Anonymous

My first time was awful. I was 17 and distracted. When

I wasn’t thinking, “Ow!”, I was thinking, “I’m sure he’s supposed to move slightly more to the left… should I say something?”

I was raised Catholic, you see and, because not many people in The Church were having sex, we spent an awful lot of time talking, thinking, writing, teaching, praying and generally theologising about all the biblical reasons not to have sex. So there I was, 17, doing it, and though it didn’t rock my world, I remember it and I will always remember it.

Firstly, because it was my first time. As unromantic as it was (after school, in his room, which smelt like old socks and Diet Coke, with Blink 182 playing in the background, condoms to manoeuvre, rushing to get it done before his mother got home and mine arrived to fetch me) and as unimpressive as he was (poor boy, turns out part of the problem was that I was the wrong sex), it was the first time.

Secondly, those ten minutes (or was it five?) were a rebel yell. Sex stood against everything Catholic in my life, it flew in the face of everything my mother had refused to say to me about sex (except to tell me, when I got my first period, that I’d better watch out because now I could get pregnant).

Sex also stood against the memories I had hidden inside me. I remember being four years old, at pre-school, and being woken up from naptime by the man who drove our little yellow bus. He touched me, kissed my skin and told me he loved me. I don’t know if it happened just once, or if I’ve created a composite image in my head of several instances. I’ve had to accept that there will be patches of my memory that will always be fuzzy. I don’t know if it was just me he did this to—I remember feeling special, chosen somehow.

At 11, I consciously started paying attention to all the information about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ touches. A public service announcement sticks in my memory—it depicted a suddenly depressed, moody little girl, who eventually revealed the reason she couldn’t stand the uncle she once loved. I watched that little girl, and her symptoms that played out in 60 seconds; her courage and eloquence as she told her mother, “It’s Uncle John; he has been molesting me.” But I didn’t have the words to express what had happened to me, and so I didn’t tell my mother.

But you can’t just hide trauma away, it doesn’t work like that. I couldn’t say what had happened until I fell into a deep depression, and needed to find the words so that I literally could save my life. It ripped apart my mother, whom I’d been protecting for all those years. It fundamentally changed the way my family saw me, and the ways they loved me. It changed me, and the ways I saw and chose to love myself.

I realised at 17 that I was destined to become either hypersexual or petrified of sex, and so, in my attempts to ‘fix’ myself, I decided I had to have sex. It was for the all wrong reasons: I didn’t love the man, the relationship wasn’t deep. But I had figured that 17 was the average age at which my generation had sex, and so I did it.

That first time sucked. Not because the sex sucked— in truth, it was probably no better or worse than anyone else’s first time—but because the sex was merely a part of my how-to-be-normal list, while I kept burying the pain inside me.

Then I met a man and quickly fell in love with him. Being in love with him unsettled all the methods I’d put in place to bury my pain. He opened me up and somehow I was more me because I was with him, like Toni Morrison said, “[he] is a friend of my mind. [he] gather me, man. The pieces I am, [he] gather them and give them back to me in all the right order”.1

Within the first two weeks of meeting, it was clear we were both falling in love. We hadn’t had sex though we had discussed it, animatedly. I was going to New York for a week-long conference and we were both overcome with the despair of new lovers at the thought of being apart for (gasp!) a whole week. At a romantic lunch in a fancy

1 From Morrison, T. 2005. Beloved. London: Vintage.

restaurant in Constantia before I left I told him what had happened to me.

This was before I had even admitted it to myself fully; this was before I told anyone else. There he was, loving me. Me. And seeing me. How could I not tell him this huge part of me and the pain I’d had to carry and kept shut away?

Speaking about what happened is not the end of the journey for me but it is key. I disclose it only where the context is fitting, (I haven’t told the nice security guard who works the night shift in my apartment complex, for instance).When I told a group of students my grainy memory of the actual events (and for some reason, it embarrassed me how little detail I had, like there’s a part of me that’s asking, in an outraged tone, “Why don’t you know more about this thing that happened when you were only four years old?’), my hands shook, I felt lightheaded. But I told them then and so I continue to tell people now. I tell through my words, I tell through my research, I tell through the way I live my life.

My boyfriend and I didn’t have sex until after the New York conference. It wasn’t the hurried, harried affair I was used to; I wasn’t trying to be normal in some man’s arms. It was him and me, bringing ourselves—our whole, perfectly imperfect selves—into a consenting, loving, sexual relationship.

Being a survivor of sexual abuse means that my relationship with my body, and with other bodies, will always be complicated. It’s taken me a long time to accept this (and I don’t live this acceptance everyday), but it’s helped to be—for the real first time—in a sexual relationship where I’m allowed to bring this complexity into bed. And for the first time, I’m having great sex!

The writer is happy to report that all her subsequent times have topped the first time, and she will be married to her best friend as of December 2012.