More than one beginning: an infinite loop

I have been on a journey to awaken my sexuality for a year by the calendar, but a lifetime by spirit. There is always more than one beginning, like there is always more than one truth.

Or perhaps there is no beginning, but an infinite loops of possible beginnings.

Perhaps all women’s stories blur and fray like the edges of a feather, so that at every point on the loop, a woman enters the collective story—adds to the current of voices saying, “here, here, it started here.”

*

I was in utero the first time I absorbed the word androgyny. I do not remember this, of course, but my parents must have talked about the stillborn baby born two years before me: Jamie, they had named the baby—a name suited for a boy or a girl. Jamie died of a congenital deformity, the byproduct of which was fused genitalia. “Mermaid Syndrome,” the text books call it. Weeks after the burial, a genetic test confirmed the baby, whose legs were braided into a tail, was a boy. Perhaps my story starts here, in a womb that had just birthed a baby without genitals. Or perhaps this story begins when my mother was in her mother’s womb, or my baby was in my womb…

I was less than a minute old the first time I heard that gender was binary, when the doctor yelled out, “It’s a girl!” not, “It’s a boy!”

I was 5 the first time I worried about seeing a man’s penis. I was running through a rainstorm with my father and brother in our underwear, but I could not feel the rain because I remember wondering, at five: should we really be doing this in underwear? What if someone sees us? What if I see my father’s and brother’s penis?

I was 7 when I first remember balking at affectionate touch from a man. My father was rubbing my back before bed, as he often did after reading me chapter books. I shirked under his callused hand. He had not violated anything—had simply been rubbing circles over my t-shirt, but I remember feeling weird, like, is this okay? And: please stop, but I don’t know how to say this without hurting your feelings, so I’ll stay silent.

I was 11 when I found out my father was gay.

I was 11 when my parents chose to stay married and I chose to keep their secret—from my brother and the rest of the world. Perhaps it was at eleven that I got the message, one’s sexuality is less important than keeping the family intact.

I was 12 when I found a “How to Have an Orgasm” VHS tape in my mother’s closet. I assumed this meant she could not climax—assumed it meant, women in our family could not have orgasms.

I was 12 when I stood up in front of my 7th grade class and defended the right to express sexual orientation. “Are you GAY?” Lawrence Burton asked me on the playground later that day. I didn’t answer.

I was 12 when I first kissed a boy and kind of liked it, but also wondered, “Is that it?”

I was 13 when the girls in art class asked if I’d ever had an orgasm. I said I didn’t know and Tanya Young said, “Oh you’d KNOW …it’s like fireworks all over your body.”

I was 13 when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and had her left breast removed. Perhaps this is when I began to associate female sex organs with pain.

I was 14 when I became bulimic and started running until my toenails fell off. The self-will and rigidity and agenda felt good. Perhaps it was here that I began to equate control with pleasure.

I was 14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34 when I didn’t masturbate, or self-pleasure.

I was 18 when I lost my virginity. Perhaps this is when I discovered it was easier to please than to know what I wanted and ask for it.

I was 18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34 when I didn’t orgasm during sex. Or ever.

I was 19 when my mother got the cancer, again—when the pea-sized, purple lumps started popping up around her vulva.

I was 20 when I discovered alcohol relieved anxiety, when I learned that for the hours, minutes, seconds, that I was drunk I did not feel like the sky was going to fall.

I was 22 when I met my husband. He was a handsome soldier just back from Iraq where he, and all of his battalion, lived “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” We had a one-night stand. The tenderness under the armor of his ribcage was poetic. I loved that he looked the way I thought of a “real” man: all clean-cut, puffed up shoulders, chiseled and hard and oozing with the promise I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU.

I was 22, too, when my mother died.

Twenty-two when my father came out.

Twenty-two when my brother yelled, “Was there not one fucking SECOND of our childhood that you could have told me Dad was gay?” and I didn’t say, “But I thought I was protecting you.”

Twenty-two when I started drinking Prosecco for breakfast.

And 22 when I started wearing black lingerie and performing sexually because I was good at performing...at pretending. Perhaps this is when I solidified my belief that I was not enough just the way I was.

I was 26 when I got married and said the same vows my parents did: til death do us part.

I was 26 when my father married a man. I decorated the town hall with rainbow center-pieces and gave a toast about unconditional love—no matter what, or who.

I was 27,28,29,30,31,32 when sex became about having a baby and that purpose, that self-will and control and agenda, felt good.

I was 30 when I got sober and stopped throwing up. I entered a recovery program, although at the time I didn’t understand what that had to do with my sexuality…that underneath all the anesthesia was a deep longing to understand my struggle with libido, my aversion to sex without booze, my fear of intimacy and being asexual or gay or somewhere in between. My need to not be left. My need to be in control.

I was 31 when I discovered that I did not know how to have sex sober. That I had no idea what I liked. That I resisted surrender as much as I resisted the idea that families can break.

I was 33 when I had our daughter and felt the obligation of raising a girl—the importance of helping her connect to her body, use her voice, understand and express what she wanted without shame: to be whoever she was, unabashedly. Perhaps this is when I realized I was not giving the same love to the child, or woman, within me. Perhaps this is when their whispers became screams.

I was 34 when my husband asked me if I was a lesbian. I had been avoiding sex. Like on the playground two decades earlier, I didn’t answer because I didn’t really know. “I’m not attracted to women,” I said, which was not, “I am straight.”

I was 35 when I went to sex therapist and inventoried all of my limiting beliefs around my sexuality, listed my fears and resentments and desires, and started to ask myself, who are you, really?

I was 35 when I went to a shaman and reclaimed the sensual part of my soul, an inner feminine guide, who the shaman said left me when I was 11—the year I learned my father was gay.

I was 35 when I went on and off Addyi—a libido-enhancing drug. I wanted to see if I could feel sexual desire. The answer was yes. I could feel desire—and to men, not women. I was not gay. But with that relief, which I am embarrassed was even relieving, came the rage…the ancestral, the childhood, the adolescent, the marital, the parental, the collective feminine, the insecure masculine, RAGE.

I was 35 when I told my husband I needed space and went to an unheated cabin in remote Maine. I shook rattles and burned resentments and prayed and meditated and...and self-pleasured until I orgasmed. I had spent two decades expecting “fireworks, all over my body,” so when the muscles in my vagina spontaneously contracted and expanded, and I felt the rush of blood in my root, I wondered: was that it? Perhaps this is when I realized that living in my head—the cognitive avoidance I taught myself as a child—divorced me from my body, from pleasure.

I was 35 when I asked my husband to go to marriage counseling. I wore a white feather in my hair. In an office the size of a closet, I talked about my own internalized homophobia and being straight and needing emotional intimacy before physical intimacy. All around me, like a thousand feathers, I felt the fluidity of gender and social constructs and sexuality: an infinite loop. I felt the fact that my need to be sure, to secure, to know, to control was the problem. Or one of them. That in the not knowing was freedom and release.

I was 35 when I heard the emerging woman inside of me say, “Please listen to me. Please, please listen to me. I have something to say.”

*

There is always more than one beginning, like there is always more than one truth.