Day 27- Belated- from this body

AngelzTears

I've had little sleep and what I've had has been filled of dreams where I am frantically searching for places to secret myself away to masturbate. The doors always open, I'm caught before I can begin and my cunt is annoyed at my broken promises. This is not unlike my search for time and space for masturbation in my waking life for years now. Moments stolen just for me in the bathroom, the water running, hiding from my partner, my children, and the waiting, hungry world. Sometimes no matter how I hid away I was, I still got caught. My partners disapproval when it existed was sharp and painful and full of sorrow. I could never articulate masturbation's importance clearly enough to be understood. I did find other women who masturbated and were willing to talk about it with me. I have friends for whom this is a non negotiable act. They helped me get stronger around my need to keep it for myself, no matter what anyone thought about it. 

***

Will I come today? Unlikely.

I have a sick child. She is grown but in moments like these when she is in so much pain and has a fever and can't swallow, she becomes small again and I become my best and strongest self- the mother. No matter how damaged I was, how little I knew about how to be a mother or how many mistakes I've made, my mother self is the best of me, always. I always stand in strength in that role. Today I have been the mother all day, doing energy healing (which I know sounds so crazy hippy woo-woo).

 I was raised with a lot of dogma about energy. I was taught that it is all the same energy, that animates us, that we use for creativity, sex and healing. That it's all the same. I don't know how much of what I was raised with is true; I discard the notion that masturbation saps the energy that is needed for other things and shouldn't be "wasted". I do think that it's all energy. That we are all energy. I can use it for writing, or healing or masturbation.  I just don't consider masturbation a waste of time, or not creative, or generative.

Sitting and being open to light is orgasmic in a different way than masturbation. The body gets busy using energy for healing instead of coming. Both expand and contract. There is movement and a release. There is a joy that comes with the creative, the healing and the coming. It's all of a piece. 

***

I was pregnant with my first child at 21. This was absolutely terrifying and healing at the same time. That this body which was used so assiduously as a receptacle for sperm and objects and garbage would be consecrated by this good use, this good thing, to grow and nourish and birth a human being was amazing. My parents were at that birth. I labored at home, in their home, for 48 long hours and the baby kept moving backwards, back up the birthing canal. My cervix would close back up. My midwife kept having to tell me to open my legs. I kept closing them without being aware of it. Looking back at it from this distance I am surprised that I didn't, literally, lose my mind. 

To open my legs in the middle of this tremendous force that had taken over my body, these giant, gripping contractions of uterus, this pushing of baby out, was counter-intuitive.To open my legs in my parent's living room where my coked out father waited with a video camera would be a crazy thing to do. I feel sorry for my exhausted midwife who couldn't understand what the problem was or why I kept fighting what needed to happen. 

As bad a scene as that was, the actual birth, the having a baby part, was magic.To have something, no, someone, come from that place, in between my legs, that place of shame and secrets and mis-use was the best sort of gift. I understood new secrets about this body. That it could be used for good things. I still hadn't learned that sex could be good, or that there was such a thing as pleasure in fucking, or joy in physical intimacy but I learned that my body could grow and nourish and birth a baby. And that baby was a gift and still is. 

My second baby was born 9 years later, in a hospital because it was a high risk birth. My parents were there again. But it was less traumatic though I almost died. Less traumatic because I wasn't in their house. I was in someone else's house. And in the end they had to cut her out of me so my abusers weren't there for that. I could keep my legs closed. And still get a baby in when it was over. Even better. 

***

I don't know what my life would have been like without having my babies. I suspect I wouldn't be here to speculate about it. I was programmed early to self-destruct. I never planned on living to be twenty one. Having children meant fighting to stay alive, and to keep them alive. Having those children showed me my body could be useful, my vagina and uterus and cervix, were all working parts that had a purpose. How bad could they be if a baby could pass through them and into the world? 

I'm grateful for these children of mine, who support me even when I write sex, who love me no matter what and let me love them back. I'm grateful for your persistence and patience, grateful for your witness and words and hope that this day comes to you in a strong way, in a good way.