Post by Sowelu on May 2, 2009 10:34:20 GMT -5
I just love this article and wanted to share it with others, so I'm posting it here. We tend to think of "spiritual" as separate from our humanness, somehow, and that's an illusion. This article, imo, expresses our spirituality-in-human-form, beautifully. This is loving life, loving self, loving the journey... and it's just wonderful to me.
And can't you just feel a grounded sense of filling up with something nurturing and warm and lovely as you read it? Blessings! ~Sowelu
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Purrrrrrr…
Fe Bongolan
May 02 2009
Dear Friend & Reader:
I bought a new bra the other day. Not the kind you would imagine your mother buying, even though for some of you, I am old enough to be your mother and perhaps even your grandmother. This was no white 18-hour wide-strapped built-for-heavy-artillery Playtex special.
This bra came with a set of clear straps and brown satin ones, to match the bra. It can be strapless, or one strap for asymmetrical cut tops, cross-back, halter and regular plain Jane two-strap. It holds up my breasts, both proud D-cups upright and perky. It is a bra ready to go anywhere anytime and any place my fashion sense determines. And I thank the goddess I found it, because it lifts me and my fifty-plus body upward, helping draw attention to my best assets–my chest and my head, providing proportion to my round sensuous hips.
My mother would have been proud.
I have often wondered about and yet am still to fully understand my mother’s amazing sexual vitality. I grew up in a family where sexuality was overt, where the women of my mother’s side of the family had no inhibitions rejoicing in it and talking about it in front of us kids. This has had an effect on me I have yet to fully gauge.
The conversations at the table during my youth between my mom, her sister Rosario and their aunt, Antonia were all-night, smoke-filled marathons of filthy jokes and ribald gossip about themselves, their men and the men of our family — only a quarter of which I could get given my limited understanding of Ilocano, spoken on purpose to try to keep me and the other kiddies lost while in earshot. However, I was intuitive enough to understand their arcane code disclosed some pretty rowdy history.
My parents closed their bedroom door, so I never saw them in the act of lovemaking. I was aware in my childhood that my parents enjoyed each other sexually, and those touches and expressions of their love while we were growing up, even though I didn’t know exactly where they originated from, provided a wordless safety net of emotional security, even as we were becoming a two-language household. There were three languages in our house: Ilocano, English and physicality.
One night, Mama had just finished giving me and my sister our baths, and with our little red muumuus on, we stood over the floor heater to warm us and dry our skin and hair while she took her bath. Dad came home from work with a funny smile. He had purchased one of those ballpoint pens with women in swimsuits that when turned upside down, the colored water inside fell and the bathing suit beauties would expose their nudity. Mama would have none of that in her house, so in protest, she tore off her clothes and paraded around the house naked. My father, my sister and I all fell down laughing so hard we all almost peed ourselves.
That was my first introduction to my mother’s perspective on her body and sexuality.
Mama’s sister Rosario was no less forward in expressing her delight in sex. After a few years of widowhood, she found herself a lover, slightly younger, who was with her until her mid-seventies. On our visit to the Philippines, the first words out of my eighty-year old Auntie Rosario’s mouth after not seeing her for years was that if I didn’t get “on the move” and find a lover, my uterus would shrivel and turn to dust. She regaled us with her days as a high school student residing in a small town near their home town of Santiago, where her roommate at the time would have weekly furniture-breaking assignations with the local priest. One night my aunt was called in to go across town to bring a doctor to break the two apart after a particularly perilous bout of coition. We didn’t need to ask for further details. I’m sure dear departed Auntie Rosario savored those memories.
When I entered my forties, I began to more fully empathize with my mother being a woman as well as being my mother. Mama married two more times after Dad died and was as live a wire as when I remembered her as a kid. My mother’s need for the closeness that sex provided and getting it grounded her in a way that was magical–it produced a variety of joys aside from her physical satisfaction. Her cooking blossomed. Her garden was glorious, she danced on the weekends with her partner, palled around with her women friends, and empty nest be damned, her life was full and boisterous enough for me to wonder whether she still remembered I was her child.
Sex brings life, no matter your age. It is a joy of this world across cultures and time. So when I read about mature women as cougars, (aka MILFs) like I was called the other day at work when I first wore my new bra, I bristled silently. I am fifty-four, a child of the Pluto in Leo generation and I love my body and the possibilities it holds — the potential it has for dancing, cooking, gardening, giving and receiving love as I walk through my own life. I learned from masters that none of it is over at my age, but getting deeper and better as time goes on.
My own sensuality was ingrained in me by the tenderest of hands from women who loved me and respected themselves. They saw sex and physical passion as their right to enjoy when they chose to. They were no cougars. They were lovers who loved men older and younger than they were. I bring that selfhood with me into my mature years with the same sense of wonderment of the mystery that lay behind my parents’ bedroom door. The joys, the moans, the laughter and the feeling of being loved for a moment or a lifetime. Now does that make me predatory?
I am a sensual person who is neither a kitten, a pussycat or a predatory cougar as the Salon article suggests. I concur with the author that cougar is a term coined to objectify and pigeonhole mature women who take control of their own sexual experiences. If I rule this body and I revel in it, which I do, that doesn’t make me a cougar.
If I’m going to be feline, I choose to be a lioness. That’s what I choose to be with the people I want to love for as long as I can, whoever they are. Its important that I have the ability to love well into my later years and far beyond the limited scope of those whose imagination is limited to making me a product or a projection. Loving is living proof of the miracle of being fully alive. And that is why we love in the first place.
Yours & truly,
Fe Bongolan
San Francisco
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