The One

The Early Defining Moments

My first orgasm happened when I was seventeen years old. A boy, who was sought after for his cute looks and winning smile, captured my vagina’s attention by looking in my direction. He asked me if I’d like to spend the night with him. I had never been with anyone until this point, so of course I immediately said yes. He held my hand crossing the road to go to his car. I came in my jeans.

By the time we got to my bedroom I was drenched. I remember him kissing me as I lay on the bed and reaching down to feel in between my legs. He was put off by the amount of fluid. I had absolutely no idea what was happening or what I was doing. He couldn’t get hard. In the end he said he couldn’t do anything as he missed his girlfriend – he had apparently just broken up with her. When he left, I cried. I felt ashamed, both that I had made myself so readily available to a stranger and then felt I wasn’t good enough. I was embarrassed having been so wet between the legs as it was a turn off for him.

I didn’t cum again until I was on my honeymoon, five years later.

The second guy that looked my way (again at age seventeen) was one I often ended up pashing at the end of the night on the dancefloor. I really, really liked him, although I revealed that secret to no one! He really, really liked my friend. I later discovered he settled for me. One night he had nowhere to stay after the pub, so I offered my parents’ holiday house. I snuck downstairs into his room in the middle of the night for another kissing session. He pulled down my undies, entered me and broke my hymen. The pain was excruciating, and I had to hold my breath for at least 30 seconds. He didn’t notice. He didn’t stop. He thrusted his penis a further six times then literally passed out on top of me. I squeezed out from under him then went to my bed. In the morning I noticed the blanket he had been sleeping on was all nicely folded. I thought he had done this as gesture of guilt from the previous evening. I later discovered it was because it was covered in blood! I threw the quilt out and covered myself in a blanket of shame for what I had allowed to happen to me. I was mortified. I saw that boy every week at the pub after that and received no attention whatsoever. I later found out he told all his friends the whole story and heard they laughed when they found out he had ‘popped a virgin’.

But the story didn’t really start there.

School Days

My first big sexual information came in 1985. I was twelve years old and in year 7. My friend went away for the weekend with her family and some friends. On the Monday, she came to me, excited. She had lost her virginity! I was shocked. As an extremely innocent Catholic girl I couldn’t believe this had happened. I asked her how. She told me an elaborate tale of a family friend (who was nineteen) wooing her in the spa. He directed her to take off his bathing suit so he could have her. She was eleven. I distinctly remember at the time feeling something was off about the whole encounter. My friend seemed excited, so I let it go. She oozed a sense of superiority that she had completed the act.

I owned my last bikini when I was twelve. I remember it distinctly. It was floral and came in two colours. It was a big one and covered much more skin than other swimwear. That summer I got a fabulous tan. Looking back at the photos I can see I was beautiful. I felt ugly and fat. As with all things, how you see yourself is what you manifest. I put on weight after that.

Sometimes as a young girl I would close my eyes and imagine I was being kissed. I practiced in the mirror. Knowing when to poke my tongue out was hard. I tried and I tried. I sometimes watched my parents in the backyard. Dad would interrupt Mum from hanging out the washing with a hug. He’d encourage her to stop for an embrace. Peck her on the mouth and cuddle her. She always looked like she was enduring the experience. It was like she was suffering from his genuine affection and did it out of duty. I thought that was love.

When I was thirteen, a family member got pregnant before she was married. My mother and aunty sat me down and lectured me for hours. I was told she got pregnant the first time she had sex. I was told repeatedly that I was never to do the same. It had apparently brought great shame to our family. I loved the new baby.

I got my first period when I was thirteen, a full year after I told my friends I had it. I was terrified! I went into my mother’s bedroom, shaking. Mum looked at me and could see by the look on my face I was nervous and scared. She said, ‘Got your period?’ I nodded. She shoved a pad at me and told me that she was angry. She said now she was running late for work, and I should have gotten up earlier. I left the room in tears. I couldn’t tell my friends – they thought I was already well past it all. Another burning memory to shape my feelings about my body and female reproduction.

I was alone and I was ashamed. Two common occurrences that marked my early years.

When I was sixteen (in year 10 at school) I fell into a friendship with some girls who liked to live a little more adventurously than most of the others at school. I’m pretty sure they only befriended me because I could regularly steal money from my mother’s purse, so I could offer them an endless supply of cigarettes. I was yet to smoke. One day I snuck out of the house, and we went to Chasers night club. I was the only one of my friends who got in. I was amidst the music and darkness for a total of five minutes before I left. It was a bomb. On the way home, I hoped my parents had noticed I was missing. They hadn’t. I proceeded to sneak out sixty-three times that year. One time a friend of a friend told us a story on the train. She had been to Chasers a few weeks earlier. She passed out and woke up in a strange man’s house. He told her he had taken her home as he just wanted to watch her sleep. I completely freaked out and wanted to tell pretty much any parental figure there was. She refused. Our friends refused. They were worried they wouldn’t be allowed to see each other and go out again if the adults knew. So, we all stayed silent while a thirty-year-old man got away with drugging a young girl and probably sexually assaulting her in her sleep. The shame of my powerlessness in these moments dug deeper with every experience.

Because I had been raised with no other frame of reference for sex, these types of occasions became all I knew about this important topic. I had no experiences of a loving sexual relationship. No experiences of a loving relationship at all. Regardless, all of the teachings at school and home had me yearning to climb this invisible mountain.

I remember often tossing and turning in my sleep and waking up with a feeling of dread. I felt lost and alone with no true love or understanding of sex, yet wanting them just the same. I needed to feel happiness through sexual relations and romantic love.

RED

A few short months after I lost my virginity, I met my future husband, who I will call Red. The base of the rainbow, red for many symbolises our primal instincts of security, strength and vitality. Our foundation for life. We waited three weeks to have sex. I was surprised that it didn’t hurt like it had the first time. The entire experience lasted for a total of five minutes, and I remember thinking, ‘This feels good,’ just before it abruptly ended. He pulled out to cum and that was it. It did not occur to either of us to do anything that would increase the pleasure of my experience. It wasn’t really about me at all.

For the following three months we were insatiable. We spent every moment together that we could. We had sex at least three times a day. I completely loved it. Each experience was short and intense. Many times I felt myself almost climax. Sometimes it was from the penetration of his fingers. Just as I was about to cum I would stop him and demand sex. I thought we needed to cum together during penis penetration. I couldn’t cum before him. I can’t remember why this was my belief, but I could attribute some of it to the guilt of premarital sex, some to thinking the man’s pleasure was more important than the woman’s, and some to my own low self-esteem. I was not worthy of this boy’s affections let alone enjoying them. The lack of orgasm, I would later find out, some people do on purpose. It’s called edging. I was very good at that!!

Red and I were both young and inexperienced. I was his first, and he might as well have been mine.

For the next four-and-a-half years we pretended to our families that we were not having sex. If someone came to my home, he hid under the bed. One time a visitor stayed so long; Red started to shiver uncontrollably with the cold. Neither of us questioned the necessity of these actions. There was just clearly no way it would have been acceptable to be having sex before marriage.

When I was eight, I got a nasty case of head lice. They were crawling over my head for weeks. My parents decided to give me an intense treatment that involved me showering with my father. He wore his bathers. At the time I never really thought about it. But the memory remains to this day. Nudity was such a bad thing in our house, we were never to see it.

Growing up, sex was not a topic regularly discussed in our household. I don’t remember ever really having ‘the talk’ with any family member. In year 6, my final year of primary school, another student asked me if I was a virgin. I didn’t know what that was. I said no. The girl laughed and laughed and told all her friends. I had no idea why it was so funny.

Later that year, I felt so grateful to have met a girlfriend that I could confide in, and vice versa. Although I’m sure I thought she knew everything. She told me she had this thing called a period and showed me the special toilet they had at the school for it. She said that she bled so she couldn’t have a baby. I asked her what happened to pregnant women. She said they had to have sex every day to stay pregnant. I was wowed by this concept – my immediate thought was, what happened to the women whose husbands had died during the pregnancy. She said she didn’t know, but they probably got a fill in. This friend had an older sister who knew ‘everything’. I was so pleased to know some stuff. Girls were teased less if they appeared to know more about these things.

I met Red under these circumstances. He was eighteen, I was seventeen. I remember telling a friend I had plans to kiss him on New Year’s Eve. If he didn’t kiss me back, then I could blame New Year’s. Midnight hit and I planted one on him. It was wet, messy and totally without finesse. He kissed back. So, of course, I wanted to marry him.

We were married almost five years later. My second orgasm ever occurred on my honeymoon. It happened kind of accidentally, on one of the two times we had sex in the whole month we were away.

For as long as I can remember, I have always been the type of person to have what people affectionately refer to these days as ‘special interests’. As a child, I loved knowing all about mathematics and science. I spent many nights awake in bed wondering how we came to be in this world, what happens next, and what are these human bodies. I would picture nothingness and then what I saw around me, and it would physically hurt my stomach to imagine. I would think about all the people in the world and what they were doing. Different time zones, different values and upbringings. Long before the days of the internet, my family had a subscription to the National Geographic magazine, which took pride of place on a big bookshelf. I remember an issue featuring a woman with her top off and only beads around her neck. I asked my mother where her clothes were. She told me some cultures don’t wear them. I was fascinated.

So other people didn’t live like us? I loved to ponder that thought. It started the ‘what if’ game that I still play to this day. What if I was to do this thing? I’m sure someone else in the world has done it before. After all, there are so many people and so much going on. Surely someone has used their bottle of impulse spray as a microphone in front of the bedroom mirror? Surely someone else dances around their bedroom too? What if I was to imagine I lived in a different part of the world? Would any of my activities and thoughts feel ‘normal’? In my family home, I knew my unique thoughts and behaviours were not considered attractive qualities. ‘Quirky’ was not a redeemable trait and conformity was our comfort zone. I was raised in a strict Catholic family and went to a Catholic school. All of my parents’ friends were Catholic. We went to church every Sunday and often to confession to repent our sins.

Not being one who enjoyed lying, I remember my first ever confession (with all the official ceremony). I couldn’t think of anything specific I had to be sorry for. So, I made something up. Then, instead of feeling better for repenting my sins, I felt worse. A few friends and I broke into the church at lunchtime a few weeks later and danced around in it. I was glad that act gave me something to say in my next confession.

By the time I got married, the dance between expected conformity and my dreamy ‘what if’ was well established. There were many things I chose to do because I thought surely someone else does this too. Surely other people pick their nose and eat it. But that’s secret stuff because you aren’t allowed to break the rules. I sealed in that shame alone.

To me, that explains my initial thoughts on sexuality. You can’t touch yourself. It’s a sin. But the only way I could get a tampon to stay in – after months of tears and lots of pain – was to actually put my finger up there and feel where it should go. After that it went in easily every time. I never touched myself for pleasure. I didn’t feel ‘allowed’, even though our progressive high-school sex educator recommended we touch our own bodies before we let anyone else touch them.

At home, the topic of sex was rarely brought up. I can’t remember being told anything much, except that it was not ok to have sex before marriage. Having one partner was the assumed option for the entirety of my existence. By the time I got to the sex education class in year 10, I felt naughty even being in the class. The only test I ever failed in my entire schooling career was the sex ed one. I had worked myself up into such a state that I couldn’t listen properly. She told us some ‘weird’ and bizarre concepts. I mean who actually touches themselves? That’s disgusting. I didn’t understand the difference between semen and sperm, eggs and ovaries. What I knew was that it made me feel super uncomfortable and very curious at the same time.

Later in life I would discover that taking action outside my comfort zone would take me to places in my life, parenting and career I could only dream of. At the time, though, I just remember going home thinking I was not going to touch myself. If my mother walked in during, that would assure my trip to hell; and as far as she was concerned, I was already on my way there.

That year 10 sex ed class reminded me that I had experienced sexual urges years earlier. At the time, I hadn’t put a name to them. The first sexual reaction I noticed in my body was watching the film clip to the song ‘Whip it’ by Devo. In the clip there is a woman attached to a pole and a guy is whipping off one piece of her clothing at a time until all she’s left with are her corset and undies. I felt that clip deep in my loins. It excited me and mortified me at the same time. I sometimes wonder how I would have acted if I had felt ‘allowed’ to explore these rumblings. Regardless, I did not do anything about it and proceeded never to touch myself for pleasure as a child and young adult.

I went to a school disco in year 10 where I was set up with a boy from the Catholic boys’ school we were encouraged to interact with. He guided me under the grand piano and proceeded to stick his tongue down my mouth and his fingers in my vagina. We were soon caught by a teacher, who didn’t say anything other than telling us to get out. I was humiliated. I had not wanted him to do what he did. I made absolutely no effort to stop him at all. I felt completely powerless in a situation where I could have had plenty of power. We were in a public place. People everywhere. Yet I didn’t say no. Why? Well, one reason is because it happened so quickly. But I’m also going to say I didn’t believe I was worthy of saying no. ‘Girls, find yourself any interest from a man and do as he directs’ was my ethos at the time. Then, of course, don’t tell ANYONE – because no matter how the situation ensued, consent or otherwise; I knew if I ever said anything at all, the shame and blame would land entirely on me. Alone.

The two concepts ‘alone’ and ‘shame’ again silently slithered themselves deep into my veins like a snake’s venom. It was so subtle; I didn’t know I had been poisoned.

Five years later, when I went on my honeymoon, I took all these ideas of sex and sexuality with me. I was now officially ‘allowed’ to enjoy sex, and I reckon that’s why I was able to achieve orgasm again. Phew!

I’m not sure whether it was because of all the not-yet-known infidelities or other reasons, but after our honeymoon, we only ever had sex when I initiated it. I felt both powerful and exhausted by this. I can’t describe the feeling of safety, knowing I would never be under a piano again in the middle of something I did not sign up for… mixed with a yearning to feel desired. Wanted. To be the woman on the pole having her clothes taken off piece by piece. Instead, it was a rerun of the same thing. I would start by touching his penis, playing with his foreskin (something I would later develop a fetish about). I would give him a head job first. I never sucked his penis after sex because it would have my ‘yucky’ juices on there. He would enter me for less than five minutes and it was all over when he came. In the early years we experimented with some things. We tried anal sex once. Neither of us knew what we were doing so we doused his penis with Vaseline and put it straight in. I screamed in pain, and we did not try it again. In the first ten years my husband sometimes performed oral sex. Briefly. I never climaxed from it, and I often felt so uncomfortable both receiving pleasure and knowing he wasn’t really enjoying himself that I stopped it. I remember once staying in a hotel room after going to a Robbie Williams concert. I was so excited to have sex that night. Red suggested the night be about me for the first time ever. I would not allow it. HE had to cum.

Marriage

Time went on, we had children, and sex took a back-seat role in both of our lives. The first time I had sex after my first child was born was when I conceived my second. We didn’t have sex again for a long time after that.

I don’t remember much about sex in the latter part of our marriage except that the limited oral sex I received filtered into no oral sex at all for the last ten years. He refused to do it. Every single orgasm I had was of my own doing.

When I was eighteen, I had a friend who moved out of home for the first time. Her family contacted the church near where she wanted to live and found her a room to rent in someone’s house. She was asked to pay over $100 a week (a huge amount at the time) for her room. It was so expensive because it had a spa in it. After she moved, she was told that, due to using too much hot water, she was only allowed to use the spa on Sundays and then only if she checked first. My friend had no problem with deal; I remember it clearly thirty years later. Why? Because mixed agendas never sat well with my brain. That woman was clearly advertising and taking extra money for one thing and providing another. I felt like that about sex in my marriage.

I was told so many times as a child that sex can be a wonderful, magical experience – but only between two virgins who got together and discovered each other during marriage. I remember over the years exploring this concept. I discovered that the less sex I got, the more interested in it I became. I didn’t get the opportunity to find out what might happen if the reverse were true.

I still played the ‘what if’ game in my head. I constantly thought, there have got to be people in the world like me who yearn for more from this. The more dissatisfied I became, the more I pondered. The more I pondered, the more I asked others about their experiences. My world started to open up. Just like with the National Geographic magazine, I became aware of other people’s ‘nudity’. And guess what? Everyone’s experience was different!

I had made friends over the years who were not privy to the same upbringing as me and of course that lead them to have different views about sex. The concept of finding your one true love and living happily ever after was largely universal in my friendship group, but the sexual experience varied. I found out that some of my friends had