Joy

I have a child now.
My husband is my lover.
Fully my lover. To the point that I think about him when I read romance novels and I get to the sex scenes and I smile. These were the scenes that used to make me cringe, make me feel like I was not a sexual being, like I lacked all femininity and sexuality. These were the scenes that used to make me angry at the world and at God for robbing me of pleasure. These were the scenes that made me walk around with a weight on my chest, feeling like it was me against the world.
And now these scenes excite me. They make me happy and glad and I can't wait till I can go enact them.
As for my child...my child has changed my life in every single way. I cannot possibly describe the depth of love I feel for this child. Everything about the child has brightened my life. I cannot remember the last time I was so joyful.
I was made for this. I was made to be a lover, a mother, and my life would have been so much poorer if I had given up earlier in the journey, certain that I could not ever enjoy sex or love. And yet, that is exactly what I was tempted to do. I look at my life now and I think about how I could never have envisioned this...never have imagined myself as the sexual person I am now and certainly not as ever being capable of achieving the goal of creating and birthing a child.
I am so grateful to God. I overflow with gratitude. Joy is my constant companion. I just want everyone else to be as suffused in it as I feel myself to be.
Don't get me wrong. Of course, I still have bad days, down days, days where there are small annoyances or major concerns. But these are nothing in comparison to the soul-wrenching, ship-rocking turmoil that attacked my marriage at the beginning of its inception. I would have drowned but I didn't...because he is amazing.
My husband. My lover. The most wonderful man on earth...for me.
Can't imagine my life without him.
We've come so far. Every so often it's nice to look back, take stock and feel grateful.
I just hope I can pass on the blessings. I hope other people struggling with sexual pain find the right doctors and the right treatment and find themselves in a happier place, physically and mentally, as well.
My husband is exactly the right mix of practical, playful, loving and deeply kind that I need. I know it takes a special spouse to support you through this difficult journey and I'm just so happy that I had one. And that now I have one who takes such obvious pleasure in raising our little one.
My husband makes me feel beautiful and desired. He also supported me through the worst time of my life and he continues to support me now as we work on raising our child. He is just...my favorite person.
I know it might be frustrating to read this post if you're still caught in the throes of your journey or if your significant other isn't necessarily being the most helpful to you right now. But it can get better. I am proof of that. And I really hope it does get better for you.

Incredible

You know that tagline, "It Gets Better"?

Well- it DOES get better.

First, the amount of time that I needed to dilate prior to having sex diminished. I started to realize that I was simply feeling readier faster. I've come up with a theory, which is the following: Right after mikvah, your vagina hasn't been stretched recently (because you've had 2 weeks or so without sex or dilators). So that first time, you have to dilate for a while, say 15-20 minutes. Maybe even longer. (The other option, of course, would be to dilate while you have your period; I never really liked doing that). But as you have sex more frequently, and your vagina adapts itself like the stretchy, fun muscle that it is, you realize you have to dilate less and less frequently.

And then comes that time when you realize that actually...YOU DON'T HAVE TO DILATE AT ALL. 

Because you and your husband can go have spontaneous sex. You can flirt and dance your way to the bedroom and fall onto the bed in a tangled heap, after which you can have him arouse you, and excite you, and otherwise make sure you're ready. And then, you just have to run your hand over him with some oil or some lubricant, and you're ready to make love. 

No dilators. No preparation. Just you and him. Together at last.

Enjoying this experience.

No, actually LOVING this experience.

Already looking forward to the next time that you'll get to do this.

Having a happy, pleasurable, love-making experience.

100% better! 

And so I've become a Happy Jewish Girl.

An awesome doctor (Dr. Goldstein), an awesome CBT therapist, and a supportive and loving husband got me there.

Here are some things I never thought I'd say:

I actually love sex.

Love the closeness.

Love the foreplay.

Love the feelings.

Love that my husband and I have traveled so far and have gotten to this amazing place. 

Guess I wasn't made to be a nun after all! 

I plan to keep writing, but also just want to express that this blog, this journey, is about hope.

When I started this blog, I needed an outlet, a place to vent, a place to cry and wail and lash out against the world. 

I wanted to talk about my embarrassment in not even knowing my own anatomy.

I needed to feel like I wasn't all alone.

Like I wasn't crazy.

I needed to share that I was in incredible pain and nothing was helping.

Physical pain. Emotional anguish. Guilt. Feeling like this was all my fault while lashing out at my husband.

Talking about how sex was impossible.

That I was considering a divorce.

The way I treated my husband.

The darkness we were going through.

Thinking I was being punished for my sins.

Thinking God was angry with me.

Doing anything possible to avoid having sex.

Being cruel.

Being sad.

Falling into despair.

I'm not despairing anymore.

I'm thrilled.

I'm in love with the amazing man I married.

I love that we get to be together and that it's a fabulous experience, spiritually, physically and otherwise.

I feel pleasure.

I feel alive.

If you are living through the hell my husband and I lived through,

Do not give up hope.

Do not despair.

There may be a solution.

Talk to Dr. Goldstein about it.

Do the surgery (if you have what I had).

And even if there isn't a solution yet-

there might be, one day.

We'll be hoping for you,

praying for you,

wanting you to join us in our

happiness.

Happiness!

An incredible word.

An incredible sensation.

An incredible high.

My husband and I went through hell and back.

This was our journey.

We are the champions.

Pelvic Floor Therapy

Today was my first session at the pelvic floor therapy. It went really well. I feel like I have my hope back.

The nice lady (her name was Katie) asked me about all my symptoms and then explained a bit about the pelvis and how pelvic floor therapy works. Basically the pelvis has a LOT of muscles and they are made out of skeletal tissue, which means that just as you get kinks and knots in your shoulders, you can get kinks and knots in the muscles by the pelvis. But there's more to it in that. If anything is out of alignment, it can push something else out of alignment and cause dysfunction or pain. Basically all the organs in the pelvic region are meant to slide past each other as you move or breathe and if they don't, there can be pain.

She did an external exam and then an internal exam of me. For the external exam, she had me stand, sit and lie down on the bed. She examined my thigh muscles, pressing carefully along my legs. It was fascinating because she found these trigger points of pain in my thighs that made me cry out. She explained that this comes about in most women who have sexual pain, because part of what happens when we tighten is we clamp the thigh muscles together. Anyway, she worked on smoothing, massaging and unknotting those trigger points of pain in the thighs.

Once she had finished with that, she got to my internal exam. She explained that there are three layers of muscle in the vagina. We found that my pain was largely concentrated in the muscles in the middle of the figure 8. The figure 8 is made by imagining it twining around the urethra/vagina as one opening and your anus as the other. You can trace a figure 8 around these. The muscles in the middle of the figure 8 (I think the perineal ones? by the perineum?) are the culprit in my case. They are what are causing me so much pain.

The amazingly cool part was that just by moving my muscles with her hand (manually manipulating them) she was able to make that pain much much less so that I almost couldn't feel it. Basically she was contorting the pelvic muscles manually to slacken them and once they were slackened the muscles were no longer screaming pain pain pain in my brain but were tricked into feeling fine. Taking deep breaths and letting out my tension also relaxed me further.

She gave me some stuff to work on (to help relax me and also to work on the thigh muscles that were so tight). I'm supposed to practice diaphragmatic breathing, the butterfly position (knees bent and feet together, like in gym class in school) and also leaning on one leg while having the other one bent and then vice versa.