Lavender’s Story
(Answers phone) Hello, hi mum – listen can I call you back later because I’ve got someone here? Are you ok? You sound a bit huffy - are you a bit puffed out? All right – yeah, I’ll phone you in a little while. Ok, bye.
Ok then – um, ok, so I’m 45, I think, and I have two children and two grandchildren. Yeah my son is 14 and my daughter is 27, my grandson is nearly 4 and my granddaughter is nearly 2. And I’m - wait for it – an Artist! And before that I was a homeopath; well obviously, you know, it hasn’t disappeared that side of me, but I decided to stop practicing and focus on my painting, focus on my creativity and so that’s what I’m doing at the moment – being poor and painting. Uh, what else do you want to know? Well you know, you could describe yourself for hours couldn’t you?
Ok, my family background is a serious mess- there was a lot of disfunctionality in my family. My mother was the daughter of a guy who was in the navy and a woman that had a lot of mental health problems. And when my mother was born her mother kind of got seriously mentally ill and put in a hospital and her father was away in the war and so she was in an orphanage, she spent most of her childhood in an orphanage. And came out of the orphanage round about the age of 13 to discover that her father had a new partner and 7 sons that she didn’t know about, and so her relationship with her mother was always very difficult – her mother didn’t really want her. And um, and her dad was kind of never around.
So um, my father’s family – he was brought up by his uncle and aunt thinking that they were his mother and father. When he was 12 his father – his adopted father who he thought was his father – went into hospital for a minor operation and died on the operating table, which was really hard for him I think. And when he was 15 he found out that he wasn’t who he thought he was, his parents weren’t his parents, they were his aunt and uncle, and his real parents were: the black sheep of the family, who was a prostitute, and one of her clients. So that kind of did his head in.
So then my parents, my mother uh, they married when she was 19, she had my brother when she was 21, and then she got milk fever after he was born and had mental problems from then on. I mean they didn’t really know how to treat milk fever in those days; it’s what they call post-partum psychosis now. She just turned into someone else and my dad couldn’t deal with it. So she was in and out of mental hospitals and it was, you know, my brother was born in 52, I was born in 62, so it was a time when they were experimenting with a lot of things. So she had lots of different drugs, she had lots of electro-convulsive therapy she had…culminating in her having a lobotomy when I was one and a half. She was sterilized when I was 6 months old against her will, and - they didn’t want her to have any more children. So all through my early childhood she was in and out of hospitals and on and off various different types of psychoactive drugs. My father divorced her when I was 3. So from 0-3 I was passed around a lot of people, when my mother was in hospital and my father was working – so I was kind of looked after by neighbours, and then my father had a relationship with another woman so I guess she would have looked after me some of the time, and my mum some of the time – and then there was the divorce. And then um, so, after the divorce, I think, to begin with my brother: I have a brother who’s ten years older and a sister who’s 7 years older and me, and we were all living with my mum, but she was too ill to cope and my brother was kind of nicking things and getting in trouble with the police and so then my dad had all of us, and then my mum came to collect me for a weekend and just never took me back. So then I stayed with her, and my brother and sister stayed with my dad. So I was with my mum and she was in and out of mental hospitals and I was in and out of children’s homes for that early bit.
Then when I was 5 my stepfather came along and I think they met through a single’s agency, and he was a paedophile and I think the fact that she had me was one of the main reasons he was there. And he started grooming me from before the point where he got – I mean before he married her, before he was seriously kind of involved with her, he was already on my case. And he was around, so from then on until I was 11 and um (sighs) …so the next bits much more difficult to talk about really, because there was a lot of sex in my early childhood and it was all very weird, but he didn’t fuck me. So he didn’t take, he tried to take my virginity one time and he couldn’t because I was too small, but he did a lot of weird things and um, because of how my mother was, I mean I think I was quite a neglected child, and here was an adult who was prepared to give me love and attention and there was a price to pay but I think when you’re a neglected child you pay whatever price is going because you just need that love and attention. And of course at the age of 5 you don’t really have the kind of judgment of you know, this is ok and that isn’t ok. So um, a lot of things happened that I still feel really, you know, horrified about, and um, I think for a lot of people – there’s all sorts of different kinds of sexual abuse – he never hurt me, I mean he never…I mean there were times when it hurt, but he never hurt me on purpose, he wasn’t trying to hurt me, he was just trying to get me hooked in to sex.
Um, so he kind of seduced me into it, so if at any point I was to say no I don’t want to do that, I – then it would stop. So everything that happened…so you’re left with this sense of why didn’t I say no? That kind of stays in there – that actually, that in some way I was…what’s the word? Um, and you can see how even talking about it makes me (anxious noise) mong out. Um – yeah – complicit…and you know, yeah… well complicit’s a good word.
And at the point when I discovered, at about the age of tenish, when I realized, recognised, that I didn’t want to do it and said, that’s it, I’m not doing this anymore, of course then it stopped. And then his relationship with my mother fell to pieces and he left.
But there were a lot – I mean you know, there’s lots of awfulness in there and I don’t want to go on about if for too long, um. I don’t think my mother consciously knew, I think she kept it unconscious because she couldn’t deal with it. And I think there were certain clues that you’d have to be wearing bl…I mean, for example, I knew that he’d had a vasectomy about two years before she did. To me, if my 9/10 year old daughter knew that my husband had had a vasectomy, and she’s know for a couple of years and I’ve just found out, that’s a little weird. And we used to spend hours, we used to spend, you know, we used to disappear off into the Nissan hut – what did she think we were doing? You know in the war they used to build these air raid shelters out of corrugated iron – into the banks – well there was one of those next to the house, you know we lived in a house that had a field either side and it had a Nissan hut and we used to go and disappear in there which is where, you know, things… What did she think we were doing? What did she think was going on, I wonder? So I don’t know that she didn’t know on any level, I feel that she may have known on some level and really really did not want to know. And just shut it out. But she was very ill, you know, she wasn’t truly compos mentis at any point. He got her off the, she was on a lot of drugs when he first came on the scene – he got her off the drugs and she stayed off drugs and out of hospital for the rest of, well no, she didn’t stay off drugs, but she stayed out of hospital for the rest of my childhood. But she was still very very manic-depressive, so she was still swinging from one extreme to the other. But there was a short period of time when they first got together that she was kind of a bit more stable, so maybe a year or two.
I guess I must have had exposure to all the same things as all my contemporaries but to give you the degree of my sexual education, when I finally lost my virginity to someone I wanted to lose it to when I was 16, my mother found out because she overheard me talking to some girls – she had this little conversation with me, you know like ‘Oh, you naughty girl, are you being careful?’ you know. To which I replied gaily – ‘Oh it’s ok, I can’t get pregnant because I never come.’ So that’s how educated I was sexually (laughs) you know, you can’t get pregnant if you don’t come. She must have taught me about periods, because I don’t remember any trauma involved in all of that, um, and…but actually my step father was not the first person to sexually abuse me, there were other people before that, and after that. Ok, so the first person was a girl who my mum had to baby-sit who used to just get a kick out of making me cry. I was very small then, I must have been three or four. And um, she would poke things up me and just enjoy making me cry and her particular thing was to make me cry and then to try and make me tell my mum that it was somebody else who made me cry when my mum came home. And eventually somehow my mum saw through this and stopped employing this girl, and very shortly after that, this girl was taken into care because she locked two small children in a shed overnight. And then they realized that she was kind of like scarily off the rails and um…her name was Monica. And um, so she was probably the first person, then there was a boyfriend of my sister’s, who…my sister lived with my dad in Jersey, and nothing really awful happened, but there was inappropriate behaviour, to the degree of – well, I must have been 4/5 and we ended up sharing a bed. He’d come… he was taking me on the airplane to visit my dad and brother and sister, I don’t know why, but anyway, he was the adult that was going to accompany me from England to Jersey and we ended up in my mother’s house in a bed together and I remember him showing me his penis and being completely overwhelmed by the enormity of it, like, my God, how can anyone walk around with something so huge and red and hard and enormous knocking around between their legs. I’d never seen one before and I was really quite… concerned (laughs). Almost horrified. And then during the period of time when my stepfather was around we lived near the sea and there were holiday camps and there was more that one occasion when some dirty old man would… I don’t know, I think when you’re an abused child somehow there’s a beacon, there’s a light flashing on your forehead that says, you know, ‘Try me because you’ll probably get away with it here.’ And so I would just be spotted by people. I think maybe if you’re just hanging around a lot and you’re a kid and obviously nobody’s there looking after you, I don’t know. But there was more than one occasion when some dirty old bloke would manage to get me behind some shed somewhere and fiddle about with me. And somehow I managed to, uh, managed to stay alive.
And, you know, but with my stepfather, it was very weird – I mean he did weird things. He showed me for example, a piece of newspaper…He told me he was part of a Satan Circle and he was trying to teach me to be able to use my will to manipulate other people. And he told me that there was a ghost that lived in the house that was with me always, always, all the time –heard everything I said, saw everything I did, knew everything I thought – and was my guardian angel and had been killed by her mother because she had fallen in love with her stepfather and had a relationship with her stepfather, so her mother had poisoned her – this ghost that was my guardian angel. And he showed me a newspaper cutting about a child – a boy, a little boy – who had been crucified and burnt to death by a Satan Circle and he said ‘This is my lot, but don’t worry they won’t do this to you because I’m looking after you,’ you know…His idea was that one day I was going to be introduced to this circle of people and I would be the princess and I would be, you know. So it was all really deeply sick. He lived through the war, he was out in Burma. He was one of, ah, 14 children, his mother had 14 children in Nottingham in sort of a mining family. Um, his mother was supposedly a medium, um…I think there was a lot a lot a lot of weirdness in his life. And I suspect that he was probably abused as a child and I suspect that he sussed me out as one of those children who is interested in magic and the mysterious, and used that completely and utterly to manipulate me. So he didn’t have to frighten me by using physical force. He hemmed me in by saying… ‘Obviously you can’t tell anybody about the things we do together because if you do then my magic circle will know about it and then you might not be safe, but don’t worry, I’ll protect you, but you know, just don’t tell anyone because…’ So it was very dark and yucky. And he would get me to do kind of ritualistic things and… so I was quite a disturbed kid. And I think the signs were there if anybody had bothered to notice. And it’s kind of weird to me now to look back and think how come nobody noticed? I was a child who came from a broken family where my mother was in and out of mental hospitals all through my early childhood, where were Social Services? How come nobody ever kind of checked up on me?
At school? I have no idea what was known and what wasn’t known. You don’t get told that kind of stuff when you’re a kid and it’s all a long time ago and a long way away and I have no idea. When I was, when I finally left home, I couldn’t bear to live with my mother any more by the time I got to 15, um, and I didn’t want to change schools and they had a little boarding – they had a girl’s boarding house and a boy’s boarding house -that ran along with school and they put me in there temporarily while they checked out my dad’s finances, so I was kind of there for a term and then when they did finally send my dad the form to fill in he was like: ‘(makes shocked noise) You can’t stay there! You have to come live with us.” And so I went to live in Hounslow. And um, I don’t know – but nobody ever talked to me, is the point, nobody ever said ‘Hi, I’m your social worker, just wanted to check in to see how you’re doing, how things are happening at home, you know’. You know, I missed a lot of school in the later years. I was a really good girl at school, worked very hard, was really into it, until about the third year when it all went (raspberry) which is funny because he’d left, he’d left by then but I just, yeah, I lost it. And I got into, a bit later on I got into smoking dope, but there was, around the 3rd/4th year (of secondary school), well especially the 4th year, I lost interest in school and so the reports that I was getting altered significantly and you’d think somebody would go, ‘Ok what’s going on with this kid, she’s top of the class for three years and now she’s off the rails, what’s going…’ Nobody, nobody ever. And you know, I told, when I was about ten, I told two of my best friends a bit about what had happened between me and my stepfather and they both said I was lying. They both told me I was lying and that I was probably a lesbian. So I never told anyone for a loooong time after that (laughs). So you know, it was never…
I don’t remember exactly when I finally told somebody, but there came a point in my very late teens/early twenties when I would kind of take delight in announcing rather shocking things at dinner parties where everyone else was all talking about this that and the other. You know, I would kind of say, yeah, hmm…just, as it came up, you know, tell us about your mother, ‘Ah well my mother had a lobotomy when I was one and a half,’ you know, ‘ya middle class shit pile, stick that in your fucking pipe and smoke it!’ (Laughs). It became a, not really in terms of being angry, just in terms of there’s a bit of me that feels as though I’ve come through a lot, really a lot, and done very well in terms of how my kids are, in terms of… I mean of course, I’m completely fucked up, I’m really fully aware of that, but I’ve had a lot of help and I’m a lot less of a mess than I could be. You know, I’m kind of somehow managing to be all right, considering. And so I think there was a time when I realized that actually there’s a few medals across my chest and that you know, people…um, it was ok, how ever shockingly I did it, it was ok to let people know that I hadn’t always had a comfortable existence (laughs).
Well, I guess around the time my stepdad left I was kind of looking at my spiritual orientation. So I’d gone to uh, Sunday school when I was very small, and ended up having a big row with the woman that ran Sunday school who tried to convince me that Jesus and God were the same person, and failed to explain it in such a way that I could understand what she meant. I got very angry with her and left. Then when I was very little I used to sneak into church when nobody was there because I liked being in church but…I didn’t really like all the blah blah. And then because I was doing all this supposedly black magic with my stepfather, and just uh, actually on my own terms really enjoying nature and enjoying being connected with the universe. We lived by the sea and the sea kind of saved my life really, and I wanted to be St Francis of Assisi and I wanted to speak the language of the birds and the animals and… not really compatible with black magic somehow (laughs). And I kind of ended up with the conclusion that really I didn’t want to do black magic; I wanted to do white magic. And I was doing a lot of reading, you know, CS Lewis and all that kind of stuff. So there was a kind of a… and then I guess I kind of had to put any overlay of kind of romanticism as a way of trying to reconnect with the innocent me. So I was very determined; I wasn’t going to lose my virginity until I’d seen a unicorn. You know, I believed in fairies, I believed in dragons…the whole thing of this world was just nonsense; the other imaginal world is where I spent my time because that was a kind of safe place. So it became known amongst my school friends: I was kind of the laughing stock at school really, that I refused to loose my virginity until I’d seen a unicorn. Um, and um (laughs), and then, I don’t know, what did happen? I slowly began to discover boys and the true feelings that go with real conscious sex, you know, real attraction between two equals rather than it being really about the pleasures of the flesh. It being about a kind of communion between two beings, I suppose, as I began to discover that stuff with boys… but I was still desperate for love, you know, desperate. And would still have, kind of I guess, paid whatever price… I did, you know, later on I went through quite a promiscuous period where I just thought if somebody wanted me I didn’t really know how to say no to them, you know. So yeah, there’s been phases and you know, spirals of it.
I um, I just got together with this lad who was really lovely, gentle, musician – just a lovely person and um, and I guess at 16 I was old enough to know that a unicorn was a… well I’d always been old enough, but I was able to make peace with the idea that you know, that seeing a unicorn was something that could happen on another level, and that it’s kind of symbolic of something rather than ah, needing to wait until I actually saw an actual unicorn, you know. And he was somebody who was kind of lived enough in the magical realm, and he was just gentle and lovely and so we agreed that he would take my virginity on my 16th birthday. And um, we… the school that I went to shared a swimming pool, an outdoor swimming pool, with the primary school that I had gone to. And we went to the swimming pool and had a swim and we lay in the sunshine…and he tried to take my virginity, and it kind of like, it didn’t really work and after a while we both kind of said, this isn’t really working is it, yes, well, never mind. And he got up and he set off a firework, and he said to me ‘Every year on your birthday, for the rest of my life, as long as I live, I’m going to set off a blue firework like this - I’m going to make a blue star for you’. How romantic is that! And then a few days later he took my virginity in my bed, in my house, which is a great way for things to happen. Um, so yeah, that was really nice.
I don’t think he was a virgin, but not far off it (laughs), yeah. I don’t think I told him anything about my history, but it’s a long time ago now, I may have done but I don’t think I did. I think I was still not telling anybody at that point. Just the shame, you know? You just felt forever tainted. And yeah, and particularly telling lovers is the very difficult thing to do – kind of choosing, when is it that you tell somebody who’s attracted to you or interested, at what point do you say and by the way, here’s this crock of shit that I’ve lived through. Do you wait until you’ve had wonderful sex a few times in a row (laughs)? Do you wait until you’ve already known them for a year or three? Or do you tell them straight away and frighten them off and watch them run for the hills? It’s kind of a weird one.
So I think I was, obviously, I was quite a damaged individual and I went through a few years of being just, it’s like, um, because I was lead into sex by my stepfather before I was anywhere near being of an age to lead myself into sex, there was a lot of kind of sexual awareness on one level, and no sexual awareness at all on another level. So often if a man, a boy, a man, was attracted to me, wanted me, was lusting after me, I would experience the lust without being able to locate the source of it. It was like I let people have me because they wanted me without having the realization that it was up to me too. I could decide. I could say ‘You might fancy me but actually, I don’t fancy you so I’m not going to.’ Or I could stay with that feeling of being lusted after and just wait and see what happened. And, or I could explore it a little bit and then I could say ‘Ok that’s enough now, stop, back off – come see me tomorrow and I’ll see whether I want to let you kiss me and feel me up a bit more.’ It was just like there is no boundary and obviously if someone wants me, well help yourself. There were all these kind of experiences of people – men – finding me the most fascinating person they’d ever met, hanging on my every word and being completely devoted, and then shagging you, and then handing you your coat. And I didn’t get it – I just didn’t get it. So it happened a number of times in a row, and I was so confused. I couldn’t understand why you’d want to have sex with somebody unless you really liked them; why, if you really liked them, you would suddenly stop liking them just ‘cause you’d had sex with them? What was going on? It was like some secret that… and also, because they were all so clumsy, so I wasn’t really enjoying the sex I was having. Maybe that was it (laughs). You know… I’d had – my stepfather was in his 60’s, ok, when I was – when he came on the scene. So, and he’d kind of trained me up in oral and manual sex. So all the trimmings, I knew all about. And all these young men that I was having sex with, didn’t know anything at all about the trimmings, they only knew about meat and two veg. So I was kind of left with kind of like, you know – yes I enjoyed what happened, but it was… it never really hit the spot and – but mostly kind of emotionally really confused. I just didn’t get the thing that men just want to fuck someone. That they want to have as many conquests as they can. They didn’t want to have seriously good sex – you know this is how it seems, they don’t want to actually find out how to really have good sex with a person, they just want to kind of get another notch on their belt, and then move on. And I didn’t get it, I just so didn’t get it, and yet at the same time I was completely vulnerable to it every time. So I was kind of a bit mashed by that.
And also the other thing that would happen would be that if… I’d be in a relationship for… I mean let’s face it, when you’re 17 a relationship of 3 months is quite a long one; well it was for me. But it would get to a point where if I think I was kind of emotionally asleep, as a lot of teenagers are, and I think I would, rather than face the challenges within a relationship, when something difficult arose – rather than face that I would just run out of the relationship. I would just like, ‘This isn’t working, bye’. So I was doing it too, but not on the same level. So if things got a bit tricky or started to feel a bit awkward I’d leg it. And there were always more and more volunteers, you know, when you’re kind of 17 and kind of gorgeous, they’re always lined up – ready and waiting so there weren’t any long gaps in between. Those came later (laughs).
But I would say that here I am at 45 with a whole host of failed relationships behind me and I still don’t know how to relate and I still don’t know how to be properly in charge of my sexuality. Um, so it’s you know, it’s kind of life long.
Yeah, ok, so my daughter was born when I was nearly 19, uh and, I’d been together with her dad for a couple of months maximum when I got pregnant with her. But I so wanted a baby anyway – I wouldn’t have cared if I’d have had her on my own. But anyway, we had her together and lots about it was great; her birth was fantastic, he and I kind of had some difficulties right from the start but I hung on in there because I didn’t really want to be a single parent. Um…hung on in there. We moved out to France together, we moved from Brixton, you know, slap bang middle of the city, to right out in the middle of the countryside in France. We didn’t marry – he would have liked to have married me but we didn’t marry, and by the time she was two I had fallen in love with somebody else, and then I left him. Um and uh – I first fell in love when I was about four with Peter O’Toole, and then it was Yul Brenner, and then it was the boy in the next class up, and, you know, I fall in love at the drop of a hat, and it’s deep and meaningful, and can unravel me quite easily. And I didn’t face the challenges in that relationship either. Because there were things I found quite difficult with him – he was a person who lost his temper easily and rather than being able to meet that challenge and say this kind of behaviour is, well whatever, you know, work through whatever the issues were. I just slowly withdrew from him emotionally and then fell in love with someone else and then left him.
Um, and then that was my daughter’s father, and by the time Jack came along I’d been with his father four years already and had miscarried one child already and I thought I was home and dry. Because obviously there was my daughter from a previous relationship and we’d been together and we had this really nice home and I thought, you know, ok great. Then we got pregnant the first time and he was a bit kind of like –‘I feel trapped’ and then I ended up miscarrying anyway. So we’d been through that kind of, ‘cause it was his first child, we’d been through that. But when Jack came along I thought that the practice run had kind of been sorted and that actually he’d obviously got his head round it. But when I was 8 months pregnant he slept with my best friend and uh it all really seriously fell to pieces and I was really mashed to bits. Um and it was quite a difficult birth in some ways, very long. He was a very easy baby but he did wake me up every two hours for 8 months. But he was easy in the sense that he was delightful to be around, but he did wake me up every 2 hours for 8 months, and so I got kind of (makes crazy noise). And um so that relationship ended in a big mess. In fact it ended in a big mess twice because I tried to resurrect that family – foolish idea – and it happened all over again, in the same sort of style. Anyway.
Well – I guess my relationship with my kids is very open. Uh, and, I mean yeah, they’re my teachers and they’re both amazing and Jasmine’s whole experience has been so different from mine. I mean she’s had some difficult things to deal with in the sense that I split up with her dad and then he had a relationship with someone else and that – you know, there was kind of horrible things that happened that she witnessed when she was visiting their home, you know…she’s had difficult stuff to deal with but in terms of her relationship with sex, she’s a hell of a lot more uh, grounded in her sexuality, and empowered, you know. I mean she, you know, we did a whole thing when she had her first period. I mean she knew about it but it was like, her attitude and my attitude as well, was like ‘Wow’, you know, ‘You’ve become a woman - let’s celebrate!’ and when she did occasionally come across people… I mean when she had her first period she went around telling all these women that she knew ‘I’ve got my first period – I’m a woman now!’ and some women were like ‘Yeah – fantastic wow!’ and others were like ‘You poor thing’. And when she hit that she didn’t understand what their problem was – she didn’t get it. You know when people were commiserating with her that she was being subjected to ‘The Curse’ it wasn’t, you know, because that wasn’t the relationship that she had learnt – she didn’t feel like that about it. And when she was ready to…I have this wonderful memory of – she had a boyfriend, the boy who took her virginity was – I mean it also has a tragic ending sadly; it’s not an entirely happy story but still lovely. It was someone that she’d known from when she was very small – we’d lived near them in London, and then we met up again ‘cause they lived in Bath and we lived there and anyway… they began this relationship and it was very sweet, they were both 15 going on 16 and one evening – well, he came to stay at my house and he - he was just such a lovely lad – and he came and sat down, we all three were sat down at the table like this, and he said um, ‘Lavender,’ he said, ‘Jasmine and I have been thinking about having sex and I thought I would talk to you about it and see how you felt about it.’ And so I kind of said, ‘Well, that’s great and if you both feel that you’re definitely ready and that you’re kind of old enough and you feel you can handle it and be really gentle and caring with each other and that’s what you want to do and you’re sure that’s what you want to do, then that’s fantastic, you know, work away. And do you know everything that you need to know, kind of like have you thought about everything you need to think about?’ And they were both like ‘Yeah, no, we have and we’ve decided that’s what we want to do.’ ‘So well great, have a good time!’ Except that then his parents found out and decided that he and Jasmine should never be allowed to be alone together for more than 10 minutes ever again. I don’t know how it happened or why, I don’t know what it was that they didn’t like about my daughter or the situation but they then just really wouldn’t allow them to spend any time alone together. They weren’t even allowed to, you know, sit in a room for 10 minutes. And then, this went on for a couple of weeks and then my daughter and her boyfriend both decided that under the strain of this the relationship wasn’t kind of going to work and so they decided that they wouldn’t be together any more – it was kind of mutual decision. Then a very short time after that he got himself another girlfriend and a few days after he’d asked this other girl out, he got hit by a car and went into a coma and when he came round from the coma he didn’t remember that he’d split up with my daughter and he… anyway – it was a big mash up – I mean he nearly died and he did have to live again. He had to learn how to eat, how to walk, how to do everything. So, yeah, so my daughter’s had a lot to cope with and negotiate too. Yeah – and she’s very sexually empowered I would say. She’s, yeah…
My son? Oh I would answer any… I think if a kid is ready to ask a question they’re ready to hear the answer provided you pitch the answer at where they’re able to hear it. So, you know, obviously we’ve had lots and lots and lots of talks about sex – not as in ‘Right, now sit down boy because I think it’s time’, you know, just a natural kind of, when it comes up it gets talked about, and laughed about. You know, like most small boys, he went through various different periods of time when he thought sex was absolutely hilarious and needed to be joked about every given possible minute and there was nothing funnier than… he had this see saw thing with a man with a big shlong and a woman with enormous tits and when you moved it up and down they appeared to be having sex, you know, (sarcastically) such fun!
And occasionally we get into ‘Right, now I’m going to pontificate’ mode, you know? ‘There’s something you need to hear young man,’ you know – not quite like that, but sometimes I’ve got a bee in my bonnet and so I will get on my little soap box and talk about something or other – whatever it might be. It’s usually got that slight feminist undertone (laughs), or humanist perhaps I should say? But yeah, he’s quite happy to tell me how skilled he is at undoing girls’ bras with one hand. He’s 14. This morning he said, I can’t remember how it came up, but I made the comment of ‘you’ll do anything for money.’ I don’t remember what it was, no it was last night, and he wanted to play on his X box and somebody rang up and said could he baby-sit? I knew I wasn’t going to be able to persuade him to spend an hour away from his X box, but the fact that they were going to pay him to baby-sit meant that he was quite keen to do it, and I said to him, ‘Oh, you’d do anything for money,’ and he said, ‘I wouldn’t do anything for money’. So we made a list of all the things he would rule out – that he wouldn’t do for money and he wouldn’t loose his virginity with an animal, was one of them he came up with (laughs). Yeah.
I hope it’s a hell of a lot healthier than the situation I inherited, yeah I hope so - I really hope so. You know, I’ve put a fair amount of effort into making sure that that was the case. Yeah.
No I’m not in a relationship right now… (Little girl voice) ‘I want my prince charming to take me to the castle and make all my dreams come true and live happily ever after.’ And I do, you know. I would like to be in a really whole, healthy, long lasting relationship that uh, that fed me and that fed the other person. And I’m not prepared to accept an unhealthy relationship that doesn’t do that and I haven’t met the person – I haven’t managed to manifest that with any of the people I have had relationships with. And so I’m just being in relationship with myself and, you know, there have been long periods of time when I’ve not been in relationship and there have been short periods of time where I’ve been, you know, since… the longest relationship that I’ve had was with my son’s father and when that fell to bits in the way that it did, since then I haven’t, I haven’t had a long term relationship, I haven’t really lived with anyone. There’ve been short-lived relationships that haven’t come to any, you know. So yeah, I’m lonely and I miss all of that lovely intimacy and sharing, but I love the autonomy of it – I love being in charge of my life and what happens and you know, it’s kind of like, I think the older you get the more difficult… the better you know yourself and so the less likely you are to want to compromise yourself to someone else. And so I would imagine that if you’ve grown up in a relationship with someone else – if you’ve met them in your youth and then you’ve matured together and you get to my age now, you know, 45, you would know somebody pretty well. And you kind of would have a good idea of what the easy bits that worked and what the difficult bits that needed to be worked on, and you know, the spaces and the full bits within the relationship and what you needed to find outside in your other relationships with friends, you know, and work and all the other things, and like I am aware that there are things missing in my life because I’m not in relationship. There’s a bit of me that… there is a bit of me that only finds fulfillment in that kind of deeply intimate relationship, and it’s a bit of me that’s starving hungry. Um, but there are lots of other bits of me and there are compensations to being (funny voice) a ‘spinster’. There are fantastic, you know, any mess that you see around you is mine or my son’s and it’s there because I’ve decided to let it be there, uh, you know. There’s lots that’s great about being alone, and lots that isn’t great. But then there’s lots that isn’t great about being in a relationship – even if it’s a great relationship, there’s still difficult things about it I guess so, yeah.
I just want to say, like you were saying before, sexual abuse is so prevalent, I mean there are such high numbers in our society and our culture and it’s so unlooked at, so undiscussed, and because it’s unlooked at and undiscussed, children continue to be vulnerable to it and will continue to be vulnerable to it until it’s a matter of general discussion. You know, it’s one of the ways in which human beings weird out, you know, people weird out in all sorts of, people wig out in all kinds of different ways and sex is one of the ways that they wig out because it’s such a big thing. Sex is huge. You know, there’s really really really really bad sex and there’s really really really really amazing sex and there’s everything in between and it’s huge, it’s huge, it’s huge on an animal level, it’s huge on a spiritual level, it’s even huge on an intellectual level. It’s a big subject. And until we get to the point of being able to educate ourselves, and free ourselves up with it enough to be able to be able to properly educate our kids… I think people mistake ignorance for innocence. I think there’s a real difference between ignorance and innocence – it’s possible to know a lot of things and yet be innocent. It’s possible to know all about sex – to know the mechanics of it and to know what it’s for – know all sorts of things about it without ever having done any of it. And it’s ok, and it’s ok for girls to know something about what may happen to them when they decide they’re ready for it, we don’t have to protect them from… protecting them from the knowledge and the understanding about it does not protect them from the reality of it. And it’s really really really important that people, you know, that parents, that teachers, anyone in a pedagogical role, understands that ignorance and innocence are not the same and that ignorance does not protect anyone. It’s really important that we talk about these things with our kids and that they get to understand that as wonderful as sex can be, it can also be about power and as an element of personal power, your sexuality is yours. And it isn’t yours unless you make it yours, unless you say ‘It’s mine’ – a kind of consciousness. You know, if you have a really wonderful, amazing, beautiful, inherited treasure that’s come down from your great great great great great great great great grandmother given to you, and it’s yours but you don’t know what it is and you flog it for tuppence ha’penny at a car boot sale, you’ve missed something. And if none of your grannies or your auntie or your mother ever tells you what a great treasure it is, you aint gonna know what it’s worth. We’ve got to tell our kids what they’re worth and what their sexuality is worth and how to protect it. That’s me off the soapbox.
