Regretfully, I was a virgin when I married the first time, due to a strict religious upbringing. I don’t remember our first intercourse and yet loved giving birth to our two beautiful daughters.
Although still religious, I was rebellious and part of me was glad that he left us in order to be himself as gay. Then I could enjoy my sexual freedom, despite being a hypocrite to my church rule to make love only when married.
It was my fourth marriage that broke me open, like a coconut spilling out its milk. I cried and sobbed and raged until I could walk away with the gift of trusting myself, truly, for the first time! (This was 1998, and I had let go of my religious addiction in 1984, how apropos:)
It’s now 2018, having lived alone for 13 years, quite happily so, while enjoying making love with a few boyfriends. It was the first day of spring that chased my aloneness away by falling in love with Antoine, a Cornell graduate student, four decades younger than me. He’d never kissed or made love until May 11th. With me. What a gift! “Amazing,” I still say often to myself and to him, after having lived together for two summer months, now having come full term to nine months of being boyfriend-girlfriend.
More amazing is the last day we spent together before he returned to his homeland in France on July 18th. Because we love hiking, especially to waterfalls, we’d planned to make love to the music of Moonshine Falls. As we placed our yellow blanket on the ground in a bed of Wild Geraniums, Antoine says: “Are you going to tell me your secret?” I’d said weeks previous that I didn’t want to keep any secrets from him, and wanted to tell him before he left, but it hadn’t crossed my mind that day. Tears became a fountain as I revealed my shame of having mercy-killed my so-loved pet kitty, Radiance. He could barely walk; was thin as pasta. Close to death as one can be, I believed.
Most amazing is that Antoine holds me close with eyes of love, of understanding, of acceptance. That we fly to one another monthly. That in my seventh decade I am not dried up. That my vagina and clitoris sing the praises of our bodies becoming passionately one, naturally, saying out loud, I AM IN LOVE with you!