligent, and appeared happy.

“The first two years are the worst,” He told me. “After that, you get your van, you get used to it, you figure out how to live with it.”

On December 7, David finally got his van and resumed driving after a two-year hiatus, calmly learning an entirely new system of driving. Sitting in his wheelchair, he accelerates by pushing the small steering wheel forward, braking by pulling it toward him. All other controls are on a button panel.

“What’s the hardest part?” I asked.

“I keep wanting to move my leg. My knee is sore.”

I no longer have to lift the wheelchair. I no longer have to overstock the pantry for fear I’ll catch flu and he’ll have nothing to eat. I can say: “Go get the dry cleaning, will ya?”

From such prosaic things comes respite, equality, and the flickering of my sex drive rekindling. We spent a recent Sunday in bed. The entire Sunday.

“When’s the last time we did this?” I asked. It was cold out; the space heater hummed. We’d been caressing each other for hours. The overheated room smelled intensely of aroused female.

“Too long.”

I lay on my back, cupping my hands over my torso. David slowly maneuvered himself over me, leaned onto my hands, and lowered into me, sliding his arms around my back. We tried to go slowly. We failed.

All we can do is try.

“I’ve some news!” Cried my neighbor in her English accent. I stared. Had she finally found a house?

She clasped her hands and stared at me in the ancient, wordless of language of women. This was no house.

“How late are you?”

“Five days. But the pee test was positive!”

“Forget the test. What does your body tell you?”

Her hands traveled the length of her torso, cupping her abdomen. My eyes followed, inquiring.

“I’m sure.”

More shrieking, embracing, counting off days, months. Mixed with my genuine happiness for her was a thin sharp needle of pain. I like to think she didn’t notice.

As I write, the familiar pain of my period pulls heavily at my belly and low back. I’ve swallowed pain pills, eaten chocolate, cried at nothing. My body’s grudging monthly announcement of failure to conceive.

Mine is a body made for babies. Made to carry then easily within my round belly, slide them out quickly from my broad hips with strong pelvic muscles, let them breast feed at double-D breasts, carry them against the perfect nestling point where my waist tapers in, chubby baby legs wrapping round the hourglass curve where my hip resumes.

This curve of my hip, a “C” shape of contoured fat, is called the “violin deformity” by cannula-wielding plastic surgeons who would happily suck out my offending womanliness, rendering me a good clothes hanger and palliating my seamstress, a bewildered Korean woman who tapers my jeans over my ass and hips, nipping them at the waist. The resulting uneven seam trailing up the backside of my pants irritates her sensibilities.

As a child I played with dolls, assuming I would have children. In my teens and twenties, I began questioning that assumption; something nameless was wrong with me. I started a raft of medications whose long-term effects remain unknown. Then I met David, and though he could father a healthy child, if that child were a girl, she might be a carrier of his Muscular Dystrophy, passing it to our grandchild. Though on the Pill, I didn’t want to be the two percent who got caught, lying on a table while David’s child, poisoned with pills and genetics, was suctioned from my uterus. Frightened by that wrenching possibility, I drove myself to the nearest Planned Parenthood and got my tubes tied at age 27. The relief was tremendous.

I knew from the outset being with David would entail decisions many women in their twenties don’t normally consider. I knew we needed to live a forgiving climate, wherever he found work, and that the increasing amounts of care he’d require would eat the time normally given to nurturing children.

But the full magnitude of my decision is a deeply felt experience continuing to unfold. Any ideas I’d had about wrapping my fallopian tubes with tiny rubber bands and blithely moving forward were naïve.

“You aren’t having kids?” My gastroenterologist asks, astounded. I am 31, deathly ill from the steroids she prescribes.

“Do David and I strike you as good genetic material?” I ask bitterly. This line of questioning is especially annoying from a doctor.

She is taken aback. “I guess not…” Brightening. “You could adopt!”

Wearily, I agree. Adoption always pleases people: they feel good about themselves for having solved my problem.

Until I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome at 29, and learned more about my illness, I felt rather smug in my decision. My decision, my body. Then I joined the EDS society and began receiving their newsletters. Women with EDS are advised against childbearing. Fragile collagen often causes uterine rupture. A fetus carried to term means a dangerous birth. If mother and child survive these hurdles, the child inherits the disease, and whole sickening cycle turns on itself.

Suddenly this womanly body made for babies, stayed only by my liberated hand, is a defused bomb. While my peers begin carrying sleepy-faced bundles in baby slings, I am forced into a new understanding. Not my decision. My body’s, made without consultation.

My inability to bear children makes me feel damaged at the core of a previously unshakable sense of femaleness. As a woman, I am going to miss one of life’s profoundest experiences. My body will never know pregnancy or childbirth. David’s green eyes will never look at me through an infant’s face. This, that I cannot bear David’s child, is… the cursor blinks, demanding an adjective. I can’t have a child with the man I love because I am too fucking sick.

Our lovemaking brings us pleasure, intimacy, binds us. But it will never make a child, so our sexuality is something that offends some, confuses others. Disabled people are supposed to sit quietly in their wheelchairs; the barren are condemned to spinsterhood. If this sounds archaic, please read today’s newspaper for the latest plans from our new government. Policies for people like for you. Policies for people like me.

Recently we attended a small dinner party. Our friend Cal carried David up the steep steps to his Berkeley kitchen, where he served red wine in cut crystal glasses. As talk will among people in their thirties, the topic soon turned to marriage and children. “Are you guys going to have kids?” Around the dark wood table, eyes turned to us. “We can’t.” I replied.

Sarah gazed at us in the candlelight. “That’s too bad. Your children would have been so beautiful.”

The first time David and I made love, I knocked down a curtain rod.

We were in my narrow twin bed, which I’d wedged against the wall to accommodate an overflow of bookcases. I was trying to straddle him while working his cock, hugely erect, into my painfully tightened vagina, all while maintaining a calmly sexy ambiance.

Prior to this June evening in 1993, I’d been celibate for four years. There are various reasons for this protracted celibacy, but mostly I hadn’t met anyone interesting enough to fuck.

At 23, David was a virgin.

I’d never inducted a virgin before, and felt a sort of solemn responsibility to make this a warm, wonderful first time, something he’d remember affectionately once we’d gone our separate ways. That he had muscular dystrophy made me feel even more responsible to make this good for him.

The personal insecurities I’d bring to any new lover — worry over my body, difficulty with intimacy, self-induced pressure to perform — conspired to crate a less than sexy mood on my part. I was so nervous my cunt closed and dried up. My body, limber from years of dance training, refused to organize itself around my eager new boyfriend.

So there we were, him straining upward, me struggling gamely for purchase, then reaching up stupidly to grab my cream-embroidered hippie curtains. The rod and curtain fell, quietly covering us. I gave up all pretense of mood and collapsed atop my not-yet-lover, giggling.

“This never happens in the movies.”

“Nope,” he agreed.

After that, we were able to get our bodies together successfully. David then devoured an enormous snack and drove home at 3 am, looking utterly blissed out.

Eight years later, I cannot pluck sexuality from the fabric of our lives together, holding it up like a particularly colorful thread meant for your examination. In writing about sexuality and disability, other parts of my life — our life — will bleed into my story: how family, friends, the medical community, even strangers can assault your sexuality. The precarious balance between being a caretaker and a mate. How illness can rob you of your self-esteem and your libido. And how in hell you cope.

I do not propose to represent all disabled folk; I write of myself, my life and illness, and my life with David. If you are disabled, or involved with someone who is, I hope my story makes you laugh, cry, disagree, nod with recognition, and feel a little less lonely during the bad days.

If you aren’t disabled, welcome. Come see how two physically imperfect specimens are making life and love together, and how, in the dark, our differences vanish.

This is my letter to the world. May reading it enrich yours.

David has a rare form of Muscular Dystrophy called “Becker Muscular Dystrophy.” It progresses with mindless, genetic brutality. When we met, David walked and drove unassisted. Then his balance began faltering, and my mother bought him a cane. In 1998 he was hired at a Bay Area university, where the everyday exertions many of us take for granted — protracted standing, using the rest room, a meeting across the building — quickly became overwhelming. He now uses a power wheelchair everywhere but in our small apartment, which is set up with his comfort in mind. The furnishings are heavy, immobile handholds. The tables have rounded corners. Grab bars snake along the bathroom walls. We have no glass baubles or throw rugs.

His initial prognosis was poor, predicting death by age fifty. Advances in medicine have altered this, and during our last clinic visit, the doctors said two stunning words to us: old age.

A short list of the things David can do: earn a Ph.D. in American History, work in his field, handle the household finances, listen to heavy metal, be a computer geek, dress, toilet, and feed himself. He is completely sexually functional: MD does not affect the penis. He has a fine one.

I have a collagen disease called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. EDS has numerous manifestations, unified by hypermobile, easily dislocated joints. My skin is fragile and translucent; when I’m naked, my veins are completely visible, like blue tracery on vellum. During the years I studied dance, if a limb didn’t move one way, I simply twisted it until the desired look was achieved. Teachers and other dancers envied my eerie flexibility. But during my twenties, years of wear and tear began manifesting themselves. A rheumatologist finally diagnosed me, warning me to stop dancing before I crippled myself. Though heartbroken, I didn’t need her admonitions. The agony in various extremities sufficed. Unhappily I stopped dancing and began writing.

So here we are: a guy with limited movement, a woman who moves too much. Makes for a creative sex life.

Last night we made love in one of our favorite positions: sitting up, face to face, our legs crossed behind each other’s backs. David can sit up himself and, cradled in the safety of my legs, he can lean backward if he wishes. The position puts no strain on my painful left knee or hip, allowing me to focus on lovemaking. He leaned far back, his hands lightly resting on my torso, rocking deep inside me. Afterward I dropped backward, my head drooping over the edge of the bed. My hair, which is long and reddish-brown, nearly brushed the floor.

We studied our reflections in the mirrored closet doors. David was still sitting up, his torso and head framed by my thighs. My breasts were just visible in the bedclothes. We analyzed the composition of this sexy tableau, as if a photographer had just sidled into our bedroom. His semen began cooling between my legs.

We were perfect.