Self pressured

Things have really progressed here.

My clitoris has shrunk. Literally. In the end I was worried over nothing. Over the days and with the application of JONCTUM, it grew smaller steadily until it reached the unobtrusive size of a rosebud.

What’s more, it is now entirely brown, like the rest of my skin.

And to crown it all, the painful sensations are on the way to disappearing. The only area still sensitive is at the front where the stitches are. Because yes, these damned stitches are still firmly in place. Besides that irritates me terribly. Almost four weeks have gone by since my last consultation at the Louis XIV Clinic and the stitches should have come out easily two weeks ago.

Pfff…

I’ll wait, I’ll wait. I’m even becoming a champion of waiting.

In spite of this good news, I have been assailed by a thousand feelings of guilt during the last weeks.

Each of these has been about my man’s frustration. I have been thinking about it all the more, now that my clitoris is all but healed, which leaves me no excuse, no justification for not taking up the question of sex again, from where I left it.

My love keeps insisting that he would prefer me to wait, that he wants to wait for me to be ready in my head as well. And me, I feel bad about making him wait.

It’s so long since we made love that I find it hard to believe when he swears he doesn't bear me any grudge over such a long abstinence. Seven weeks and a half of waiting serenely? No I haven’t believed it for a second. I thought he was saying it out of kindness, out of love or whatever, and that he was sparing me from his dissatisfaction.

He has had to repeat again and again that, although he misses making love, he wants us both to enjoy our lovemaking, and for that he is ready to wait a long time if necessary. He had to repeat it because that doesn’t relate to what I believe I know about men.

For me, a man would like to make love all the time. And if his partner is unavailable too long, then he’ll go and look elsewhere. It seems simplistic but it appears to me to be exactly what I think. Of course a man in love will wait a very long time, but all the same, what I believe is that without sex there is no salvation.

So, for me, more than two months without sex is the antechamber to a split up.

It took me a long time to shake this belief. And in the meantime I have given myself a little anxiety which I will need to discuss with my therapist when he returns from holiday.

What revealed this fear of being left because of the lack of sex was the pre-eminence of my man’s pleasure in my mind. Until now, his needs, wishes, rhythm has guided our sexual life more than mine. My weak libido was happy with little and was inspired by the desire to give him pleasure.

To push the reasoning further, I would say that I was “at my man’s disposal”. Not being able to give him pleasure during my healing, I had the feeling of lacking in my duty, to be at fault.

The sad admission of the complete success of the circumcision that I suffered, I am a docile woman, sexually submissive to male desire. I had, and still have, my mind focused on the sexual needs of my man, totally denying my own.

This reminds me of my room mate at the clinic who told me that her husband, who was working outside Paris, wasn’t expecting to return to Paris until after six weeks of healing. She thought that normal. “You can’t make love, so OK, what good if he returns?” At the time I thought it was awful. To tell the truth, it shocked me.

And, now, I know that basically I think like she does.

I am convinced that it is a view of things that stems from the fact of having been circumcised and the sexuality that you have afterwards when you are adult.

My docility in sexual matters, my subordination to masculine desire, that’s what has been slowly building in my head since my circumcision.

That brings tears to my eyes, that idea. It puts me into a black rage and at the same time makes me sad.

So is that what my mother wanted for me? That I should be submissive to a man? That I should be his sex object? Is this the woman's future she chose for me? Or did she even think about it? After all, if she was circumcised herself, perhaps these are questions that never occurred to her, it seems so normal not to have any sexual prerogative when you are a woman?

I am disgusted. I don’t even want to ask these questions. I can no longer take discovering the extent of the tragedy of circumcision on its victims.

I feel I have still further to go along the road before blossoming. Kilometres even. The price to pay for repairing the broken pots seems to me to be heavy, very heavy. That annoys me to some extent, that statement.

My man has suggested to me consulting a sexologist in a few months “to learn how to make love well”. I think it’s a good idea. Because even if we have taken up lovemaking again (pianissimo this time, I’ve learnt my lesson) and it’s going relatively well, I basically don’t know how to make love well….

[Original in French]

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Small steps

Thursday 12 July 2007

The ice is breaking more and more between my clitoris and me.

Earlier, during the iodine era, there was a swab between us when we met. But now my personal hygiene puts me in direct contact with my precious organ, creating a new form of intimacy.

At first I was very intimidated. I barely touched it, very cautiously and holding my breath. It was returning from far away and above all I didn’t want to irritate it by persistently insisting that it reveal itself.

Then, as the days have been passing and I haven’t been suffering any rebuffs, I have become more familiar with it. So my timidity has given way to great curiosity. I study its shape, I explore the folds and recesses around it, I assess its size, I try to feel it “inside”, in brief, I wander around the area in complete liberty.

And it was a pleasure mixed with relief that I noticed after an exploration recently that my clitoris had decreased in size. I have been thinking it was enormous, to put it bluntly. And I found that was making me awfully worried. I was afraid it would stay like that, planted in my intimate area like an iceberg in a lake.

OK, I don’t want it to become really tiny, that would certainly bother me. The ideal in fact would be that it keeps its current size.

I don’t know if it’s the cream I am applying every morning or the Marseille soap, but it looks very different from last week. Not only is it smaller, but also it’s changing colour. From a bright pink it has changed into a very chic salmon pink. I imagine it will need only a few weeks to change into brown.

What’s more, now that it isn’t taking up all the room, I can FINALLY see my labia minora. I am reassured. I am downright delighted. They seem quite pretty, small though they are. And they soften the look of my sex I think.

So, as if on purpose, the stitches still haven’t gone. That worries me a bit, but Dr Foldès having spoken about “the following weeks” I will wait….

With the arrival of all this good news, and since we have the blessing of the surgeon, my man and I tried taking up some bedroom activities recently.

We started with a fanfare, happy to be finally making love again.

But although things went well, I felt more and more tense. I was frightened. Frightened of hurting my clitoris in the heat of action, frightened that my man would hurt me while caressing me, frightened of being hurt because of the stitches.

And of course, sure enough, I was more in pain than anything else. To the point of breaking up the festivities.

Those catastrophic capers gave me a terrible blow to my spirits. I was sad all the next day. Sad, disappointed and a bit discouraged too.

All that for that?!

Pfff…

My man consoled me by saying that we weren’t in any hurry and that I obviously need more time to become more confident, not to be worried about it being painful.

He is right I think. But, there is still a little disappointment in my heart.

I really thought I was ready.

OK, it’s true that I was dreading careless contact with my clitoris. I am afraid of feeling a sharp pain or something similarly horrible with any over-abrupt contact.

Nevertheless, it’s much less disagreeably sensitive. The day before yesterday I even risked wearing trousers. Wisely, I chose fairly large trousers, even too big for me, just to be comfortable. It wasn’t till the end of the day that I felt any difficulty.

For the moment I have returned to my darling skirts, but I found the trial promising.

My relationship with my clitoris and its vicinity is at only an early stage. I’m making a wish that my clitoris and I will end up by being as thick as thieves, and very soon…

[Original in French]

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Hip hip hooray!

Thursday 5 July 2007

It was raining very heavily on Tuesday afternoon when I left Paris for going to my second post-operative consultation at the Louis XIV Clinic. My feet were soaked but nevertheless I was feeling tranquil. In the RER which was taking me to St Germain en Laye, I felt nothing particular.

However as the station approached an irrational tension took hold of me. As I walked towards the clinic, through the sunny town, the tension grew and my legs started to go numb.

As I had arrived early I stopped at a café, the same one that I had waited in before my first consultation. The tension that gripped me changed into a more diffuse fear.

What concerned me most was that the healing was possibly too slow and that I was perhaps going to have to return to St Germain en Laye. I didn’t want to return. Not for a long time anyway.

There were very few people in the waiting room. Few people and no black women. I was surprised with that but I didn’t have time to think about it because, hardly had I sat down than I noticed Dr Foldès who was moving towards his secretary. And strangely, I wasn’t as worried or concerned to see him as I was the times before.

I almost didn’t have to wait at all. Leaving his secretary’s office, he came into the waiting room and called me. It was at that moment that I noticed my fear had returned.

In his office, he started by joking about my guitar (I was to have a lesson a bit later in the day so I had to cart it with me to the clinic). He was smiling and seemed in an excellent mood.

He started by asking me the date of my operation.

He was in the process of consulting a multicoloured file carrying my name when a telephone call interrupted him. Apparently it was about a woman who wanted to arrange a date for an operation. He turned the pages in his diary and I could see that every Wednesday and Friday were full of African-sounding names, circled in light blue ink. Perhaps they were the names of the women he was going to operate on?

After turning several pages, he asked the person at the other end to contact him again at the end of July. Then he put the phone down and gestured me towards the end of the room where his examination table had pride of place.

As he got up, he asked if I still had a discharge. “Almost none” I answered. “That’s normal. It will stop altogether soon” he assured me.

After a rapid examination he enthused: “Perfect! You have a magnificent clitoris! Good position, good size, good colour. It is per-fect! Are you happy?” “Oh how I am” I replied, really proud. In truth I was more than happy. I felt delighted and strangely relieved that all went so well.

“From now on you are no longer a circumcised woman”. That sentence brought tears to my eyes. I considered I was no longer a circumcised woman once I left the operating theatre but to hear that, from his mouth, that really touched me. It was as if he were liberating me from something. As though he were absolving me.

He explained that the first part of my healing, the most difficult, was over. I now had to approach the second part which would give sensitivity to my clitoris.

This second part, he told me, was at least as important as the operation itself.

And the good news had started to flow.

So, finished with the iodine cleansing four times a day.

Yippee!!!!

Goodbye to the roving washbag! Goodbye sterile swabs! Goodbye washbottle! Our history stops here! I am free of you!

From now on, for six weeks, I need do only two washes per day, one in the morning and one in the evening and .. Marseille soap. He made a point over not using either intimate gels or shower gels for washing my clitoris or labia. He said Marseille soap was the only cleanser which wouldn’t harm the area.

Each morning (and only in the morning), after my shower, I have to apply a small amount of cream called JONCTUM to my labia minora and clitoris. It need only be a very small amount to form a fine protective layer.

This miraculous cream is going to be a sort of dressing which will make “the operation zone more comfortable” to use his terms. Moreover it will let the skin form and cover my clitoris again. Finally, the application of the cream will have the effect of making my clitoris more sensitive.

Taking advantage of a pause in the conversation, I told him about my anxiety over my labia minora which I still couldn’t see. He explained that was normal, that they were certainly there at the base of my clitoris but that the latter, which still hadn’t returned to a normal size (excellent news, I found it still to be just too big) was masking them somewhat. What’s more, they are quite small, the process of reconstruction chosen having been to inject the flesh which had escaped the knife of the circumciser. So I will see them better (if I can say that as I have never had the honour of seeing them at all) in a few days.

He carried on by saying that he had given me back my clitoris and that it belonged to me. “It’s as if I had given you a finger or your nose, it would be part of you and, accordingly, it belongs only to you”. He explained that to rediscover its sensitivity, I shouldn’t depend on men or anyone else. “It’s for you to find this sensitivity by familiarising yourself with your clitoris little by little”

He said that the unpleasant sensations that I was feeling currently when touching my clitoris would disappear gradually in the next few weeks and that it would take about six months before it would be completely sensitive again.

I asked him when I could start up sport again and he said I could do it from now on. The same with swimming.

I also asked the question about sexual relations. And I can restart those too from now on. He said it wouldn’t be terribly agreeable to start off but it would soon be more comfortable. Joking, he asked if my man was in a hurry. When I answered that my love wanted to wait for the green light before doing anything, he answered it was to his credit.

Then there was silence. Then I said to him, “Thank you doctor, many thanks”. My voice was faltering as I spoke. I wanted to clarify to him exactly why I was thanking him, explain this “thank you”. But nothing came out, I had a lump in my throat.

He nodded his head, silent and smiling…

Accompanying me to the door, he said, while shaking my hand, “Good, now we have to convince other young women to come for the operation!” So I told him about my blog and its subject. He said it was a good idea, that reading the story of women who undertake the operation could perhaps encourage others to take the plunge.

It’s really because I don’t chat easily in public that I satisfied myself with smiling. Because it was extremely difficult to prevent myself from purring contentedly.

“You can write on your blog that I am only a doctor. I cannot push women to have the operation. It’s their choice. Theirs alone. I will accompany them, operate but the decision to reject this custom and to want to rediscover their bodies belongs to them. I can’t take it for them, “he added.

“Good the, I’ll see you in December for a little update?”. On these words and on my “Yes, of course” rather strangled by emotion that Dr Foldès and I took our leave of each other.

Going to his secretary to pay for the consultation, I was smiling broadly. Sitting down opposite her to write the cheque for 50 euros, I couldn’t stop myself exclaiming that I was so haaappy!!

She asked me why and I explained to her that it was because everything had gone so well. Smiling she said “You doubted it?”

Leaving, ecstatic, I wanted to skip about like a kid. I called my man and I submerged him in my joy, poor thing (he didn’t take anything in, he had to wait until I explained everything again once I had got home).

Then, when I going to the station, I remembered a question that I hadn’t asked Dr Foldès. I called him and told him that in my happiness I had forgotten to talk to him about these dratted stitches which had still not come out. He answered that it was imminent, that it would happen within the next two weeks.

Yippeeeeee!

God I am so happy.

Since the consultation I have the feeling of being incredibly light. There is lively music in my head all the time.

If that is what joy is like, I wouldn’t be at all surprised!

[Original in French]

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