Not done yet- Wanting it all

I made this collage a long time ago when I was thinking of my mother. Apologies to the various artists whose work I borrowed to create it. There is a girl and a sentry in the picture and on the eve of the anniversary of my mother's death it still evokes how I feel about her. I needed that sentry in the picture to bear making it. I needed sentries in my childhood to survive it. My mother was larger than life. She was terrifying and beautiful and very crazy (I've heard dozens of proffered forensic diagnoses) All I know for sure is that she was crazy and very smart, driven by hatred and her own twisted version of love and that she was my mother.

I believed her always. It's easier now that she's dead to see what was truth and what was her fiction, what was the family mythology. It's easier now to begin to understand that everything I was molded to be, everything that I was told that I was, was a carefully crafted and reinforced construct. Somehow I was still true somewhere in all of that crazy making, hidden away, waiting to make my escape.

What does this have to do with masturbation and desire? Everything. When the person who gave birth to you, who burned as bright and as powerful as the sun defines you from birth as dirty and wrong and twisted and incapable of love or being loved- it  fucks with your ability to understand your own desire and desirability- it skews your sense of self so badly it takes a lifetime to undo it. That process of healing and reclamation is a little like slapping make up over a birth mark at first. You apply it hoping to make the birthmark disappear and it does outwardly but you always know it's there, always see it in the mirror even when it's hidden. Over time the birthmark fades and on occasion burns back to life and fades away again.

When you are both sexually abused and then punished sadistically and sexually for the same abuse there is no hope really of ever pleasing, even when you are doing everything you are told and smiling if you can, before the shock settles in. I notice as I write that I am using the word you instead of I. It's a way of putting some distance between this material and myself, between myself and my mother, between all of this ugly and the light I want to rest in now.

Pleasing was hopeless but I never stopped trying.As an adult, nothing broke my heart more than not  being able to please my partner sexually. If an orgasm were not the net result of sex for my partner I disappeared into a thick well of shame and inconsolable sorrow. I got really good at making sure that never happened, but sometimes, it does. Sometimes I am not successful in calling forth every orgasm I see just beyond my fingers, mouth, pussy and my mad bedroom skills. The word overachiever comes to mind and I'm not talking about this to brag on being great in bed (though I am), I am showing how desperately I applied myself to learning pleasure, to learning how and when to touch, how to listen, how to pay acute attention to my partner's desires and implement them with the attention and will of someone trying to save the world.

I wonder where my own desire belongs in this pathology of my own sexuality which is a twisty ball of barbed wire and misfiring synapses that I could spend a lifetime trying to unravel it and never get that work done. I've accepted the ways in which I'm kinked and dark and full of strange hungers. I've been lucky enough to find a partner for whom my kinks work. No matter what rough patch we might hit, sexual chemistry is never a problem for us. But my desire outside the two of us is different. That desire is still in my back pocket. My desire for myself, for what gets me off by myself is still stuck somewhere long ago. Held in a child's too small hands. That was big stuff for a little kid to  navigate and survive. And I am so grateful that I finally found a place where good sex exists. Hot and sweaty, long and full of good hard fucking, tender sweet spots of a kind of touch I never knew existed that always makes me cry and plenty of laughter. Lots of joy. This is something I never expected and will never take for granted.

But my own desire for me, my own hungers that are specific to masturbation and self touching, self fucking, are still mysterious and terrifying. Now that I am wide awake and aware. Now that masturbation is a conscious form of meditation I can't escape the dark lands where my desire is mucked and tainted and stuck in the way back times. My fantasies are so complicated and perverse and so entwined with incest it's a wonder I managed to ever come that way at all. On my own, with my brain firing up images and movies, where I sometimes am all the characters at once but always land someplace where I have no power, no voice, no hope and this is where I get off, without fail, every time.

I can only imagine how uncomfortable this is to read. Mothers, incest and dark fantasies. Masturbation and moldy desire that has the stink of rot to it. I had no idea when I started this project what it would actually be like. How much of my trauma would out. How entwined my self touching and my abuse were and still are. I am such a prolific smut writer I wonder how come I can't just re-script this stuff. Why can't I write my brain patter differently. I have so much easy access to hot material, why isn't that enough? Not to mention all the delicious smut in the world, and porn and images- there is so much content why can't I use that instead?

I won't masturbate tonight or tomorrow. I will light a candle tomorrow for my mother, lay out the rosary that represents her experience of the divine as a child, set out the Buddha that represents her experience of the divine as an adult. I have a statue of the Mother Mary that will go on the alter and a small strip of photo booth pictures of one very good day with her and her daughters and her grandchildren all squished in the booth and smiling genuine smiles. I will do my ritual where I allow myself to love her and hate her all at once. I will hold both the dark things that she did to me and other memories at the same time- the sand dollars we collected at Ocean Beach, the sound of her voice when she sang along to Tony Bennett and Sarah Vaughn. I will remember how funny she was even though her humor was always sharp and thorny. I will remember how she told me I could fly and then cut my wings over and over again.

The next day or so will be a time to both grieve that she's gone and celebrate it. Because her being gone means that she can't hurt me anymore. Her being dead means that I can love her safely, from a great distance. Her being gone means I can try and find my own truth about me and keep on mitigating all of the things she told me that I believed. That I was no good, a waste of space, dirty, and wrong. That I was crazy. That I was a slut and a whore. That I was a liar and never loved her. Of course I always loved her but I often wondered if she was right and I didn't understand love. Her love (and now that she's dead I think she did love me, sometimes, in her own warped way) didn't ever make sense to me. I spent my life trying to earn it and never got it, but now that she's gone I can feel it sometimes. Now that she's gone I get to make it so if I want.

***

I had an orgasm two nights ago. I was alone in the shared living room space I live in and it was very late. I had to keep stopping every time the bedroom door opened. I felt a bit like a criminal in the dark, waiting for the house to get quiet and trying again. I did come eventually, an hour into it, including interruptions. I did come. I remember the intricate fantasy that got me there but I can't share it. Not now. Maybe not ever. It was ugly and did the trick. But I'm still not done yet. It's June and Masturbation Month is over and I'm not done yet. I'm finding shifts and big truths and learning things that I hid from myself all of these years. I'm going to keep on going. And after I'm done with the yearly mourning ritual I will try again.

See I want it all. I want everything I'm entitled to by virtue of being human, being female, being fractured and being whole all at once. I want to know my desire inside and out like I know yours. I want to be able to hold it in my hands up to the light without flinching. I want to step all the way in, all the way in, to my own wanting, my own yearning, my own open throated hunger and stand there without shame. I want my mirrors to stop shattering. I am ready to face the truth and claim it all for me because I want it all, every bit of wet heated through hunger that belongs to me and always did. I am taking it all back for me, ugly and beautiful.
I am absolutely determined.

I'm grateful for the conversations I've been able to have about this strange work, with you who are engaged in it, or just reading it, or not reading it but supporting it anyway. I'm grateful to have company in this. Glad for your voice, for the resonance I find and for the compassion.
May the coming day be good to you.