I turn forty this week. 40. So you betcha I’ve been doing some thinking lately.
When I turned thirty, I was depressed. It felt weird — how was it possible that my twenties were over? What happened after you weren’t young anymore? I had two kids at age thirty, married eight years already. We had left the urban environment that housed our newlywed bungalow and retreated back to the suburbs where we had grown up to establish our family home in a two-story colonial. I thought about death, constantly, and it hung over me like a storm cloud even on the sunniest days. I had started to gain perspective and recognize my mortality. It would wash over me in the nighttime, striking fear into my heart. Was I really living? What was I doing with my life?
Two more kids followed. My career blossomed, but my job was already becoming boring. Jack and I bickered about how often we should have sex, who should be the one to initiate it, and who would wake up in the middle of the night with the baby. We were constantly working on the house, a new fridge here and a wall painted over there. Every weekend was a family field trip and every weekday was a blur of chores and tasks. We were in survival mode. I didn’t have time to think about mortality; I was distracted, but I wasn’t happy.
After eleven years of babymaking and breastfeeding, I emerged. It was as if I had been gathering pieces of a puzzle and suddenly I saw how they fit together. I put together my puzzle — the cannabis, the yoga, the walks in nature, the love I felt for my children and yet my eagerness to see them independent, the healthy eating, the self-help books, the pleasure I took from sex with my husband, the camraderie that he and I shared, my bisexuality, and the appreciation and the gratitude that I had for life. Someday I would die, yes, but today…I was alive. I would live for today. I would live — today.
I suppose I make it sound as if it happened all at once. It didn’t. Five years later, I’m still admiring the puzzle, finding new angles to explore and different ways to add on to the image. But the idea is there — I’m living with intention. I’m working with the pieces I’ve got, grateful for all of my blessings.
We started enjoying the house that we’d spent so much time renovating. We explored ways to make ourselves better people, listening to the ideas of others and discussing big ideas. Philosophy, psychology, sexuality. Parenting started to make sense, now that we were thinking big picture. We began to respect our children in ways our parents still have never respected us. We shed shame that had been ingrained in us in through our Christian and Catholic upbringings, instead focusing on how we could live in the world in a way that honored our existence while not harming others. Who cares what others think? If we only get one life to live, it’s a waste of time to worry about shame, about the judgements of others.
We vacationed at nudist resorts, then at swinger’s resorts. We opened up our relationship, first to sex and then to deeper feelings. I started writing again; it was a passion of mine that had been pushed aside during the baby days. I wrote — I write — to document it all, to make sense of it all. I see patterns emerging and I can adjust my trajectory based on the wisdom that I pull out of my brain through my fingers, tapping into the keys of my laptop like the piano that I once played in my youth.
And then, I got hurt. I wrote, but it was disjointed. Some entries were too long to post on a blog, some were too personal, and some were too painful to completely, coherently write — instead of paragraphs, I have bullet points, run-on sentences, voice-to-text musings, and scribbled thoughts in a journal.
I already wrote about the past year, briefly. Don’t laugh — that was as short and vague as I could write about it. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately, and my thoughts have led me to this conclusion: I am going to write a novel. A book about this past year, about opening up our relationship and how that all went down. I’ll write out the details that I couldn’t quite share in a blog post — the connection we developed with Ned and Tarah, my connection with Helen, the spattering of other dates and kisses and caresses that found their ways into our lives. I want to write my story, about how I found myself, of my sexual and self exploration, the bumps along the way, and the victorious sense of self that emerged yet again when I found my way back to Jack.
I was writing a lot when we first started opening up our relationship, when it was all vacations and dates and swinging and scintillating sexual experiences. But then I had my heart broken. I opened up to Ned, thinking he’d be a friend, a best friend, maybe even a boyfriend, a person to have in my life, in Jack’s life, in the life of my kids. I opened up to him first, and then his wife, and our kids became close, and then he broke my heart. He toyed with me, he used me, and I was wrong about him. I hate being wrong, but I’ll admit it when I am. I let myself be vulnerable with Ned — a poor choice. It was a choice that cost me my sanity for a year, sending me on downward spirals of anxiety and rumination.
Without Jack, I wouldn’t have seen the patterns as they emerged. I ignored his heeds for too long, thinking him perhaps jealous by how distracted I was. I was frustrated with what I perceived to be his lack of understanding, annoyed that he didn’t seem to understand even though he listened to my every emotion-filled uttering. But it was me who didn’t understand, and Jack who did, all along.
In the end, Jack was the one who saved me simply by loving me. Truly loving me. He helped me find my way back to myself. He pointed out the other people — friends and lovers both — who had my back, who had my best interests at heart. He was able to recognize who was authentic, and who wasn’t. He reminded me to reflect, he discussed ideas and theories and rumors and gossip, he even entertained the kids so that I could write and cry and reclaim the inner peace that I had lost.
It’s a bigger story than a blog post. It’s a book, a novel, a memoir of the time I found myself, then lost myself, and then was saved by the love I’d had all along. It’s a love story, about the love between me and Jack, and all the other loves I discovered along the way. Love between friends, between new lovers, between parent and child, between siblings, and then, finally, self love. Love of life, of living.
It’s a story of shedding the shame that had been instilled in me, by not just my parents but by society. It’s about learning to enjoy being the person that I am — sexual, sensual, silly, and flawed. Deep and dark, kinky as fuck, but also introspective and empathetic. Aware of mortality, and finally not afraid to live free. To be bold. To be me.
I used to complain to Jack that I would love to write a book, but I didn’t have a story. I had stories, yes, but no conflict. And then, all this. Sprinkle in some sex, and perhaps I’ve got something here worth reading. I’ve been neglecting the blog, yes, but meanwhile I’ve got 175 single spaced Google doc pages begging to be edited and expanded upon. I have stories that need to get out of my head and heart and instead become Eliza’s, trapped on a page. I need to write to save my soul, to move forward with the strongest sense of my Self.
My summer project is to write this book. The story is there, ready to be told in its entirety. It’s going to hurt. And then, it’s going to feel so, so good to be free.
The book will tell my story, the story of how I came to be me, ending at age forty. Ending at a time when I feel hopeful, confident, and ready to take on the world. I’m as young as I’ll ever be, but as old as I’ve ever been. Even though the story I’ll tell in my book is over, my life feels like it’s just beginning.
Going forward, this means my blog posts will be more like my personal journal entries. Raw, rough, filled with run-ons. Authentic, though. Timely and consistent. Rampant with ideas and musings, equal parts deep and desire-filled. I want to share my musings about sex and self, relationships and real people, love, and life. For you, but for me, too. A real reflection of me, I hope. I hope you’ll keep reading. I hope I do justice to the wonders of sex, and to all the ideas that beckon to be spilled from my soul.
I can’t be certain, but from my vantage point, it seems I only get to do life once. I want to do it well.