So 10th grade wasn’t so great for me. Not that any of the other grades were exemplary, but 10th grade is a time I can look back on and say, “oh.” I don’t know how to explain that one any better…
I’m going to write about the boyfriend I had in high school for this post. I am very uneasy about it, and I am not sure why. I am just going to call him “the boy.” This is because there are probably people who know him who will read this and I do not feel in any way comfortable just putting his name out there. Also because someone I met in France referred to her boyfriend as “the boy” and I thought it was cute, and then she broke up with him, so, yeah – appropriate. Insensitive? Possibly. But definitely appropriate.
I will begin by giving a brief history of sex ed in my house: babies come from sex, but only in a very mechanical, technical, scientific way. Sex between married people is okay (as in “allowed,” or “not frowned upon”). Sex outside of marriage is dirty and wrong and sinful and horrible.
These are the things that lead to sex: talking on the phone with a boy; holding hands with a boy; being alone with a boy; going to the movies with a boy; touching a boy in any way; allowing a boy to touch me in any way; thinking about having sex; talking about having sex; thinking of sex outside of marriage as anything other than dirty and wrong and sinful - I can get more sarcastic and specific, but I feel I have made my point. Also, that was a very long sentence.
On two occasions my parents actually “sent me away” to keep me from having sex with boys. I’m not kidding. The first time they sent me away was the summer after my freshman year in high school. A very pretty senior had gotten my number, and he and I spoke on the phone a lot. Like “until the sun comes up” a lot.
He really wanted to take me on a date, and my mom said no. He offered to take me AND my mom out on a date, but my mom didn’t go for that either. I felt it was terribly unfair, but I saw my mom’s wisdom in that move probably before I was even 20 years old.
I was sent to a camp for kids with learning disabilities. As I have mentioned in at least one previous post, I had been diagnosed with ADD and was on Ritalin. My brother also got to go to camp with me. I guess he had ADD, too, but I’m thinking it was probably to keep an eye on me there, as well.
I’d like to point out that I was not a big slut at this time – that came later. I was still a good girl with good thoughts and whatnot. Also, my sister never got sent away for any reason. The entire situation was strange. Now I’m thinking about it too much – I’ll just move on.
So I spent that summer at the learning disability camp with my brother, and we danced circles around everyone else there – probably because we didn’t really have such debilitating disabilities. There were several male teachers at the camp, though, who surreptitiously made it known that they were looking forward to the time when I would not be jailbait anymore.
Nothing inappropriate happened. I mean, I only liked one of them back, and there was that pretty senior guy at home, and I was only fourteen years old. (That all seemed to serve as an explanation as to why “nothing inappropriate happened,” but upon rereading, I don’t really think it is sufficient. Fuck it. It’s a blog. MY blog.)
Side note: this is the summer I met Jonny for the first time – some friends and I snuck out of a slumber party in the middle of the night and met up with him and his brother and hung out for a while.
The second time I got sent away was the summer after I started dating “the boy” (ok, from here on out, no quotes, just the boy). We started dating about a month before I turned 16, so it was after all of that crappy shit when I was 15.
I really liked him a lot. He really liked me a lot. It was very sweet and idyllic. He was my first true love. We both knew we were going to eventually have sex with each other, and apparently my parents saw that coming, too. So I got sent off to El Salvador. In Central America. To “work” at an orphanage for malnourished babies.
By “work” I mean that I was told I was going there to help out with the babies, but of course it was to keep me away from the boy. I don’t know why I never thought more of it at the time. I was horrendously naïve – that’s probably why.
I spent, I think, about six weeks in El Salvador. That experience could be the basis for an entire novel, so I’m not going to go much into it. I will say that I was painfully lonely, and I missed the boy so much. I wrote to him every day, and looked for his letters to me every day, but apparently the postal service in El Salvador was not what it was in the U.S., and there were many letters between us that got lost along the way.
He was at the airport when I arrived back home. He drove me home in his new station wagon he’d gotten for his birthday. We had sex for the first time within about a week of that.
I was a virgin.
I don’t really know what to think about that statement: “I was a virgin.” It strikes me deep now to think of everything that happened to me before I consciously and willingly had sex with someone else. At the time, though, I believed that I was a virgin.
I hadn’t had consensual sex with anyone at that point in my life, and I had no conscious memory of the things that had happened since I was a very little girl, and I did not consider what that guy did to me on super bowl Sunday as sex, per se. So that’s sorted out – I was a virgin.
The boy was so ridiculously considerate of that, and of what I was comfortable with physically. The slightest indication of unease would put an immediate halt to everything else we were doing that wasn’t quite sex.
He waited until I was ready, until I told him definitively that I was ready, and that was that. Off to the races.
My 16th year was blissful. Then I turned 17.
Shortly after my 17th birthday, I was rushed to the hospital via ambulance. It turned out I had an ovarian cyst the size of a grapefruit. They took out my ovary. It was devastating.
The operation catapulted me into a depth of depression I had not experienced since I was very, very young. Relationships fell apart – friendships, and of course, the boy. It was like I was alive for the first time ever, and then snuffed out again. It was bad. Really bad.
Of course there are many more details as to what happened between the boy and I, but I don’t really feel like getting into that. The bottom line was that the surgery triggered that hellacious depression and I was sinking in it and I could look around me and see that no one could help me because they had no idea how bad it was in my mind.
I don’t know when I came out of that depression – it was literally years. It really, really sucked. I’m tired of thinking about this for now.
For my next blog, I will tell you how I got into drinking and hard-core drugs, did not graduate from high school, became a giant slut, and lived in my car! Yay!
I mean, holy jesus. No wonder I don’t like talking about all of this shit – it was horrible!
But my life is not horrible now – far from it…so…there’s a little light for the tunnel.
To be continued…
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