sea-sick goats

well, well, well... there is a topic....

all right, i confess, the title is a decoy. i just want to talk about sex without attracting anybody's attention (that's why i do it online, of course, as opposed to, you know, in my living-room) (but the people in my living-room don't really want to talk about sex) (with the exception of the starry-eyed teenager) (and the hungry-looking man). oh oh oh...

anyway, i prefer to talk about it here, under the guise of goats. without the risk of being interrupted, contradicted, looked at askance, or drowned in follow-up questions...

so, sex. a tricky topic, wouldn't you say?

yes, i could not agree more. i'd love to say it used to be real simple, but got complicated when i became a mother. that would be food for thought enough, but no, it was always tricky. and keeps getting more so.

the plot only thickens, as we used to say.

the thing is: i simply do not understand sex.

(yeah, yeah, get funny on me... after boyfriends galore, two husbands, four children and forty-two years on this planet, i must know something about sex...) (maybe, but not anything that matters...)

i don't understand what sex is. i don't understand what it's for. and i am clueless as to how/what to do with it.

it's as murky and dark as it ever was. possibly more so...

...

when i was eight years old i decided to think seriously about my future career (well, 'decided' is a big word, it was just that any conversation with a grown-up i didn't yet know like the back of my hand would, sometime in the first thirty seconds, include the question: "So, what do you want to be when you grow up?". Little did I know they were only asking because that same question was haunting them and their unrealised destinies day after night, after day after night. In my innocence, I believed grown-ups were, you know, 'grown up' and that they were already 'doing something'...).

in the span of one year, i decided that i would 'later' become a) a missionary Catholic nun in Burundi, b) a prostitute, c) a general in the Russian army, and d) a writer.

of these, (d) is the only option i confess to these days when people ask me, as they still do, "So..., what did you want to be when you grew up?" (yep, still the same haunted people...)

with the amazing 10/10 vision of historical recollection, i can now see that (a)-(d) were all attempts to understand sex.

(a) was born of my first real crush, Soeur Marie-Sophie, 27 years old, brown as a tanned nut, with a laugh like a secret waterfall. To me she looked and smelled like pure golden sunshine. She descended upon our grey northern village school with tales of lions, jungles and gorillas, and photographs of little dark children sitting on her lap or helping her build 'their' school. i gave all my savings away to Soeur Marie-Sophie and her project, and for years wrote her long letters filled with dreams of the day when i would finally be able to join her.

(b) was what my mother called 'a small misunderstanding'. i had discovered a shelf in the village library devoted entirely to Harlequin romances. based on this abundant source, i became convinced that prostitution was a higher divine calling with good money, flexible working hours, and highly enjoyable duties. i guess someone must have 'put me straight' on that one at some point, but i still feel that in an odd way, this was the closest i ever was to 'getting it'...

(c) what can i say? uniforms are sexy... and i always had control issues.

(d) although this here post is probably the first time i write 'about' sex, i would not, could not, have ever written a word 'without sex'. it is from sex that all writing is born. i know that...

...

so much for archaeology. somehow, all the pieces of the puzzle are right here (have always been here), but i don't know how to put them together.

since those early days, i must have read millions of words about sex (from the bible to leonard cohen lyrics, from pornography sites to academic feminist treatises, from tantra manuals to rumi's poems)

and all i have to show for it are questions. lots of questions.

for example:

is sex something that one does, or something that one is?
and what does sex have to do with god and the divine?
for that matter, what does it have to do with creativity?
is sex something inside me, or is it something that happens between me and someone else?
is it a thing of the mind, of the body, of the soul?
what about sensual pleasure? is that sex?
does that mean there is sex (loads of it) between me and my babies?
can you have sex without touching?
can you have sex without thought?
what happens to sex in motherhood? how is it transformed in the bodies and souls of mothers?
what does it mean to be sexually awake, as a woman, as a mother?
is it possible for a human being to not be sexually awake?
what would that mean? what consequences would it have?
what about orgasm? is it a good thing (like giving birth) or a bad thing (like too much alcohol and sugar)?
is sex something you can give to someone else, receive from someone else, share with someone else? or is it only something you can experience in parallel?

i could go on... i don't know the answer to a single one of these. i don't mean i don't know the answer intellectually (even though i really don't), i mean, much worse, that i don't know the answer in myself.

....

as i was writing this i suddenly remembered myself, aged 13, in the dead of night, scribbling a feverish note with some of these very same questions, addressed to my mum, who would be leaving for work before i woke up, return long after i would have left for school, scribbling away with a sense that it was a matter of life or death that i should know, right now.


i also remember her answer, waiting for me in the morning on the dining-room table, in her beautiful round handwriting, with a thick grey marker and in capital letters. 'Yes and no!', underlined.

....

yes and no.

....

29 years later, and i am still not a farthing wiser...