What My Vagina Taught Me

There has been a lot of talk about self-responsibility of late -- most of it from politicians.  This is not a political post.  This blog is about relationships, after all, and the one I've had with my body all these years has been no less problematic than the one with my mother.  (That's another post). 

I once told my psychologist that I thought of myself as a 'free-floating brain' resentfully tethered to a corporeal anchor, a.k.a. my body.  I like my body fine.  I just forget that it's attached.  The "Me" I think of is my thoughts.  I go about happily thinking, pondering, solving, examining, considering and then BAM! something happens to my body and I have to stop my vaporous existence and pay attention.  This jerking into the three-dimensional world happens even more now that I am in my 50's.  In the last five years I have had to stop thinking in order to take care of acid reflux (GERD), overactive bladder (OAB) and now Temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJD).   

During each of these interruptions I've done what most health-conscious people would do: I went to my primary care physician; I took prescribed medications that caused unwanted side-effects (Prilosec, Nexium, Enablex); I ratcheted up to a specialist (gastroenterologist, urologist, neurological dentist); I had expensive tests (endoscopy, CT Scan, MRI) I researched my malady on the internet and read lots of badly spelled first-person accounts of similar problems; I complained to anyone who would listen; I had a good cry or two and, finally, I realized that the medical profession didn't know everything.   As much as I like my doctor of 25 years, he didn't have the time or knowledge to do more than treat symptoms.  Specialists, though at a higher price point, still evaluated me based 'on the curve'.  In each case, it wasn't until I stopped believing everything a doctor told me that I got better.

Instead, I started from scratch, taking bits of advice from several resources, trying this or that and compiling results.  In the case of the acid reflux I learned that my digestive tract just couldn't handle processed foods on a regular basis and that eating after 7:00 PM was not a good plan.  Overactive bladder?  I drink so much water you wouldn't believe and I stay away from white wine, cheap beer and grapefruit juice – all triggers.  I now manage both without medication.

Now, this TMJD thing has me on the ropes.  I have seen countless dentists and spent an outrageous amount of money trying to stop my mouth from burning.  Once again, I am tweaked and manipulated by experts.  I spend another sleepless night struggling with the prosthetic I wear and cringing at the idea of braces for the second time in my life.  I’m hearing one thing from the dentist, another from the chiropractor who agrees with the triggerpoint therapist and on and on and on while the dollars mount.  Then it hits me that I have totally ignored the most successful expert –- me. 

GROAN! This is not easy.  I am too tired and old and preoccupied with Words With Friends to deal with this.  I want to hand over the control to someone else.   Can’t someone just know the answer and fix this?  I cry and fret and even pray a little.  Then I remember my vagina.

Back in the day, when I became sexually active, the Pill was a miraculous gift.  My doctor wrote out the prescription for that early, heavy estrogen version that all women were taking in the late 70’s.  I was still living with my parents and hid the dated dial container in an empty eight-track tape.  I felt so free, so liberated and so deathly ill from side effects, mostly nausea.  So I researched other methods in my raggedy copy of “Our Bodies, Our Selves” and hit upon the diaphragm.  Yes, it was a bit ‘retro’ but so was I and once fitted out, I became confident in its effectiveness.  However, when I told other women that I used a diaphragm, almost all of them screwed up their faces in disgust -- not because it was ‘messy’ but because they had to TOUCH THEMSELVES.

Allow me to break this down for the uninitiated:  The diaphragm is a pink, latex yarmulke with a spring in the rim.  You squirt some spermicide in the dome and fold it over like a taco.  Then, you slide it in your vagina carefully hooking the spring edge under your pelvic bone.  This is done BEFORE sex.  After sex you wear the diaphragm for another eight hours before you remove it in much the same way it entered.  Still with me?

Unlike those other girls, I felt very proud of myself. I was grateful not to take hormones every day for something that didn’t happen every day and I learned where my cervix was – you know, just in case there was a pop quiz… or something. 

The point IS, while I still have an ambivalent relationship with my body and, yes, I want someone to just fix this thing when it annoys me, I also know that’s not going to fly.  No, it’s down to me, to educating myself, asking a lot of questions and listening to my body AND my mind.  Here goes.

Living up to my potential

My good friend is concerned that her son is not living up to his potential.  Do any of us?  Is it even a fair question to ask?

I didn't live up to my potential.  Coming from a very small town along the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, I had the potential of marrying young, birthing several children, working in a factory or pink-collar job, joining a Baptist church and slowly committing suicide.  No, I didn't live up to that potential but I certainly gave it a good effort.

Neither of my parents were educated people.  My father stopped school around age 13; my mother made it to her sophomore year of high school.  Dad began working at the Bassett Furniture factory at age 17.  Mom worked at DuPont.  Factories were everywhere in Henry County at that time.  [Companies did then what they still do now -- that is, follow the cheap labor.  The only difference, in post-WWII America, was that the poor, uneducated, non-union workers were still citizens.]  After realizing the factory wasn't her idea of glamorous work, Mom became a 'beautician'.  My father started driving a truck long-distance delivering the furniture instead of assembling it.  They had one child - me.  There was no reason to expect I would do anything other than follow in their footsteps.  College was never discussed or planned for.  In truth, their goal for me could easily be summed up as "Don't get pregnant out of wedlock."  

I barely graduated high-school.  In fact, if not for those two years of chorus I wouldn't have met the credit requirement.  I failed Algebra two years in a row.  Same class.  Same teacher.  Same F.  So far, living up to my potential.  I was engaged to be married too.  I met my fiance when I was 17.  He was not what you would call good-looking but he was interested in me and that's all it took.  I decided I wanted to experience sex.  I thought it best to take this step with an older partner, someone with experience, someone I could trust.  I had played around with guys in the past but never gotten close to the full-on act.  When I met my future fiance, Michael, I thought he fit the bill.  He was a nice guy, responsible, experienced and he loved me.  We picked a weekend when my parents were out of town for this important rite of passage.  I don't think I have ever been so unimpressed with something so hyped.  Granted, we weren't in a seriously passionate relationship so the loss of my virginity was less like a Danielle Steele novel and more akin to the directions included with most IKEA furnishings.  I think we tried it one more time before I decided to pull the plug on this endeavor.  I wrote him a letter explaining that I just wasn't ready for this level of commitment.  I left the letter in my room, folded up and tucked between some books.  My mother found it while vacuuming.  She was horrified.  Those were the days when your value as a woman (a.k.a. your marriageability) was zero if you didn't have your hymen.  I begged her not to tell my father but she did.  Next thing I know, my father is making Michael and I promise we would never do that again unless we were married.  We didn't.  What we did do, well, what I did, was agree to marry Michael -- my way of making up to my parents for my 'sin'.  So far, living up  to my potential.  

Me as dispatcher at the Henry County Sheriff's Office

How I got out of that engagement is another story and another post.  The point is, by the time I narrowly graduated high-school I had no job, no fiance, no hymen and no plans for my future. That's when I took the job as a dispatcher for the Henry County Sheriff's Office.  I made less than $400 a month.  I sat in a dark, underground bunker, tethered to the phone line and associating with the scum of Henry County -- the deputies.  I was 19 years old but I looked 30 and felt 60.  Something had to give because I was definitely living up to my potential.

It was while I was working the 'graveyard' shift that a reporter from the Martinsville Bulletin came in to check the complaint log.  Nice guy.  A little older than me and a Yankee.  Steve was originally from Michigan and had the same body type and intensity as a young Dustin Hoffman.  We started chatting.  Over the next few months, Steve brought me books to read and then quizzed me on their content. The first novel he gave me was Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and he taught me how to pronounce the Russian names.  He forced me to explain Descartes' ontological argument for the existence of God from Discourse on the Method and I could.  In this post-Watergate era, Steve honed my debating skills on all manner of politics and helped forge me into the liberal thinker I am.   He was the first person to tell me I was smart and that I could and SHOULD leave Henry County and that the way to do so was through education.  It was Steve who talked me into applying at the local community college where I completed my first two years of study with a 3.8 GPA including an A in Algebra!  [My ex-husband and I still laugh at my parents' reaction when I told them I was resigning as dispatcher to go to community college:  "Why do you want to do that when you have a perfectly good job already."] 


Steve changed my life.  Of course, I did a lot of the work myself but I had no idea what options were available to me.  I was living up to my potential.   A potential that had been outlined for me by my unaware parents and the frightened, uneducated community of my birth. I had no clue, none, of what was capable of being but my experiences have made me unwilling to settle for anyone's idea of what is potential -- including my own.

Location! Location! Location!

I did it again.  Thinking that I was getting in on the ground floor of something that was SURE to be big, valuable, perfect in all ways, I ended up trapping myself.  I'm talking real estate here.  Or, am I?

When I bought my home in Cary, North Carolina, at age 40, I felt like I was caving in to the societal pressure of owning a home.  I'd managed to avoid the pressures of marriage -- except for those four years I was married in the late 80's  which don't really count -- and children but home ownership made sense.  I'd been living in a great apartment in downtown Raleigh with my two cats for years.  Happy.  Then I got a dog. A dog is too close to having children, I've since discovered, because with a dog you have to walk it and if you are lazy like I am that means you need a yard.  So, I bought a house just so I could have a yard just because I had a dog.   Lesson learned: stick with cats.  

The house I bought was in Cary because I couldn't afford the house I wanted in downtown Raleigh.  Raleigh was just beginning to be popular to those "other outsiders" -- Yankees -- and all of the inner belt line communities were out of my financial reach.  As I watched Raleigh go from Mayberry to slightly hip (only slightly) I reasoned that downtown ANYWHERE would follow suit.  So, I bought my tiny little 1950's cottage in downtown Cary.  I spent so much money remodeling that place.  I learned a LOT about power tools, plumbing and electricity and interior design.  I stayed so busy working on that house that it took me a few years to realize how completely bored and isolated I had become.  No, downtown Cary did not 'turn around' and become hip.  Five years after my purchase, with a completely renovated home, incredible cottage garden and vintage appliances to complete the look, I was still the only house in my neighborhood not occupied by "White Trash".  There was still nothing in downtown Cary that resembled a decent bar or restaurant and I was totally separated from my friends who still lived in Raleigh.   I knew I had reached a new low when I became friends with the two Mormon boys who stopped by one day.  I am not joking.  I was their 'go to' for a cool non-alcoholic/decaffeinated beverage on hot mission days.  Lesson learned:  when you know the Mormon kids by their first names you are officially LONELY!

So I sold the Cary house and moved to Wake Forest.  Yes, I'm groaning too.  Why?  Because I was SURE that this unique riverside community would gain value and turn around.  Wasn't Wakefield (just to the north) already metastasizing into another bloated Yankee Mecca?!?!  I'd be in a condo alongside other like-minded childless folk!  Ah yes.  I'd buy this place that needed work, put to use my considerable power-tool skills, walk my dog on the lovely trails by the river and then sell it for a hefty profit.  

Then the market crashed, owners defaulted on their loans, short-selling to families (with children!) who could no longer afford those McMansions in Wakefield.  The value of my home plummeted leaving me with not one but TWO mortgages and, finally, my dog died.

But the realization I've come to is not that I have a shitty real estate antennae.  That's true too but the epiphany I'm having today is that the friendship I had with a neighbor would never have existed if not for my isolation.  It wouldn't have existed because in our native habitats we would never have known one another and other than proximity, we have very little in common.  I realize that the reason we stayed friends, long after the relationship should have passed into the "casual acquaintance" category, was because there wasn't anyone else around.  That just like I dug up the Cary driveway to make room for flower beds that I later abandoned, I've spent years trying to fashion this neighbor into a suitable companion TOTALLY IGNORING who she really is.  Not that who she is is 'bad' or 'wrong' or anything judgmental.  No, just that she and I are as different as I am from a 19-year-old Mormon virgin.  

I can't sell my house yet but I can come up with a list of improvements that need to be done so the condo is 'turnkey' when the market rebounds.  And, I need another list -- a list of the things and activities I love, that speak to me, that stir my passion, people I truly enjoy, who enhance my life and don't just occupy my time.  

It's power tool time.