Not so alone

 I cannot sleep and so I read my emails. Ever since meeting a young woman, another writer, this past week, I've been thinking about my writing and how everything else in my life has taken precedence. And it pains me. I feel the pandemic has quieted me, made me more fearful of doing anything, or perhaps made all my rumblings seem minor, unimportant. 

I have lost most of my fire and so to try and regain it, I painted a wall in my office red. 

Amid my emails this morning was this note and poem by a young American poet:

“Deep inside the jaws of the pandemic, I’d found myself chewed up and swallowed by unending loneliness. The morning I wrote this poem, I’d completely given myself over to looking outside the window of my longing; I was writing love poems. What I saw was a streetlight. A man-made object that dared to mimic the elegance of the moon. This symbol of light was just enough for me to know that all the love my heart longed for was not as out of reach as I’d been made to feel. That if the streetlight could derive its meaning from the moon, then the longing I pressed out of my pen was also bringing me closer and closer to something more real and more exciting than I could ever imagine. How horrifying! And how energizing to be completely alone yet comforted by creating a poem, a record of where I was and a contract for where I was going.”

—Jalynn Harris

the life of a writer is desire  
              i hammer into the page  
                          i make up my mind: the streetlight  

is not the moon, but anything can be 
              made beautiful under the ease  
                          of my hammer  

i wish you could see that i write in blue ink 
              the color of oceans & early mornings  
                          & everything is clear like  

tears rushing towards the chin  
              of my desire. i pen what i’m meant 
                          to pen. how deep in love i am  

& how silly of me to spend all morning dreaming  
              about love & not expect my  
                          desire to set me free  

the knives of my fingers tap 
              out the notion that if i turn the key  
                          it will unlock. 

admittedly, i am foolish  
              about love—a simple yes excites me— 
                        ‘cause i know that all that i require will be met 

like water meets the tongue. it’s scary 
            desire, a small fan at my window in the summer,  
                        a booklight lighting the pages of my life

I am going to try harder to get back to my writing and my old self who is not so fearful.  Is this possible? I remind myself of Georgia O'Keeffe who said, “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life — and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”

The big question is what do I want to do now?

My Eyes - post rewritten August 13th

 Although I hate excuses, I have a valid one for not writing. Three weeks ago, I had the lens taken out of one eye and replaced with a Johnson and Johnson. There was a slight complication and my cornea was bruised. Three weeks later I had the second eye operation. Again, there was a complication with the cornea. 

At the end of June, I returned to the clinic and had my eyes tested. A lot of people can go without glasses after having cataract surgery. Not me. Luckily, I like wearing glasses and, at this appointment, was given a new prescription - a lot weaker that my previous one - and told I only need them for reading and driving. 

I will make one small note about my novel. I have removed Chapter 1 and 2 from this site because I have made so many changes.  I've also changed the main character's names because "Eve" sounds like me and she is not me and add to that I named the husband Adam (unintentionally) and it sounds a little too biblical. I will reinstate the first two chapters soon with the changes though I expect more will come and I've rewritten three more chapters... which I may or may not publish here. 

To be honest, I am a little bit of a mess at the moment in regards to my writing and a little in regards to my life. 

 

Would you read this?

 I cannot believe how fast time is passing and how I am always busy although I am stuck in this little village with few friends, no social engagements, no cultural events, no dining out, no travel, and no leaving the house from 6 pm to 6 am seven days a week. But simple living demands a lot from each individual. Cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, cooking, clearing up, showering, brushing teeth, deciding what to wear, dressing, paying bills, doing one's income tax... and on it goes. For the last week, I have also been putting together presentations on the fall/winter collections of European designers for the store - difficult without seeing and touching - working from line sheets and photographs, and supervising repairs on a friend's house as he is locked down in England. 

And then there's my novel that causes me the most grief and I am such a painfully slow writer that I fear that I will die before I finish. Is this how I want to spend my last days, I ask myself? Every day when I wake, I worry that this may be my last day on earth. Do what makes you happy, I whisper to myself. 

Susan wants to live long enough to see my book published. She likes me to read bits and pieces to her but when I do, I find myself thinking it is crap and who would want to read such fiction. And yet, underneath the self doubt is a confidence that I can write well and, in large part, this is due to you, my readers who applaud my efforts.

I read somewhere that we lead small lives if we keep to ourselves so I've decided to begin publishing my novel here just in case I don't make it to the end or if I die too soon. So here is the prologue but you must understand that it may change as I get further into my story.

Three Hundred Days of Indulgence

Prologue

   The Frenchman knelt and lowered his head to my feet, kissing one foot and then the other. Je baise ton pied difforme de sorcière. Ta signature diabolique, he said, stressing every syllable, pausing every few words so I might understand his language. He rose, wrapped his arms around my waist and spun me round, singing, “I am yours. I am yours.”

   The man was crazy. My hammer-toed feet were diabolical. I had hated them all my life until this mad Frenchman knelt and declared that they belonged to a witch. He was the sorcerer, the magician. With a turn of phrase, a slight of hand, he transformed the way I looked at myself. Early in our relationship, I had sent him a picture of myself from Venice. I thought myself drab in a long floral skirt and bulky black pullover but knew he would like the mask on my face. He noticed only my eyes, staring out through holes on either side of the hooked beak. My look was one of rebelliousness he had written. My life was a defiance of normality, of morality. Non, décidément, tu ne ressembles pas aux autres femmes.

    I should have laughed when he wrote that I was unlike other women but instead I felt as if I had been handed a rose. Never mind that he had announced more than once that he loved women, all women. His wife had put it less delicately: “He’ll fuck anything that wears a skirt.” But that was later, when frightened by the intensity of our affair, she blamed me for seducing her husband. I was not the seducer. 

    I was a dutiful daughter until I discovered Simone de Beauvoir. Her love and lust for Sartre and others, astonished and excited me though I found it difficult to reconcile the bookish-looking woman in photographs with the seductress who lived her life in cafes and bars drinking and arguing; and who managed somehow, with so much alcohol and sex, to write a weighty body of literature. She refused marriage because she felt the institution steals a woman’s autonomy. After reading this book, I swore I would never marry.

   Then I fell in love and moved in with my boyfriend. Before the year was out, I’d agreed to marry him. If only I had suggested to the boyfriend who listened carefully and applauded my ideas, what I later suggested to the husband. After five years as man and wife, I proposed that we live separately like Beauvoir and Sartre. He rolled his eyes and told me not to be absurd.

   Several months later, I packed my bags and moved across town. It’s easy to write in one sentence that I left him but the leaving was painful, full of self-doubt and recriminations. I turned into the kind of person I hate – a spineless liar who snuck around and found an apartment, before telling her husband she was leaving. Fifteen months later, my husband left a love letter on my doorstep. I returned to him. Fifteen years later, I packed my bags again but instead of crossing town, I crossed an ocean. I was giving myself a year, I told him, to study an old passion of mine - the French language. I had no idea, when I said “passion” that I would fall into bed with a Frenchman and learn more about myself than the language. I had no idea that I was granting myself three hundred days of indulgence. 

Let it be

I wrote this post around the first of January and then my computer died and I did not continue... I have an idea for other posts but I'm looking for my courage. I'm sure I'll find it soon because, at this time in my life, I don't have time to waste. 

 "When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me

Speaking words of wisdom, let it be
And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be

Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be"

Paul McCartney wrote this song, inspired by his mother, Mary who died when he was 14. Many people thought "Mother Mary" was a biblical reference but Paul says no it's "about leaving problems behind and moving on in life".

My two words for this new year 2021 are courage and kindness. 

Courage as Henry Van Dyke describes it in "Life":

"So let the way wind up the hill or down, 

O'er rough or smooth, the journey will be joy: 

Still seeking what I sought when but a [girl], 

New friendship, high adventure, and a crown, 

My heart will keep the courage of the quest, 

And hope the road's last turn will be the best."

Kindness - the kind of kindness that I want to own, is more difficult to describe. Sylvia Plath suggests it's superficial in her poem "Kindness". A week or so after writing it, she committed suicide.

Dame Kindness, she is so nice!

The blue and red jewels of her rings smoke

In the windows, the mirrors

Are filling with smiles.

What is so real as the cry of a child?

A rabbit's cry may be wilder

But it has no soul.

Sugar can cure everything, so Kindness says.

Sugar is a necessary fluid, 

It's crystals a little poultice.

O kindness, kindness

Sweetly picking up pieces!

My Japanese silks, desperate butterflies,

May be pinned any minute, anesthetized.

And here you come, with a cup of tea

Wreathed in steam.

The blood jet is poetry,

There is no stopping it.

You hand me two children, two roses.

Emily Dickinson's idea of being kind is too sweet for my tastes:

 

If I can stop one heart from breaking,

I shall not live in vain;

If I can ease one life the aching,

Or cool one pain,

Or help one fainting robin

Unto his nest again,

I shall not live in vain.

Naomi Shihab Nye comes closest to my meaning. In an interview, she describes how this poem came to be. She was on her honeymoon, on a bus, and she and her husband were robbed of everything including their passports and money. A man on the bus was killed. The newly-weds sat in a small town despairing of their loss, and the loss of a life, not knowing what to do when a stranger approached and asked what was wrong (in Spanish). He listened with kindness and, at the end, said he was sorry, very very sorry and then went on his way. His kindness soothed them. Shortly after, Nye's husband left to go to the next town to try and get their traveller's cheques reinstated. She sat there a little afraid when this poem drifted across the square to her. She took the small notebook and pencil from her pocket and took dictation.  

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore…

As I sit at my desk, the 4th of February, I wonder if I have embraced courage and kindness in January. Let me think on this a while.  

"And so this is Christmas"

"And so happy Christmas
For black and for white
For yellow and red ones
Let's stop all the fight

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear"

Oh my head is stuffed with so much these days, it's hard to stay focused. I am up and I am down and I pace and try to do something useful every day but simply doing what one must to stay alive most often overwhelms me. I want all to be beautiful but it is impossible... but then again, I believe that I was able to give something perhaps not beautiful but heart-warming to each of my children and Rob for Christmas. I asked each one what they wanted from me and Gill's request was the most daunting. She wanted an essay on what it was like to be her mother. I poured over old journals, blogs, her letters and such and wrote and rewrote, edited and then edited again, adding and subtracting, and it turned out to be as much of a gift to me as it was for her. I asked her permission to post it here and she agreed. 

So, although I have not posted anything the past month, you'll understand that I have been writing - not my novel which is giving me a lot of grief but writing - and all feeds into the story of my life and how I read it.

"Bringing up Baby"  

 “What has it been like being my mama and watching me go from a baby to a woman?" Gill asks.

That's a big question, little one. I've been your mama for over 34 years and you sugar and spice with your great big heart through thick and thin have always been my dream daughter.

***  

When you are five months old, I write in your baby journal: “You have a wonderfully happy, tranquil disposition and are easy to care for…." At six months, I note that “you are coming along beautifully… a perfect cherub… [with] wonderful smiles.”  A week after your first birthday, you take your first step and a month later, you conquer walking: “You are still very easy going… I love having you my little one, my daughter! When you raise your little arms to be picked up - which you do often - I can’t resist you.” 

You are now almost two. You are sitting in the bath, your hair tied back in a braid: "I still can’t believe I have a daughter and she is so sweet," I write. You are now talking, forming simple sentences and love saying "no, mom". You are quieter, less physical than your brothers and mimic me more than they did. You love washing walls and countertops. Jokingly your father says you'll probably be an airhead. I say you're going to be a doctor or lawyer, whatever - you will always be special.

When you are almost four years, we move to France for the year and, unlike your brothers, you do not speak French or complain about missing your friends and home comforts. The only time I am aware that you are aware of language difference is when you ask, “how do I say ‘give me back my toy’ in French?”  By the end of the year, you speak French as well as the village children. One of my sweetest memories from this year is watching you with Susan. (How happy I am that she can teach you about the natural world - a subject I know little about.) In my mind’s eye, I see you plodding after her in fields of wild flowers and when she points out a particularly unique orchid, you exclaim, “how clever you are Susan to find such a beautiful flower.” Once, when the two of you are sitting on a grassy hill in the hot sun drawing, Susan removes her blouse, and you tell her: “my mother has nicer breasts, Susan.”

You are my sunshine.

We return to Canada and you begin French Immersion kindergarten. We walk to school each day because I read that children who walk to school rather than be driven are better grounded. Often, we sing and step to the rhyme “left, left, I had a good job and I left. I left my wife and 48 children just because I thought I was right, right” our left and right feet touching ground on the appropriate word. I believe you love school, make good friends, have play dates, are happy. A few years later you join an early morning walking group and the leader tells me that you are noncompetitive, are never shoving to be first, you take your own sweet time, you chat to whoever, you are a delight.

You teach me how to be a better mother. I am angry at you because you won’t do your school work. I yell and you cry. I say “Gilly you have to allow me to yell sometimes.” You say “you have to allow me to cry.” We shower together and you look up at me and say, "aren't vaginas beautiful?" You are already leaps and bounds ahead of me. 

Before you are ten, we become travel companions. I see you still, trudging behind me pulling your small green suitcase. In those days, we go cheap and don’t make reservations. We stop at small inns and examine the room and decide if it is good enough, clean enough. Once we are invited to Italy to stay with a family who has a daughter your age. We go but that year it snows, the house is cold and the mother has a hissy fit and books her family into a Hyatt in Rome. We decide that we will go to smaller, more affordable cities. I am befuddled and you suggest Pisa and Verona. We visit the two, wander, share meals and beds. From that time to this, I love travelling with you.

(Years later, you want to see the Mediterranean. I drive for several hours and park by the sea. We walk and talk, sinking into sand and soaking in the water, and forget to search for a hotel until it is too late. No vacancies. We drive out of this town to the next. No inn. Finally, when I can drive no longer, we spend the night in the car, in a hotel parking lot off the autoroute. I am miserable but you, daughter of my heart, tell me "it's an adventure” and make me laugh. Forever after this, when we find ourselves in trouble, you remind me that life is an adventure.)

You are a pre-teen and your brothers are well into their difficult teens and test me often. I worry that you are too sweet, too kind, too ready to please, and worse, too like me. (Throughout my early life and well into my teens, my friends’ mothers called me “Little Mary Sunshine”: I was so smiley, so polite, so “tamed”.) Around this time, we have our first real confrontation. You buy a very skinny stretchy black skirt for a choir recital. You try it on to show me and for the first time, I see that your body is changing. You are still very young, you barely have breasts but you are sexy. This sexiness worries me. I seek a friend for advice and she tells me that I am right to be worried. There are men who prey on little girls. I tell you to buy a larger size and you cry and ask if I think you a slut. (As some one glibly told me “with boys you only have one penis to worry about”.) 

At fifteen, you tell me that you want to go to school in another country, to be the new girl in class, to wear a uniform, and to be intellectually challenged. You have searched the internet but it will cost too much. You sigh: “most of all I wanted to see if I could make a dream a reality.” I think of Langston Hughes:  “Hold fast to dreams/  For if dreams die/ Life is a broken-winged bird/  That cannot fly.” This is too important to ignore, I think. Several months later, you are the new girl, wearing a school uniform and being challenged intellectually in Lisburn Northern Ireland. We celebrate your 16th birthday at an Italian restaurant. You walk home from school with a tall good-looking boyfriend. He disappears. It is a long grey wet winter and you are unhappy. You lose weight. You write me a note: "Sometimes a cold lonely apartment on Bachelor’s Walk seems like a lot compared to this non-stop chaos and drama. But even when I am not stressed, it’s almost like I need to create it… I respect you more that I knew I could respect. I respect very little in this twisted world.”

I am dumbfounded: I say “let’s go home”. You say, “no, I said that I was going to do this and I am.” We still watch movies and read poetry snuggled into each other in bed but you are pensive. 

We return to Canada and you re-find friends and complete high school. You have grown intellectually and physically in Northern Ireland. You are writing poetry and prose. You challenge teachers at school. A steady stream of your friends come to our house and eat our leftovers. You appear happier. You are beautiful. You graduate. You will soon leave home for school in Toronto. I can no longer watch over you and keep you safe. One morning I find a package of black licorice, tied with a ribbon, and a note from you in my bathroom drawer, thanking me for rescuing you when your spirits were down. You include a poem that you wrote in Northern Ireland:

"I return home to my mother

who still hasn't eaten her scone

from the bakery that's shut down.

She's praising a poet

reminding me to dream big,

to earn my own living,

not to underestimate myself.

She sees some power in me

that I don't acknowledge

no matter how hard I squint to see.”

***

By this time, I have been a mother for nearly 30 years. I began when I was 29 years old. I feel as if I turned around three times and voila, I’m in my late 50s. Raising children is the hardest work I’ve done. Have I been good enough I ask myself? I often feel like a child myself and see, in truth, we have been growing up together. I cannot imagine myself in the world without you or your brothers. This reminds me of Sharon Olds’ poem “The Planned Child” as all three of my babies were planned:

“… when a friend was pouring wine

and said that I seem to have been a child who had been wanted,

I took the wine against my lips

as if my mouth were moving along

that valved wall in my mother's body, she was

bearing down, and then breathing from the mask, and then

bearing down, pressing me out into

the world that was not enough for her without me in it,

not the moon, the sun, Orion

cartwheeling across the dark, not

the earth, the sea--none of it

was enough, for her, without me.” 

***

You attend university for one year and then spend one year in Paris as an au pair before returning to school. I visit you in Toronto (December 2006) and write in my blog: “Every time I see her walking toward me, beautifully groomed and dressed… I think Paris, my favourite city has changed her, left its mark. She is so much taller, thinner, more confidant than I was at her age… And though I worry about her restlessness, sleeplessness, I do not worry that she won't find her passion… We talk for hours. When we are sitting, she curls into me. When we are walking, she links arms with me.”

A year later, I write: “I want to plant a seed in her brain that may take years to sprout. Nothing she does or doesn't do will stop me from loving her… I don't expect perfection. I know she is human… She doesn't have to be better than she is. I don't want her to despair as I have. Yet, I know I am powerless in this realm. She will despair.”

Susan tells me not to worry about you, to let you be: "Gill's clever." (I thank the heavens for all my strong female friends.) I let you be. You write me: "I feel as if I am always searching for something I

can't find. Anything within reach will never do." One professor tells you that you must decide what you want as you excel at all aspects of the program. I cannot advise you. I do not want to risk suggesting something that will divert you from your true path (if there is such a thing). I worry. I commiserate. I support you as best as I can but know you must find your own way to be alive.

 

In your notes, letters, and tributes, you paint me, with words, to be some wonderful wise creature and I have tried to live up to the picture you have painted with your glowing reviews but in true, I struggle. I am indecisive. I don’t know what direction to take myself. Paula Meehan says  it so well in her poem “I am not your muse”. 

I’d like to leave you in love’s blindness,

cherish the comfort of your art, the way

it makes me whole and shining,

smooths the kinks of my habitual distress,

never mentions how I stumble into the day,

fucked up, penniless, on the verge of whining

at my lot…

***

After graduating, you work hard. You blog. You visit your grandparents. You fall in love with a man who owns a boa. You create an in-home dinner club. You sparkle and shine. You leave boa man and meet television producer. I feel powerless to stop what is supposed to be the most joyous ceremony in your life. (I see clearly that your husband-to-be is an unhappy man, a lost soul, a drunkard.) I question myself even now: Is there anything I could have done to stop it? 

You learn quickly that if you do not leave him, he will crush you. You return to me. You become a gypsy. You find work here, there and everywhere. You re-educate yourself. You experiment. You find love again. You move to a new country, learn to drive, follow dreams, create your own business, and over this past difficult pandemic year, you have developed a social conscience, re-educating yourself yet again.

Still you have dark moments when you doubt yourself and all is gloomy. I want to reassure you, to tell you not to go there, that you are too warm, kind, intelligent, beautiful to indulge in self pity. Or if you must, know that it will pass, that it’s good to be human. I love how you aren’t afraid to expose your human side in your writing, how you pour it all out as if saying, take me as I am. I do.

You remain my dream daughter. 

You are home for the holidays. You call out to me “there’s a monkey in your bed.” and you silly-Gilly are laughing under the duvet on my kingsize bed like the child you once were.

“More than gems in my comb box shaped by the God of the Sea,/ I prize you, my daughter”     -  Eighth-century Japanese poet Otomo no Sakanoue Iratsume 

 

 

Too Old for Sex?

I admit I'm pathetic. Now that I have all the time in the world, I'm finding it difficult to alight and write. I putter, doing odd chores, reading, ironing and, once in a while, jigsaw puzzles. In France, our movement is quite restricted. I am allowed out to assist vulnerable people so once or twice a week, when David goes down to the garden, I sit with Susan and we drink wine and talk about her books or my draft or sex. Just because I'm in my nineties, she tells me, doesn't mean I've stopped fantasizing and dreaming about sex. 

In the second volume of her memoirs, Susan explains, at length, about the destruction of the pleasure society that was based on imagination and play instead of rivalry and violence.  To return to it, she writes, that "[w]e will have to start small, with that first thing the myths say went wrong, women's talent for pleasure."

She suggests "A school for grandmothers! Learning to be like Baubo! We have what it takes. We are practical and worldly wise, we have sexual experience and boldness of spirit. We are more untrammelled by convention and less anxious about our sexuality than young women. We are angry like them; they are angry to be considered just women. We are angry not to be considered women any more, just a sort of disembodied bodies. Or we are bitter and punish ourselves for what others have done to us by saying we are old and asexual and tired of the whole thing. But this can be made to work for us. It is physiologically quite untrue because women's sexual sensibility and capacity grows with age, and if we can be taught to see it differently we will be eager to tell our grand-daughters how to avoid our embittering experiences."

This is such a weighty topic that I will leave it to Susan to elaborate but I should explain that Baubo - the Goddess of Mirth - is an old woman in Greek mythology. She was bawdy and sexually liberated, and when people laughed at her, she didn't mind. Laughter is good, she said. Susan tells of Baubo dragging her clitoris in the sand which reminded me of a magazine article I wrote in 2007.

 The Omnipotent Clitoris

Yvonne Young 

If the most liberal mothers buy their daughters condoms, do the most enlightened buy them vibrators? The thrill of seduction is nothing compared to the earth-moving quake of the female orgasm. Unfortunately, young women exploring their sexuality aren’t learning this fundamental truth: the clitoris or “magic cape” as Natalie Angier calls it in Woman: An Intimate Geography, alerts as well as ignites in the heat of the moment. While men have been discussing its properties for centuries, the owners of this palatable treasure are ignorant of its power. 

Sixty-seven years, after Christopher Columbus set sail to discover a new world, Renaldus Columbus (no relation) claimed he’d discovered the route to a woman’s sexual pleasure. His claim was rejected by Kaspar Barholin, a Danish anatomist, who insisted that what 

Renaldus chose to name “the love or sweetness of Venus” had been known since the second century. Whoever discovered the clitoris, Georg Ludwig Kobelt, a German physician, was the first to document its structure and function. In his text of 1844, he writes that the glans cliteroides is “the primary locus of sexual arousal... which will make women want to have intercourse despite the dangers of pregnancy and the trials of motherhood.” 

Although women now know more about their bodies than in Kobelt’s time,
they are still ignoring danger for the sake of romance. Furthermore, the thrill of danger – the high of risk itself – is being substituted for the pleasure of orgasm. When Dr. Carol Cassell, a leader in the field of sex education, asked a group of 125 women, all family-planning professionals, whether they’d ever had unprotected intercourse when they weren’t planning pregnancy, much to her surprise, every single one of them said “yes.” When she asked them why, they answered, “Romance... Spontaneity... There is nothing more awful than premeditated sex.” 

According to a friend, in her early twenties, part of the pleasure of sex is the danger. Last year, she spent her days and evenings working and her late nights and early mornings frolicking in bed with a young man. (She didn’t know a person could get by on so little sleep.) At the beginning of the relationship, she insisted that her lover wear condoms but as time passed, she became more lenient. To avoid pregnancy, she didn’t allow him to ejaculate into her body “most of the time.” After several months of passionate coupling, she missed a period and almost drove herself crazy with worry until her next menstrual cycle began. When I asked whether she’d become more cautious since this pregnancy scare, she said no.

Another young friend reminded me that there is more at risk than unwanted pregnancy. Last fall, while I was living in France, she was hiking around Europe. She dropped in for a visit and stayed a week. From the moment she arrived, she couldn’t stop talking about the places she’d been and the people she’d met. Then, casually, she let it drop that she had spent one night in a Spanish hospital in agony. The doctor, without examining her, had prescribed medicine for a bladder infection. Although she’d taken it for three days, she was still having trouble urinating. Several days later when her condition still hadn’t improved, she finally went to the village doctor for a second opinion. She returned in tears. Although the doctor wanted laboratory proof, she was almost certain my friend had herpes simplex II or genital herpes.

Like my other young friend, this woman is well educated and cautious about sexual encounters. Before becoming intimately involved with a man, she insists he is tested for disease. When she travels, she carries a supply of condoms. But one starry night on a beach on the Costa Brava, she lost all reason and made love, without protection, to a fellow traveler. She cursed herself. She cursed him. How dare he not tell her that he was infected?

I have since learned that between two-thirds and three-quarters of people with genital herpes show no symptoms and are unaware that they are infected. The tiny blisters and open sores that mark the disease can appear at any moment, disappear, and reappear again and again. More disturbing still, the virus can cause central nervous system damage or death in infants born through the birth canal. Unlike other sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, or candidiasis, which can be arrested with antibiotics, there is still no cure for genital herpes. My friend, like those who carry the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) or the more lethal HIV, will always have to protect herself during sexual encounters or risk passing the disease on to others. 

Women often fail to protect themselves during sex, Dr. Cassell explains in Swept Away: Why Women Fear Their Own Sexuality, because they have been raised to play the passive role. She believes that unless women first admit that they are sexual beings, that they want and are going to have sex, they will continue to put themselves at risk. Her theory matches Nancy Friday’s.
In Women on Top: How Real Life has Changed Women’s Sexual Fantasies, Friday elaborates on the “swept away” syndrome and women’s unwillingness to protect themselves during sex. “Being contraceptively prepared goes against a lifelong addiction to love, a state of mind that includes sexual feeling but has never been differentiated from it.” Although it may be preferable to love the person with whom one makes love, Friday admits, it is more important
to recognize the difference between sex and love. One way to recognize the difference, Friday insists, is by masturbating. Although many women feel more comfortable about touching themselves than they did when Friday’s first book, My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies was published in 1974, she suggests that there is still a considerable number who shy away from pleasuring themselves. Friday encourages mothers to tell their daughters to masturbate because, she believes, when a girl or young woman touches her own genitals, she learns more about her anatomy and becomes a more intelligent owner, more in control of what is hers.

Naomi Wolf, in Promiscuities, suggests that young women would also benefit if older women gave them information about contraception and sexual pleasure so they could learn to value their sexuality: “We can teach our daughters that shame belongs to the act of abusing or devaluing female sexuality, not to that sexuality itself.”

Until the middle of the eighteenth century, men such as Columbus and Barholin had a vested interest in women’s sexuality for they believed that without female orgasm, there would be no conception. Not surprisingly, women didn’t challenge this belief. Although medical science has changed men and women’s attitudes towards sex, some things remain the same. Most men love driving a woman to orgasm. Most women love the sensation. In the throngs of passion, however, many women ignore or forget that it’s the female body that incubates the next generation and, as Dr. Genuis points out in Risky Sex, is more seriously injured by the majority of sexually transmitted diseases. 

Many women don’t realize, Natalie Angier writes, that they are endowed with a protective device, “a magic cape.” The clitoris, unlike the vagina, does not respond when it is frightened as in rape, or when it is hurried or harassed. Under ideal conditions, its 8000 nerve fibers (twice as many as the penis) swell with pleasure and then “it is a taut little baton, leading the way, cajoling here, quickening there, andante, allegro, crescendo, refrain.”

If young women are to benefit from the sexual revolution of the ‘60s—when their right to birth control was established and their right to decide their own future was won—they will become more aggressive and responsible in and out of bed. They will push themselves to move beyond the “swept away” syndrome. While there may be pleasure in danger, there is much more fun to be had with self-knowledge.

In her chapter on the clitoris, Angier notes that she uses the terms “clitoris”, “female orgasm”, and “female sexuality” almost interchangeably. She would most likely endorse the idea that mothers who value their own sexuality would want their daughters to be easily and super orgasmic. Such mothers would gift- wrap vibrators as well as condoms for their daughters.

 

Yvonne Young has published stories and book reviews in “The Diarist’s Journal”, “Fugue”, “The Vancouver Sun”, the “North Shore News”, and the “Kings County Record”. She was short-listed in The Canadian Literary Awards contest and won second prize in the “West End” literary contest.

 

References


Angier, Natalie. Woman: An Intimate Geography. New York: Houghton Mif in Company, 1999. 

Cassell, Carol. Swept Away: Why Women Fear Their Own Sexuality. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.


Friday, Nancy. Women on Top: How Real Life has Changed Women’s Sexual Fantasies. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.


Genuis, Stephen. Risky Sex. Edmonton: KEG Publishing, 1991.


Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1990.


Morrison, Ken, editor. Safer Sex Guidelines: Healthy Sexuality and HIV. Ottawa: Canadian AIDS Society, 1994.


Rubin, Lillian B. Erotic Wars: What Happened to the Sexual Revolution? New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990.


Tsena, C. Howard; Villanueva, T.Guilas; and Powel, Alvin. Sexually Transmitted Diseases: A Handbook of Protection, Prevention and Treatment. California: R & E Publishers, 1987. 

Wolf, Naomi; Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood. Toronto: Random House of Canada Limited, 1997. 

Outrageous for Lisa

To beautiful Lisa who reminds me of Japanese Haiku:

“Between our two lives/ there is also the life of/ the cherry blossom.”

"You are filled with doubt/ of the magic inside you,/ but it's all I see."

Something "outrageous" (or not) for your birthday

When my friend Susan Reid left academic work, she asked herself "What are you really interested in?" The first thought that popped into her head surprised her: "I am interested in women's cunts". This led to her work on women's sexual language and this, in turn, lead to her talisman "I have a big cunt".  When stressed or anxious, she whispered this phrase to herself and "poise calm and dignity descended".

Soon after I arrived in France in 1989, Susan asked if I would accompany her to her garden below the village to pick fresh figs. I was in a sad, tear-stained state and said little as we walked so Susan filled the silence with a monologue about her first and second marriages. Her first husband had been her university professor at Oxford and, at first, his age and authority delighted her but she soon discovered he was arrogant, condescending and a womanizer although he had one agreeable trait: "He loved cunts. He found each one unique and beautiful." I must have looked shocked, as Susan paused and explained that no one word describes the whole of women's genitalia. She would like to dispel its ugliness and bring "cunt" back into fashion. (Six years later, Eve Ensler, in her play the Vagina Monologues, also wanted women to reclaim the word.)

Although I trust Susan implicitly, cunt is a powerful appellation and I had to push myself to use it especially in my blog as my mother and father read me daily. (Later, my father commented on my "filthy" language. ) Sadly, I still find it difficult to write about cunt. In languages other than English, it does not have the same potency but as Germaine Greer argued in 2007 cunt "is one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock".

"I tried to take the malice out of it. I wanted women to be able to say it. The same way I would say: “You think cunt is nasty? I’m here to tell you cunt is nice. Like "Black is Beautiful”. Cunt is delicious. Cunt is powerful. Cunt is strong.

"Ah - it didn’t work. And now, in a way, I’m sort of, perversely pleased, 'cause it meant that it kept that power."

In her poem "Hypocrite Women",  Denise Levertov notes women coddle men as if they cannot handle the truth but women too don't have the guts to admit our own harsh truths: 

Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak

of our own doubts, while dubiously

we mother man in his doubt!

And if at Mill Valley perched in the trees

the sweet rain drifting through western air

a white sweating bull of a poet told us

our cunts are ugly - why didn't we

admit we have thought so too? (And

what shame? They are not for the eye!)

no, they are dark and wrinkled and hairy,

caves of the Moon...             and when a 

dark humming fills us, a

coldness towards life,

we are too much women to

own to such unwomanliness.

Whorishly with the psychopomp

we play and plead--and say

nothing of this later.          And our dreams,

with what frivolity we have pared them

like toenails, clipped them like ends of

split hair. 

Her description of the cunt and women's attitudes toward this precious part of our anatomy makes me despair. In adolescence, I too thought it as ugly as sin, when the hair started sprouting. I thought worse -that it was smelly, and once a month bloody-awful. 

This was so unkind and such a lie.

I don't know how young women think about their cunts these days. 

I remember when my daughter was a little girl, she looked up at me in the shower and exclaimed "aren't vaginas beautiful, mummy?" YES. 

If this is of interest at all, I recommend reading Susan Reid's autobiography in three volumes. The first is titled "About Being German; Speak to me: recollections of growing up in Germany, 1927-1948: Volume 1" 

Inspiration

 Just when I sink feeling blue and hopeless, inspiration arrives. Thank you wholeheartedly Lisa and Brendan.

and

Dearest Marlene

 I received your email this morning and I know too well that I haven't posted here in a long time. Every day I tell myself to write a blog and every day I find reasons not to. I am writing. I am pretty good about writing myself a letter in the morning as a way to get through my day. When I don't, I am a scrambled mess. I have continued to write my novel though I have no idea how to write one. Oh I do have a number of books outlining a step by step approach but I don't want to take the time and besides, I want to create something original. Susan and David smile and frown at me when I discuss my progress or lack of it. It's so easy for others to say "do it". At times, I am astonished at my bravery and at other times, I despair because I have so easily deluded myself and am an idiot. I am reading Smart's "At Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept" and Anais Nin's "Henry and June" for permission to say whatever I want. 

Yesterday I wrote down this Smart quote: "To deny love, and deceive it meanly by pretending that what is unconsummated remains eternal, or that love sublimated reaches highest to heavenly love, is repulsive, as the hypocrite's face is repulsive when placed too close to the truth."

Oh, I have been so repulsive. And yet, there are startling moments when I return to see what I've written the day before and I grin and think myself pretty fucking amazing. Unfortunately these moments are rare but aren't the greatest moments in one's life rare and startling and beautiful when they appear in the most ordinary of circumstances?

I worry also that I have left it too late, that my weather-worn brain will fail me or is failing me or is not up to the challenge. I was afraid of reading Anne Truitt's third journal "Prospect" because the second spoke of aging and its limitations but I am now into it and instead of being disheartened, I am encouraged. She quotes Cicero born in 106 BC - I am always amazed that old wisdom is still wise:

"Age does not steal upon adults any faster than adulthood steals upon children... I regard nature as the best guide... Since she has planned all the earlier divisions of our life expertly, she is not likely to make a bad playwright's mistake of skimping the last act.

"Great deeds are not done by strength or speed or physique: they are the product of thought, and character, and judgement. And far from diminishing such qualities actually increase with age.

"Age has to be fought against; its faults need vigilant resistance. We must combat them as we should fight a disease - following a fixed regime, taking exercise in moderation, and enough food and drink to strengthen yet not enough to overburden. However the mind and spirit need even more attention than the body, for old age easily extinguishes them, like lamps when they are not given oil..."

I struggle every day trying to create a regime that works for me, and trying to go easy on myself when I fail. For example, this morning I wrote: "Rob has gone to pick up our car with its new perfect body (hopefully) and I am wondering whether to attack my novel, write a blog, do my morning pages, vacuum the upstairs while Rob is out and so on it goes - the everyday demands and then the extravagant personal self-indulgent writing, and the craziness of reading three books at the same time. I drive myself crazy trying to be productive, establish a routine, and never feeling fast enough, quick witted enough and at the same time, telling myself to slow down that, in the end, it doesn't really matter."

I fear my dear Marlene, that I haven't quite conquered my "addiction to perfection". I should possibly read Marion's book again too but how much can a greedy person like myself absorb? 

Kahlo says it for me

I’m not going to ask you to kiss me

Neither ask for forgiveness when I believe that you have done wrong

or that you have made a mistake.
Nor am I going to ask you to hug me when I need it the most
or to invite me to dinner on our anniversary.
I’m not going to ask you to go around the world
to live new experiences much less
ask you to give me your hand when we are in that city.
I’m not going to ask you to tell me how pretty I’ am
even if it’s a lie or that you write me anything nice.
Nor will I ask you to call me to tell me
how your day was or tell me you miss me.
I’m not going to ask you to thank me for everything I do for you,
for you to worry about me when my moods are down
and of course I will not ask you to support me in my decisions.
I’m not going to ask you to listen to me when I have a thousand
stories to tell you.
I’m not going to ask you to do anything,
not even to stay by my side forever.
Because if I have to ask you
I do not want it anymore.

xoxo