I know I've given you an incomplete view of my childhood, but I think I've given you enough for you to be able to guess what it was like. What I haven't talked about is the attitude towards sex in my house.
My mother, strangely, was never too closed about sex. She did give me the talk, and let me know that I could come to her with any questions.
My Nannie, on the other hand, swore that she only had sex once (when she conceived my Mom). Sex to my Nannie was a nasty, dirty, degrading thing that she was forced to do because she was married. There were a lot of conversations in our house about how boys only want one thing, to stick their wee willy winkie (her words, not mine) wherever us girls would let them. My Nannie was very vocal about this. I learned from a young age that sex itself was meant to be a "using" experience for girls.
I was also made to feel shameful about my body. The body shame was many faceted. There was the usual body shame that comes along in a sexually repressed home. There was also the body shame that comes along with being a chubby kid in a house of anorexics. Yeah. Did I forget to mention that? Both my Mom and my Nannie were anorexic while I was growing up. My Nannie was a much milder case than my Mom. My mother's top weight when I was a child was 108 lbs at 5'5" with a large frame. To put this another way, my mother's BMI was between 16.6 and 18. I recently found a picture of my Mom at the beach with me when I was a baby. Even with her "baby weight" you could still see all of her ribs and the bones in her chest. My husband said she looked like a concentration camp victim.
Enter chubby kid with endocrine problems. I'm sure you can guess what happens next. Yup. I spent a big portion of my life on enforced diets. I endured searches of my bedroom looking for errant food wrappers, snide remarks about my belly, pinches of my belly fat followed by looks of disgust, and excessively glowing praise whenever I managed to lose a few pounds. It's amazing that I never developed an eating disorder.
In all honesty, it's just amazing that I came out of this as well as I did. Generally, I'm a relatively content person. I have a lot of friends and a wonderful husband. I'm very very lucky.
But, there are a few holdovers. I'd never thought that I had absorbed my Nannie's weird attitude about sex. That is…until I suddenly lost my libido. Consciously, I know that sex is a wonderful, super fun, and intimate thing. And as long as I'm horny, that's exactly how I feel. But, as soon as you take the drive away, I start to think of sex as something kinda gross. If I'm thinking of it as something kinda gross, and my hubby starts "pressuring" me for sex, I start to hear my Nannie's voice in my head and suddenly I feel degraded and used. It sucks.
And then there's the body issues. Half of feeling horny is feeling sexy. If you never feel sexy that can put a serious crimp in your libido. Now, don't misunderstand me. I am perfectly comfortable being naked in front of my husband. I know that HE thinks I'm sexy. He's been very convincing about that. The problem is me.
People often fantasize about being WITH someone else. I fantasize about BEING someone else.
Ahhh, the damage your family can do.
Throw on top of this some molestation and an attempted assault at 14 and you are left with someone who is sometimes kinda messed up about sex. Generally, I've managed to avoid a lot of the bizarre thinking about sex that I was raised with, but it rears its ugly head when my libido is gone. I'm working on that though.
Next time, I'd like to talk to you about the things I've done/been doing to help myself.
