Sobriety, Sex and Motherhood

…major life lessons from the front lines.

I always knew I wanted to be a mother. Kids love me. They always have. The other babysitters on my block had nothing on me. Come on, I even look like Elisabeth Shue in Adventures in Babysitting. I’ve never been so blindly sure of anything in my entire life. But a wife? Not so much. Except for in third grade, when I got married to Robbie Campbell at Brewster Elementary School. He was my first boyfriend and I didn’t care who knew. We literally shouted it from the rooftops: we made it playground official when we became husband and wife on top of the curly slide. In Mr. Brown’s class we were the couple du jour, we shared the throne of the “big brown leather Lazy-Boy” during reading time and were full on #relationshipgoals.

Sometime between third grade and now, my view on being the “wifey” drastically changed. I wouldn’t touch a relationship with a ten foot pole from the time I was fifteen until I was pushing thirty. Marriage, who needs it? Not me. I was an independent woman who likened herself to a man. I became the “cool girl” who wasn’t going to try to tie you down or talk about where we stand or what I was feeling. Ew, no labels here. My romantic relationships consisted of men (…and the occasional lady) that I would have sex with, sometimes regularly but oftentimes not. The committed relationships I did have were with guys who didn’t want me sleeping with anyone else to which I would sometimes reluctantly agree. As a teen, when the talk of marriage came up with my friends as we laid out by the pool, my name would be mentioned, never as the prospective bride, but as the girl who husbands’ would cheat on their wives with. Ouch. But honestly, that didn’t deter me, and for the most part I owned it. Only I didn’t sleep with other people’s boyfriends (…except once in a drunk blackout and I still feel really, really bad about it) and there were definitely a few men in my life who I desperately wanted to choose me even though I never gave them the chance.

This “independent woman” badge that I so proudly emblazoned across my chest as my female power was really just a tough exterior for a lost inner child who was sad, alone and terrified of being left behind. Coming from a small East Coast family where we didn’t exactly know how to talk about our feelings and a father who was in and out of our house without much explanation, abandonment issues were inevitable. It became clear to me that men had the power to do whatever they want and the women-led family unit just gets hurt (…or so my young, impressionable mind thought). Of course I didn’t want to be weak and adapted accordingly, becoming a tomboy. I hung with the fellas, played sports and even threw a fit when I had to switch from baseball with the boys to softball with the girls. No more skirts or dresses for me. It was only mock turtlenecks, Gap cargo pants and Polo shirts — hey, whatever, it was the 90’s on Cape Cod.

In high school, my body became the only way I knew how to relate to the opposite sex as a woman. It became a commodity, a way for me to communicate. I separated my body from my heart over and over in an empty, desperate search for connection and love. It’s the only way I knew. When going out, I would wear tight, revealing clothing to attract men, knowing that when I was drunk it would be safe for the girl inside me to come out and connect with them. I would even slather on makeup and perfume, a traditional female ritual I still have never fully embraced. I grew my hair long and have had signature blonde tresses cascading down my back ever since. A confused, sensitive little soul, I turned to drugs and alcohol to deal with the intense emotional distress that I couldn’t healthily communicate and, toting around a handle bottle of Captain Morgan’s on the regular, quickly became a blackout drinker. I spent most of my early twenties wasted. I would show up late night at guys’ houses I was secretly in love with and beg to come in, crying alone in their yard when they would reject me. Once, I woke up from a blackout on a cross country flight and had a severe panic attack. Shaking uncontrollably, the flight attendant summoned a doctor over the speaker who then sat in the back with me and told me to breathe. In, count to four. Out, count to four. It was a regular occurrence for me to fake going into my apartment when my friends would safely drop my drunk ass off after a night out and then make my way (read: bob and weave) to the neighborhood bar for last call to find someone to go home with. The woman inside of me was desperate to be seen, felt and touched. Many nights ended with me in someone’s bed I didn’t know or throwing up the massive amount of alcohol I had ingested — sometimes both. The intense shame of the damage I was doing to my body and soul would send me into a paralyzing anxiety spiral the next day.

Then it all came to a screeching halt. I quit drinking and got sober when I was 27-years-old. Honestly, my alcoholic bottom was not all that interesting. There had been so many other times that were so much more shameful but this one just seemed to do the trick. It was at the end of one of my normal weekend benders in San Francisco: an all-nighter followed by a boozy Easter Sunday brunch at Foreign Cinema with friends, day drinking in Dolores Park and then consuming tall boys in the shower before heading out to dance at Delirium, the dirty dive in the Mission where I was a regular. The next day at work, I had a crippling anxiety attack (a.k.a. just another regular Monday morning) which was not going away with my usual Xanax and Coca-Cola antidote. As I was frantically trying to GTFOH, I rushed past my boss on the elevator who looked aptly confused as I was leaving before she was even arriving. I sat in my bed alone in my Haight Street flat and cried. I knew I had to stop drinking. I couldn’t take the pain anymore, I was done.

A lot happened when I got sober but the most interesting thing that I’ve been grappling with for the past year, almost a decade later, is how I did a complete one-eighty and stopped using my body to connect with men. In fact, I abandoned that part of myself entirely.

Practically overnight, I went from a strict diet of non-committal casual sex to seeking full-on relationships only. Just like that. And everything seemed to be going along swimmingly until the day I thought I was ready to have a baby and was confronted with the hidden shame around my femininity that I’d been burying for what feels like forever.

I was creeping up on my mid-thirties and had been dating my most recent partner for about a year and a half when the desire to start a family became more than just something we would casually fantasize about. I had one other serious relationship before I met him which was a turbulent rollercoaster ride of destruction that neither of us could get off for almost four years. I mean, it makes sense, I was newly sober and just coming out of bottling my feelings for over twenty years. I had no idea how to communicate and was insecure all the time. I would revert back to a child with the flip of a confrontational switch, crumple onto the floor of the bathroom, spend hours in a shame puddle, crying endless tears of despair. But with this guy, it was different. I had done a lot of personal work and taken a year between relationships to focus on emotional awareness, self-love, friendships and my career. So when I met him, I felt whole. Well, as whole as possible at that time.

Our emotional relationship was uber secure when we cracked the door to becoming parents open, bringing me face to face with my relationship to my body and sexuality in a way I never fully understood before. Up until that point, I was on auto-pilot, just going through the motions when it came to sober sex. I wasn’t confident in my body and when the shame surfaced and was too much to handle, I could easily disassociate on demand. But now there was a reason to have sex. My vagina finally had a purpose. We were procreating! Someone had chosen me to be the mother of their children. What a perfect opportunity to step back into the female sexual body I had left behind when I got sober in a safe, maternal way. Except that’s not what happened. Instead the house of cards came crashing down. While I was biologically ready to have a baby, emotionally I was not. I was blindsided with so much shame and internal criticism that I began projecting it onto my partner. I accused him of not being attracted to me and thinking I was “baby-crazy” even though he had never even uttered those words. Oh great, I was now calling myself names. Isn’t that cute? There right in front of me was everything I had been running away from. My feminine desire (…and all the trauma and shame attached to it) was being woken up from a decade long slumber and the masculine self I had embodied in the meantime was absolutely not having it. Lucky me, I had a front row seat to watch the battle unfold. And let me just tell you, the beef between Remy Ma and Nicki Minaj pales in comparison to the self-inflicted disses flying around inside my head.

Not surprisingly, my partner and I pulled away from each other during this time, turning what should have been a joyous occasion of creating new life into something that felt dark and stifling for both of us. Soon as we peeled the layers back, he dropped the bomb that he was actually not ready to start a family. Um, excuse me? What, you don’t want to have a baby with this crying mess over here? Being in a very precarious place, just embarking on establishing confidence in a somewhat shaky part of my womanhood, with this news, my insecurities reached a fever pitch. Motherhood had always been the one lady-like trait that was a non-negotiable for me — essentially from birth. Through my jaded perception of my female self, his reasonable reluctance became a direct reflection of my worth as a woman, the ultimate rejection which pushed me over the edge and sent me spiralling into a depression that lasted the better part of a year.

With any personal growth, you need to hit bottom before you become truly willing to change, especially around the deep, dark, past pain. I had officially hit an emotional bottom. From this place, I was able to seek therapy to understand what was going on inside and why facing this part of me caused me so much pain. My therapist helped me realize that we all have feminine and masculine energy inside of us and I had learned to embody the masculine and suppress my female self from an early age as a way to protect myself. I was riddled with feelings of feminine inadequacy. Together we figured out that when readying to invite a child into the picture, I was confronted with this locked room filled with shame that, until then, I was not ready or willing to open. I was so shocked by what I found that, instead of cleaning it out like a logical person, I locked myself inside and that is what caused such a quick descent into depression.

The only way out is through.

Looking back, my partner’s reluctance was actually a beautiful gift from God. It challenged me to grow, shining the light on the insecurities and fears holding me back from embodying my highest self. From there, the path to radical self-love became a lot clearer. Every single day, the woman inside me comes out a little further (physically, emotionally and sexually) and I am learning how to be gentle and welcome her true desires for intimacy, sex, marriage and babies with open arms.

About a year ago, during the thick of my depression, I met this woman while I was in Los Angeles for my bestie’s bachelorette weekend. I had come undone and completely fell apart. Sobbing in the shower, alcohol everywhere, I knew I had to get to out of there, stat. Drawn to her, I unleashed my whole story on her in a matter of seconds. When I was done, a mother herself, she said “Wow, what an amazing mom you are. You are already parenting your unborn child by taking care of yourself first.”

The strong, beautifully flawed woman that I am today believes her.