How I Was Always Sex Personified

How to not struggle with your sexual need and to accept it

It’s Christmas Day and the bitter cold penetrates the windows. A sweatshirt is bundled tight around my body. My puffy jacket is off to the side. All that could go wrong is going wrong with this adventure of meeting my parents. My mother has told the stories of how she couldn’t stand me as a child and how now she can barely tolerate me now.

“She’s very sexual,” my mother says to the man across from her.

Her words slur together. Her cheeks flush bright red with the alcohol in her system. I swear she just waggled her eyebrows at us. He sits with me at the dinner table. We’re doing the whole holiday introductions with things and it is a special sort of failure.

I know this is the time to snatch the wine bottle from her. I attempt to, only to have her be quicker than me. She cradles the bottle like a newborn babe.

I am mortified and spend the rest of the night replaying my mother’s words like a bad cinema reel. That man became an ex years later and he always accused me of wanting sex too much. Wanting affection, touch, and everything just too frequently to be satisfied or satiated.

It wasn’t a secret in my family that my first relationship was a girlfriend in third…