Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women (4 page)

Lucy and I live together, and I’m thankful each night she presses her breasts and belly against my curled back, rests her tiny toes on my calves. We have three dogs. One of those dogs has a female symbol tattooed on her belly. Zora and I appreciate living cage-free. Each Easter, Lucy and I put chicken and ham inside plastic eggs and hide them around the yard. Our dogs sniff them out. Roll them with their noses. Crack them open with their teeth. Eat the meat and lick the plastic. And as we laugh at their discovery, I feel like a child who has found a way to set characters free.

The Right Fit

Kami Day

O
ne summer when I was about nine, my mother, brother, sister, and I spent a few months in Seattle with my maternal grandparents. My mother asked me to walk to a nearby store to buy her some Tampax, so I did and then carried the box home in full view rather than asking the store clerk for a bag. My mother was mortified—and maybe realizing I had no idea what Tampax were motivated her to have the sex talk with me. I remember we were lying on my grandparents’ living room rug as she used all the technically correct terms to describe how sex works. She then told me Heavenly Father had made one man whose penis would fit just perfectly inside my vagina. She wanted me to believe the only man I could have sex with was my husband. I was too young to think about the logistics of making sure every man met the woman he was designed for, and vice versa. And later when I learned what rape was, I thought it must be painful because the rapist was not the man Heavenly Father had designed for the victim. A few years passed before I began to have disturbing questions about women who married more than once, and I remember feeling nauseated when I finally realized people who were not married were having sex, and not always with just one partner. Yes, we were told that when you love someone and are married in the temple, sex is wonderful, but we were also told that sex before marriage is terrible.

What my mother told me about this perfect fit seems extreme, but she was only doing her best to inculcate the teachings of the Mormon Church. She and my father are Mormons, and their parents and grandparents were also Mormons. For almost forty-four years, the church controlled my life. It was part of nearly every decision I made, every breath I took. I had been taught from infancy that the Mormon Church was the only true church, and that being a member was the one way to salvation, to returning to live with Heavenly Father. I was told that I would grow up, fall in love with a worthy Mormon man, get married in the Mormon temple for time (earth time) and all eternity (afterlife time), and have many children. I would find joy in devoting my life to serving my family and the church. I would find motherhood fulfilling and meaningful, and in my old age, I would revel in my grandchildren and look forward to being reunited in the Celestial Kingdom with Jesus Christ, Heavenly Father, and my deceased relatives.

There was a great deal of preaching and teaching about remaining sexually pure until marriage. Sex was connected to love, joy, marriage, and righteousness, but also to misery, sin, loneliness, and uncleanliness. We heard sad stories about young women and men who had defiled their bodies—which we were to think of as temples that housed our spirits—by having premarital sex. These stories were always filled with shame and remorse, creating a disturbing mix of titillation and disgust that washed over the whole idea of sex for me. As a young teenager, I was in the habit of reading whatever was in my parents’ bookcase, and I found
Marjorie Morningstar
in their collection of
Reader’s Digest Condensed Books
. I carried it to school with me, and as I was reading in class one day, I stopped and closed the book. I had come to the part of the story in which Marjorie has sex for the first time, and the description includes the words “horrible uncoverings . . . and then it was over.” As I read those words, I experienced physical sensations I had never felt before—sensations involving pleasure and revulsion. That I still remember the exact words of the passage forty-six years later attests to their power for me. In the following years, I tried to understand why sex would be bad the day before you got married and wonderful the day after. But I was sure it would be true.

So, we Mormon youths thought about sex all the time and felt guilty about our thoughts all the time. In an attempt to protect us from ourselves, church guidelines state that we are not to date until we are sixteen, and necking and petting are taboo. Like most people, young Mormons are not able to adhere to such guidelines, so they are tortured with guilt about their weakness. I was no exception. I dated a few boys steadily, and I liked to make out with them, but I came home from my dates feeling sinful and wretched, full of promises to Heavenly Father and myself that I would not give in to temptation again. Of course, I did. However, I did not have much trouble saying no to actual intercourse and remained a virgin until my wedding night on September 24, 1970, one month after my twentieth birthday.

In spite of all that talk about sex, though, I don’t remember anyone at church ever mentioning homosexuality. No invitations were issued to us young people to explore our sexuality. No consideration seemed to be given to the possibility that there might be gays and lesbians among us. The first time I heard the word “homosexual” out loud was from the lips of my mother when I was about fifteen. I danced in a ballet company, and one of our principal dancers was Henry; somehow (the story is hazy), Henry got into trouble with one of his male art students. My mother explained to me that Henry was gay—homosexual. Her explanation was direct and unencumbered, as I recall, by judgment or moralizing. She said some men loved other men and Henry was one of those men. She did not say anything about women, and I would be several years older before I realized women could be gay too. I did not even make the connection between Henry’s story and the relationship I had with my friend Sharon when I was thirteen.

For about six months during my eighth-grade year, Sharon and I got together every Friday night. As time went on, we began to pretend we were on a date. One of us would be the boy and one would be the girl. At first one of us would put an arm around the other one, or we held hands, but soon we escalated to making out. Truthfully, Friday nights could not come soon enough for me; if we spent the night together, we slept in the same bed and eventually had all our clothes off. We pretended to have sex, still thinking of one of us as the boy and one of us as the girl. We couldn’t really have straight sex of course, and we didn’t know girls
could
have sex. In our minds, we were practicing making out for when we had boyfriends and for when we had sex with our husbands. And we were sure we would have the same feelings when we were married to the men of our dreams. We carried on this junior high friendship, punctuated by hot and heavy make-out sessions, but we did not talk about our relationship. And somehow we sensed it was important that no one knew what we were doing. We didn’t know about lesbians, but we knew we would be in trouble if anyone caught us. I had some inkling then that I was different, but I could not articulate why I did not fit in, and I certainly did not attribute my difference to my sexual orientation. Years later, after I came out to my parents, my mother admitted that she had never known what to do with me.

In the fall of 1969, when I was a sophomore at the University of Utah, I began dating the man who would be my husband for twenty-three years. Up until he asked me out, he had only dated cheerleaders and sorority girls, so my long blond hair and dancer’s body made me exotic; and I think he was as fascinated by my serious, non-bubbly personality as I was by his happy-go-lucky Mormon one. He was the kind of man every Mormon girl wants to marry: former missionary, clean cut, funny, athletic, attentive, cute. He wanted lots of children and he planned to become a dentist so he could support them. He declared his love for me. How could I not marry him? I was almost twenty, the time had come for me to take on the role I had been taught was my destiny, and here was John to marry me. He was a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity, so we got “pinned” in November, became engaged in February of 1970, and married later that year. The path of our relationship did not deviate from the one expected in the Mormon culture, and to any observer, we were the right fit for each other—the perfect couple.

But our dating, and the months leading up to our wedding, were fraught with contention that was soon to be sharpened by the pain of rejection and guilt. After all the positive attention we got on the day of our marriage, I had to get in the car and drive away with my new husband for our honeymoon. Years later, my mother told me she had seen me through the car window, sitting very still, staring straight ahead. I looked trapped. But I don’t think she was surprised by that. A few weeks earlier, I had gone to her room, sat on her bed, and told her I wasn’t sure I wanted to get married. Her words to me were, “The invitations are out.” She believed I was just nervous about the big step I was taking, that I would be fine once the wedding was over. And I wanted desperately to believe that too. I clearly had my doubts or I would not have expressed them to my mother, but I clung to the belief that having sex with my husband once we were married would make me fall in love with him. I wanted to be in love with him—someone who loved me, loved children, lived a faithful Mormon life. Love, marriage, sex—I had been taught these things went together. I had not really experienced a longing for sexual intercourse, but I believed that as soon as I had sex, I would like it and I would be an enthusiastic partner.

After our reception, my new husband and I drove to Park City, Utah, for our first night as husband and wife. My mother had bought me a light-blue negligée, and John and I were both excited to finally experience the big event we had been saving ourselves for. I know it sounds incongruous to say I felt trapped and yet looked forward to having sex, but I was sure I would love sex and therefore all my misgivings about getting married would magically disappear. But we were woefully unprepared. John had not known how babies were made until he was a senior in high school, and the only advice he got about lovemaking was from his older sister: “Take your time.” I knew the mechanics of what was going to happen, but nothing about the fine points of pleasure. So, neither of us had any experience—we thought it would just come to us naturally.

What I remember about that night was the darkly paneled, unfamiliar, downstairs room that reminded me of a cheap motel. I remember the physical discomfort, the stickiness and stiffness, the too-bright bathroom light. I was shocked to discover that intercourse hurt, but worse, that it was messy. I lay awake that night as John slept, thinking about the movies I’d seen in which people had sex. In
Butterfield 8
, Elizabeth Taylor just gets up and gets dressed—I didn’t see her wipe herself off—and no one had told me I’d have to sleep on the wet side of the bed. No one had told me about the feeling of violation, either. Or the sense of suffocation. Or the stark loneliness of lying under someone while he labors to an ecstatic conclusion in which you have no part except to be the receptacle. We both had all the right parts anatomically, but we did not fit together. There was little sense of “give,” of comfort, of rightness. John woke me for sex three more times that night, and I kept thinking of bumper cars. I finally got up, filled the tub with water, and tried to figure out how to hold the douche bag (a gift from my mother) aloft so the Massengill would flow down the tube into my vagina, thus flushing me out. I imagined a lifetime of this distasteful operation. When I was squeaky clean, I dried off and got back into bed. I lay there in the dark, thinking about the life I had made for myself.

Morning finally came and we headed to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I had convinced myself that after the first experience with sex it would get better, and I was actually looking forward to trying again. The sex didn’t get better, though, and the car trip back to Salt Lake City a few days later was long and quiet. We had decided to live in John’s parents’ house while they were out of the country, so it was there, about a week later, that we had our first conversation about divorce. We stood in his parents’ bedroom, their bed between us. I don’t remember who brought up the possibility of ending our marriage—I suspect John did in hopes that I would ridicule such a suggestion. When I didn’t—I do faintly remember feeling a glimmer of hope—he insisted that we would not break his mother’s heart by divorcing, that we had been married in the temple for time and all eternity so divorce was not an option. He pointed out how young we were—he was twenty-two, I was twenty—we were inexperienced newlyweds, but we had a lifetime to learn to make each other happy. Heavenly Father would help us if we honored our temple vows and kept the commandments. I was humbled. I just needed to have more faith, so I resolved to try harder. And every day from then on, I awoke with that resolution.

Six years later, John and I were living in Texas, where he was stationed with the Navy. By then, we had three children, and on the surface, we were a happy little Mormon family. On the outside, I was an exemplary Mormon housewife and homemaker; but deep down, I knew I was trying to compensate for my inadequacies as a mother, and that I was not cut out to be a wife either. John and I had sex about once every three weeks, and I had never had an orgasm except for the occasional one that woke me up from a deep sleep. Understandably, John resented the time and energy I put into cooking, canning, sewing, taking care of the boys, and my church jobs because there was very little left over for him. We were both sure I was frigid, so we decided to do something about my problem. He learned of a Navy psychiatrist who specialized in working with sexually dysfunctional couples, and we began seeing him once a week. During the first session, I learned that many women do not have orgasms with intercourse, and I also learned that I needed to be responsible for my own orgasm. Of course, I did not have a clue about how to take on that responsibility, so to help me, the doctor showed John and me a video of a woman masturbating. I watched in amazement—I had not known women could masturbate, and watching that video was one of the most sexually stimulating experiences I’d had in years.

About a week later, using my memories of the video as a guide, I had sex with myself for the first time and discovered my dormant libido. My body did work! I had believed I was doomed to live my life without ever experiencing the pleasure I was sure everyone else in the world enjoyed. My husband had been away, so I greeted him at the door with the good news, and in the following weeks, I taught him how to help me have an orgasm. We believed we had found the solution to the one obstacle to our married bliss, and we were so confident we decided to have another baby.