There are days when I am a cassette player. When I was a kid we had a really old one, a
bit of a fossil really. It would get
stuck and the tape would skip back and forth.
The same line would be sung again and again, like an obsession.
It often starts with a memory. Me, picking a fight over something silly or
asking him not to do something that he wanted to do. At times he would be so stoic that his lack
of reaction would cause me to continue to argue my case, well beyond what was
necessary. And he would continue to
withdraw, fuelling my irritation further.
Other times it would be a revision of what happened in that
first eighteen months. The vaginismus
that I started self-treating eight months into our marriage (but what if I had started earlier?). The six to eight months of treatment that saw
me cured (but why didn't I do it faster?). The multitude of other excuses he produced
for why he couldn't love me (my annoying mannerisms,
my lack of 'self-awareness', my failure to clean the kitchen adequately for
godssakes).
On the good days, the rational part of my brain wins. The one that knows that the fights I picked
were minor, usually justified and fairly on par with those in other people's
marriages. That I (mostly) reacted in a
healthy way to the situation at hand.
Miss Rational knows that dealing with a sexual dysfunction
is easier imagined in hindsight than done.
There is the shame, the crippling feeling of inadequacy, the hope that
one day it will all just work, somehow.
And all of that comes after the realisation that something is actually,
seriously wrong. That this is not normal. If a woman gets past all that and draws
together the courage to seek treatment, there are the medical professionals,
many of them who know very little about the condition much less how to diagnose
it.
But there are also bad days.
The times when my mind is sucked into the vortex of regret, self-doubt
and endless questioning.
Those bad days, when
rationality takes a back seat, are the
ones where for the entire day, one or two thoughts run in a loop in the
cassette player of my mind.
If I had fixed this
earlier....if I was what he wanted in every other way, he would have loved me.
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