Sex seems to be this seemingly in-navigable minefield – one wrong step and KABOOM, the whole damn thing will blow.   What I want to know is, how did this happen?  I’m sure that it was not meant to be this way.   But, it is the ultimate topic of taboo.  I am totally hard-pressed to find a single human being in my universe willing to discuss it openly and at length.  This speaks volumes of its great distortion.

One week shy of my 36th birthday I finally had the epiphany that it is really not that big of a deal which is not to say that it should not be savored and enjoyed like a great meal or a glass of fine wine. What I mean to say is that I finally have arrived at the conclusion, in my own very excruciating process of thought, that this little word which we contort into a four letter obscenity,  is a mere fraction of who we are as human beings.  Yet, we spend massive amounts of time and brain space on it.  It’s quite ridiculous actually.

I have spent thirty years with this tiny three letter word pervading and invading my thoughts and actions.  The great breakthrough came when I finally realized that I am so tired of it.  I have exhausted myself recovering from sex, chasing it under the guise of looking for love, weaponizing it in order to get my way, intoxicating myself so that I could tolerate it, minimizing it so as not to feel and perverting it because perversion is familiar.

This brings me to my childhood abuse.  Frankly, I set out to leave that part out of this.  I’m finding that to not be possible, however.  I was broken.  Sometimes I think that when a child is broken, the cracks of the brokenness don’t show themselves until much later into adulthood.  I’m approaching middle-age.  I should be a fully functioning and confident woman by this point.  I do realize that all of the things that I have done – the promiscuity, perversion, intoxication – are nothing short of an immature attempt at keeping the cracks sealed.

I’m tempted to apologize for bringing up my abuse, but really I can’t help it.  I can’t speak of my utter misunderstanding of all matters of this human condition without looking to that very second at which my 6-year-old little girl self surrendered to the pain in order to survive it.  I broke in that moment of surrender.  There went my soul in one direction, my heart in quite another and my sexuality…Sometimes I just have to take a deep breath and stop trying to know.   Anyway, I can’t speak of anything – sex, love, anger, hate (that one’s a doozy), pain, healing, sadness, grief – without going back to that.   It’s just how it is for me.   You just cannot imagine how tired I am of my brain traveling back to it in order to understand everything I’ve ever done.

I’ve had new memories of my abuse lately.  I will not speak of them except to say that I had to ask a friend if I was raped.  How could I not know that?  I mean it’s really a pretty cut and dry thing.  Well, except for when you are looking at it through the eyes of a broken 6-year-old.  Trust me when I tell you that they don’t really understand very much.  Wow, this is enlightenment, really.  I have grown into this woman with three children and have the sexual understanding of a six year old.

I have agonized over this topic more than I think I could ever convey with mere words.  I really think that all of the things that I’ve described – the distortion of sex – were just me stretching myself in all different directions to keep a multitude of “fingers” plugging up the cracks in the brokenness.  The irony is that it is only in recognizing that something is broken that it can finally approach repair.

When I was a child we had these annoying plumbing issues in the upstairs bathroom and my father, never the plumber but always frugal, kept sort of patching the issues.  Well, on Christmas Eve when I was about 11 the whole damn thing just burst and we had the equivalent of Niagara Falls in our dining room.   It’s sort of like that – the failure to recognize what’s broken just leads to disaster.  In plugging all of my cracks repeatedly with the misguided vision of a six year old girl, I’ve approached disaster more than one time.

Who knows, maybe I have actually come to a disastrous point – that’s all perspective, I guess.  However, I choose to believe that my still living and attempting to do no more harm every day is the proof of disaster –averted.  I have no idea really.  All of these words are merely my own meager attempt at understanding my humanity so that I don’t have to live from the place of brokenness anymore.

I share these thoughts mostly because it makes me feel better.  The only thing that I know to any degree of certainty is that I know very little.  However, I am also pretty sure that sex is not really a big deal.  It’s a lovely gift from above, just like sunrise and majestic mountains.  Although I really can’t remember a time when the contemplation of the Rocky Mountain’s majesty ever caused my soul to feel torment.