Didn't I See This Movie?

I had a surreal experience on Kol Nidre night (the night when Yom Kippur begins). A young woman came up to me at synagogue and said, "Do you remember me?" I had supervised her immersion in the mikvah, a ritual bath, immediately before her wedding because the attendant scheduled to be on duty didn't show up. The night was very memorable for me because I had to be at the surgical center very early next morning to get a D&C for my third miscarriage; the last place I wanted to be was at the mikvah with a happy bride, but it was rainy and I didn't want her to wait any longer for the no-show. Anyway, it was this woman who approached me at synagogue. She told me how grateful she was that I showed up that night in general and all the more so, because she was pregnant. Now, in the movie version of this, I should have been, too: seriously, dragging myself out late at night in the middle of a tragedy to help this woman with a mitzvah (commandment) meant to help you conceive? It felt like the setup for some positive karma coming my way. Alas, the world doesn't work like the movies.

I think about my infertility more than I'd like to admit. I wish I didn't, but it's hard to not reflect when I see pregnant bellies at synagogue, or when I have a sweet interaction with a neighbor's kids. On Rosh Hashana I thought about our second baby, who was due then, and when someone told me her due date was Jan. 7, I thought of our third kid who was due Jan. 6. The one thing I can tell you is, infertility sucks. So much so that my friend who has cancer told me that he found infertility more challenging in many ways than cancer. His experience was that it was certainly more lonely. "People rally around you when you have cancer. That's not the case when you're experiencing infertility," he said.

One of the suckiest things about this is seeing myself turn into a person with behaviors I never, ever wanted to have, like avoiding pregnant friends. I think it is so petty and lame, yet find myself doing it anyway. I am trying to have compassion for myself around this, because I know my poor brain is trying valiantly to protect my wounded heart. I know this is a phase and it will pass. In the meantime, there is always Facebook.

Another eye-opener for me is how suffering related to infertility isn't related to how long you have been trying to conceive or how long you've wanted to be a parent. I was very late in wanting kids, then was thwarted by a very advanced case of Lyme Disease. It is hard to make love, let alone seriously contemplate parenthood, when every nerve in your body is on fire and you can't use your arms. For some (dumb) reason, I thought that would mean I would be less sad about our infertility, but that's not how it works. The heart wants what the heart wants, and furthermore, sometimes I have to encounter the second arrow of, "Well, if you had come to this sooner, things might be different." Feeling like there is a hole in your family is a lonely feeling, no matter how long you've been feeling it.

I am working hard to keep things in perspective, like by taking account of the tremendous blessings that I have, especially being happily married to my best friend. I cling steadfastly to the belief that you can be happy no matter your circumstances. I also do believe that everything will work out how its supposed to, whether or not I'm immediately happy with the results. Still, I can't help but feeling thwarted in doing God's will, as David eloquently wrote about, even as I have to concede that this may not be God's will for us. We'll see; it's definitely too early to make that call. David and I are definitely still in the game.

In the meantime, I continue to pray and take comfort in the struggles of the Jewish matriarchs, most of whom suffered infertility. I read Hannah's story in I Samuel and was moved to tears. I'm trying to use this fallow time as a time to work on myself and be of service to others. If you are the spiritual sort, please keep us in your thoughts and prayers.

Sex and the Sickly Girl

We were in the kitchen cooking and my mom, in a moment of tenderness, rested her hand on my shoulder. "Ouch!" I yelled, because touching me near my neck was excruciating, as a consequence of my late-stage Lyme Disease. "That amount of touch hurts you? How do you have sex?" she asked. I was mortified, but not surprised, that my mom went there.

I am not someone who has an abundance of libido to begin with, and it is hard to overstate how un-sexy illness makes you feel, between tubes hanging out of your arms and suffering from terrible pain. When the brain is caught in a pain feedback loop, it is not so interested in lovemaking. I think this must be a survival trait! This says nothing of the myriad medications I took/take which made/make me nauseous and sleepy. When I took hydrocodone (Vicodin) for pain relief, that caused its own sexual issue: making my body incapable of orgasm. It took me a while to catch on to this, but I finally brought myself to ask my neurologist if the drug and dysfunction were related. I'm proud to report that I was his first patient who ever mentioned it! That's me, a regular Nancy Drew. The doctor agreed with me that it made perfect sense since Vicodin is a major depressant -- it's hard to excite and depress the nervous system at the same time, right?

I think I have some image of what sexy means and that does not include someone with chronic health problems, so I have a hard time viewing myself as a sexual being. Obviously, sex is so corporeal, it's tough to feel sexual when your body is falling apart on you. Although sex is my greatest weakness in my marriage -- I think it will always be my Achilles heel -- it is also extremely important to me, which my therapist says puts me way ahead of the game. I know people who live in sexless marriages and seem ok with it, but I think it's corrosive. Even if my husband wasn't very sexual, it would still be important to me, because I think sex is an important part of a healthy marriage. It does encourage bonding, and I can't help but think the world would just be a happier place if people got off more. Look at Betty Dodson: she's 81 and looks like she's in her 60's, and she attributes it to a lifetime of orgasms. And who am I to second-guess Betty? Besides, it's nice to do something pleasurable for your body when it's hurting.

V Is For Vampire

I think about vampires a lot. Not as much as men think about sex in a given day, but probably more than most women think about sex in a day. I think about how vampires, if they were real, would function in society. For example, would they need to go to the dentist? Would enterprising dentists start offering night hours to treat vampire patients? I think about whether they'd want human companionship other than for food. The title of this post comes from the fact that I spontaneously started singing "V is for Vampire" to the tune of "C is for Cookie." Vampire, vampire, vampire starts with 'V.'

These thoughts come out of my mouth at weird times, to my husband's amusement. The other night, when he walked into the bathroom to brush his teeth, I spit out my toothpaste and said, "It would be really hard to go back to human sex once you've had sex with a vampire." I wasn't trying to be funny or cute; it's just what came out. Its been a long time since I heard David laugh as loud as he did when I asked last night if we could go to ComicCon next year if there was going to be another True Blood panel. David takes all of this in stride, playfully biting my neck, trying to imitate the sound of fangs extending, and inventing the vampire smiley for texting :[. He's used to my obsessions and tolerates the harmless ones with good cheer.

Before you write me off as a poseur, I will write in my defense that although I never jumped on the Dracula bandwagon, I voraciously read Anne Rice's books in high school and probably watched "The Lost Boys" about 100 times. I am new to Twilight, True Blood, and Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels, which True Blood is based on.

One of the things I think about is why vampires hold so much mystique in our culture. Vampire myths have been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years. We never tire of vampire media, though its popularity certainly ebbs and flows. What is it that holds our interest through centuries? One possibility is that vampires usually mingle sex and death, which have always been inextricably twined. All the TV shows and films showing grieving people losing themselves in sex to numb out? It's real. Heck, look no further than the phrase "la petite mort," the little death, as a euphemism for orgasm. Sex and death are linked. I so wish I could take credit for the following, but my friend MB gets the glory. When I shared my sex-and-death theory of vampire persistence, she said, "And food! It mixes sex, death, and food." That's a pretty good summary of our id, right? Of course, since vampires are practically immortal, their lore also touches on humans' deepest fear and greatest weakness: death. If you combine this with the fact that it's hard to resist a scary tale (notice our persevering interests in zombies, werewolves, etc.), I think it's pretty clear why humans heart vampires.

Stay tuned for a follow-up post about why I love True Blood, and why Bill and Eric totally kick Edward's whiny ass.

Virginity

A friend told me how she recently attempted to lose her virginity: to a man who sounded really creepy and manipulated her into letting him have intercourse with her after she cried when he told her, "I don't go out with women who won't have sex with me by the third date. Clearly it means there's no spark, and no potential." I felt really sad for her that her first time almost was with a creepy guy who clearly didn't care much about her or her best interest. I'm sad that she chose to date this creep even though the warning signs were so clear that God might as well have swooped down and said, "Run!"

I've been thinking a lot about virginity lately because I've fallen in love with Alan Ball's HBO series True Blood. In season 1 episode 6, the protagonist, Sookie Stackhouse, loses her virginity to the sexy Civil War-era vampire Bill Compton. Everything about that scene (and the beginning of episode 7, which is the post-sex hot-tub cuddle) is perfect. The setting is gorgeous: Sookie and Bill are in front of a fireplace with zillions of candles lit around them (of course!). Their tenderness and passion are balanced perfectly. But what really takes my breath away in this scene is how this couple interacts when Bill's fangs come out because he's one turned on vampire. The actor, Stephen Moyer, looks at Sookie (played by Anna Paquin) with such a look of fear and vulnerability. Her response is incredible. No more spoilers for you -- off to your Netflix cue!

But I digress. I've watched this scene now more times than I like to admit, and it's made me so grateful to the first man I slept with. He was a trusted friend; kind, gentle, sensitive, and knew the gravitas of what I was doing. Basically, he treated me and the situation with the respect it deserved. Sex is difficult enough without the burden of having a lousy first time! I can't imagine how messed up I'd be about sex if my first experience with intercourse came about from fear and coercion like it did for my friend.

In my informal interviews with friends about their first times, it seems clear that losing one's virginity is an important life passage that has the power to affect future sexual experiences for better or for worse. I used to think only women could be traumatized by their first times, but I've heard men talk about their disappointment with less-than-ideal encounters.

Because it's a pretty momentous occasion that I believe has the capacity to influence one's future sex life, people and society need to treat virginity seriously. Men and women should choose their first partner (and hopefully other partners) carefully and try to set the stage for a positive first experience with intercourse. However, Americans also have taken respect for virginity too far. There are virginity parties where teenage girls pledge to their dads that they'll be sexually abstinent until marriage. This seems yucky to me. Besides the pledging to their fathers part, this type of thinking holds virginity out as some holy grail. Worse, it seems to directly connect girls or women's' self-worth with whether they're virgins. Hopefully parents will love their children regardless of their sexual choices.

It would be interesting to see how I would handle this issue if I had children. I don't really believe in waiting until marriage to make love for the first time; if you plan to stay married for life, I can't imagine signing up for a lifetime of bad sex. I think you can get a good idea of how someone is as a lover from intense fooling around, but most of my religious friends who hold out for marriage aren't seriously fooling around with their fiances. It just seems like purchasing an expensive car that would be a huge hassle to return without taking it for a test drive, so I can't see exhorting a son or daughter of mine to wait until they're married. But, I still would want a child of mine to make sex-positive decisions about whom to make love to and when. I would certainly counsel them that most teenagers (meaning under 18) are unprepared for the intense emotional issues that come up when you make love. But, lots of people have sex much younger than that and end up ok.

I also don't know how realistic it is to ask kids to wait until marriage. Do parents forget the intensity of puberty? Your whole being is basically radiating, "Go forth and propagate this species," and most parents either conveniently forget to acknowledge it, instill their kids with shame about sex, or tell them to subordinate the desire without offering an outlet. I can say for sure that I could not, in good conscience, try to defend or endorse Judaism's prohibition of male masturbation. All I can think of is this from Monty Python's Meaning of Life: "Every sperm is sacred/Every sperm is great/If a sperm gets wasted, God gets quite irate ... Let the heathens spill theirs on the dusty ground/God shall make them pay for each sperm that can't be found."

I wish I could wrap up this post in some nice little package. In summary, virginity needs to be kept in perspective: it's important, but not all important!