Sexual Healing
How sleeping with a woman helped heal my body issues*
For most of my young adult life I absolutely loathed my body. It didn’t matter what size it was or how fit (or not) it was, to me it was utterly disgusting. I can’t remember exactly when these feelings began, but I know that getting pregnant at 17 and having a baby at 18 certainly didn’t help the situation. Stretch marks, loose skin, swollen belly, puffy legs and ankles. I found it excruciating to be inside this ‘grotesque’ body that appeared to have betrayed me.
Throughout my late teens to mid 30’s, I was always at war with my body. I found it utterly repellent. I would sleep with guys and never get fully naked. Always keeping a little something on to cover my stomach area, which was the main focus of my self hatred. Even my then husband never got to see me undressed. I became obsessed with hiding and full of shame about the way my body looked after having a baby. How had I let myself go like this?! No doubt something many mothers can relate to.
During that sad period of my life, I met some kind and gentle men who wanted to love me, and seemed to find me desirable, sexy even, and yet during sex with them I could never relax. I was always too terrified that they would touch my stomach or see my stretch marks and discover my secret shame…that I was repulsive. Back then in the early 90s there wasn’t the pressure for women to look ‘perfect’, in the way young women face now. But my body was for me, just more evidence of what I had been shown by my parents since birth, that I simply wasn’t good enough.
Until that is, I met a woman named Harper…..