Sex, Shame and Losing My Sanity
The way we talk about sex around our kids matters, a lot.
My mother was angry. Actually, I think she was scared. Wait, maybe it was disappointment in her eyes? Whatever her mood, it was my fault. She’d found pictures of a scantily clad Shania Twain and others on the computer I had been given for my 13th birthday. My older brother had built it, using odds and ends he had lying around, including his old hard drive. I’d discovered the images (although by today’s standards, those tasteful nudes would hardly be considered pornography) and looked at them. I’d never seen a naked woman before; the images stirred feelings I had never experienced. They were exciting, arousing, and forbidden. I kept them anyway, hidden like the shame I felt for the way looking at them made me feel.
“Like father, like son,” my mother said after confronting me about the porn. She stormed off, tears streaming down her red cheeks.
Years before, mom had found a letter my father had written to the church. It was a confession of sorts, a laundry list of transgressions that the Church of Scientology asks its followers to document as part of the process of healing and growing. Unlike other religions, however, Scientology keeps written proof of your most personal sins in a manila folder, just in case they’re needed down the road. My father’s letter described his extramarital affairs. It was the proof my mother used to define him as a philanderer and a monster. She told us how dangerous a man he was; he’d have sex with men, women, boys, and girls — everyone, anyone. Mom often said that no one was safe from him and his lust, certainly not me or my step-sister. My father’s relationship with sex was the cause of our broken family and our poverty. He was the cause of the pain we endured, and I was just like him.
Before the computer and the porn, I’d discovered masturbation. I vividly remember excitedly telling my mother about it at the dinner table one night. I described how I was touching myself when suddenly I sort of blacked out and woke up on the floor. I told her it only worked once, though, and I couldn’t make the feeling happen again. “I bet,” she said and changed the subject. I didn’t understand the awkward silence that followed, my older sister staring out the window and mom’s current boyfriend intently focused on his plate. Why weren’t they as excited as I was about this incredible discovery?
I had invited a girl over one day after school. Our living situation was strange at the time, as it usually was. My mother had broken up with her boyfriend, but we still lived on his property. He lived in the main house, and my mother, sister and I in the rundown out buildings. “We rent out the main house”, I lied to the girl I was trying to impress, “and live in the other building while the renters are here”. I was so embarrassed about my poverty, so scared that she wouldn’t like me if she found out that I was poor. Worse, maybe she’d tell my friends at school. I needn’t have worried, she liked me, and we made out on the bed. I fumbled with her clothes and felt that same rush I experienced from looking at that porn on my computer. But this time, the presence of another person combined with the emotions I was feeling were overwhelming. I stopped and got up, “time to go” I said, “before my mom gets home”… Time to go before my shame overflows and I can’t hold it together anymore. Time to go so that I can sob away how disgusting I feel, how disgusting I am.
I’d met that girl while working as a lifeguard along the rugged coast of South Africa. My swimmers body, the dark tan and bright red lifeguard shorts combined with a steady supply of visiting families and their daughters who came to enjoy the waves and warm tropical waters; it was a perfect recipe for me to develop an unhealthy understanding of sex. The other lifeguards and I had competitions, who could get a kiss the fastest, who could convince the girl who hardly spoke the same language as us to take a trip up to the lifeguard tower for some alone time together? Women, girls, became objects that I used to live out the shameful conflict in my mind between teenage love and my own disgust at being a heterosexual male. If mom found out, she’d hate me, she’d know for sure that I was just like him, a monster, like my dad.
Almost twenty years later during the pandemic, I had a very stressful job. The entire world felt like its survival was resting on my shoulders. My mental health had plunged from “well” to suicidal in the space of a few weeks, and sex wasn’t on the cards with my partner. One evening at the office I was crying in the bathroom. Without fear of being caught because everyone else was safely sheltering in place in their own homes, I ugly cried a puddle of tears around my feet. The shame of not being able to cope with the overwhelming responsibility and unbearable workload felt just like that day my mom found porn on my computer. It wasn’t my porn, but I liked it nonetheless. I didn’t choose to be overwhelmed and depleted from building a COVID test to save the world, but I wanted to keep doing it. Even my suicidal ideations were interrupted by this same thought pattern, “I’ll kill myself when the test is built, when I’m not needed anymore.”
I masturbated in the bathroom that evening, the floor slippery from my earlier tears. I felt better afterwards. A deep exhale, a dose of dopamine to tide me over. But as everyone who has ever had addiction will tell you, doses of dopamine aren’t long lived, and tend to be less and less effective the more you use them. I was standing on the edge of a cliff, and had just taken the first step into the abyss that started my fall. Sugar, marijuana, alcohol and later SSRI’s, intense exercise and finally the peace and solitude that I feel when I think about dying, became my escape from reality. I’m depressed, just like I was poor, and the shame feels exactly the same.
I wonder, if I read this story out loud at the dinner table now, would my step-sister stare out the window? Would mom’s boyfriend focus on his peas? Would my mom change the subject? Or would the decades between now and when I discovered my sexual identity soften my mom’s hurt and rage just enough to allow her to be my parent? Would she guide me, tell me I was normal, tell me that sex is special and expressing it with someone you love is itself an act of love? I don’t know, but I hope to have the presence of mind to do so when my daughter tells me about her first love.
