This week I am offering my own sensual, sexual experiences as Maiden, Mother, Queen and Crone-to be.

Myself as Maiden

I have pretty much always had a current love interest, a paramour, an inamorata-of-the-moment in my life. Ever since elementary school, I have been involved in a series of crushes, flirtations, romances, relationships, and marriage/partnerships of varying degree of consummation, duration, maturity, intensity and pleasure. However, before I turned fifty, I had never felt myself to be particularly beautiful in the abstract.

While I had definitely attracted my share of admirers, one by one, over the decades, it is not as though I ever had a queue of suitors waiting outside of my front door, vying for my affections. Try though I might, I never quite fit the popular, idealized, mass-market parameters of beauty or body type or demeanor. Far from being a femme fatale, with a Hollywood face or figure, I usually failed to turn heads in a crowd.

Certainly I had been told many times that I was pretty, but it was always in the dubious context of, “You really ought to lose some weight, you have such a pretty face.” Or, “Why don’t you pull your hair out of your face so that people can see you.” Those motherly suggestions didn’t exactly serve as Self-image enhancing morale-builders. Oh, I was probably pretty enough, but it was a pasted-on look. My lips were fetchingly colored, but my smile was frozen in fear. During the Maiden years of my teens and twenties, I was serious, withdrawn, self-conscious, over-sensitive and as unsure as a tentative spring shoot caught in an inclement frost.

Completely unprepared emotionally, I was out there, and available because I was expected to be. But my heart was never in it. I was way too shy to perceive — let alone enjoy, and heaven forbid, show — myself as the sweet, loving, sensual, sexual swan-in-waiting that I really was in my secret, tender hidden heart.

Instead of being who I was, I believed and internalized everything that I had been taught: that I was not thin enough, striking enough or vivacious enough to attract appreciative attention. And that was what life was supposed to be all about, after all, wasn’t it girls? To be attractive to men.

By the age of thirty, I had left an idiotic mistake of a marriage and several semi-serious boyfriends behind. Like Greta Garbo, I vanted to be alone. Those relationships were not awful or abusive or co-dependent or any such thing. They just didn’t fulfill me, the full me. Something crucial was always missing. Eventually, I began to realize that the absent ingredient was myself, that mysterious shadowy stranger who lived in my body and who did and thought things beyond the scope of my ken.

How I yearned to learn who I was, myself, in the heart of my soul and not as a warped reflection of someone else’s view of me, be it mother or lover or Glamour Magazine. In an undeniable flash of inner truth and commanding clarity, I felt myself called upon by spirit, by destiny, by dharma, by fate, by free will to embark upon a concerted search and rescue mission for the Holy Grail of my own elusive soul. And this expedition had to be solo.

Tomorrow:
Mama Donna: Me as Mother

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The Queen welcomes questions concerning all issues of interest to women in their mature years. Send your inquiries to thequeenofmyself@aol.com.