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Category Archives: Naked Pictures of Faceless People

NPFP Guest Post: Surviving Abuse with Disabilities

Welcome to RMB’s Naked Pictures of Faceless People, a series of guest posts from diverse anonymous bloggers. (Read more about NPFP’s origins.) These are the posts that are jumping to get out of us, but for whatever reason — safety, embarrassment, conflict of interest, protection of loved ones’ reputations or feelings, or so on — we don’t or won’t or can’t post at our own blogs. Anyone, whether blogger or reader only, is welcome to submit or discuss a potential post by emailing me at arwyn at raisingmyboychick dot com.

Trigger Warning: There is a trigger warning on this post for references to child abuse and violence against people with disabilities.

Surviving Abuse with Disabilities

I am an abuse survivor, although I don’t like to use the word “abuse”. I was physically and emotionally hurt by my parents. I am also disabled. Autistic, among other things. These two things may not seem like they have anything to do with each other, but they do.

First of all, people with disabilities are more commonly victimized to abuse than the general population. This may be for several reasons that I do not understand, but it is true. Secondly, disabled people may be less likely to report abuse, for example because they do not have the skills to communicate what happened to them. These are both points that warrant attention, but this is not what I’m going to write about now.

What I’ll write about is when abuse is excused by a person’s disability. My parents beat me on quite a regular basis, and more often said that I was worthless and that they were only parenting me because no foster home would want me. These actions would’ve been considered abusive if they happened to a person without disabilities, but in my case, almost everyone — even my therapist — contends that my autism is the root cause of it all.

You see, I had behavior problems as a child and young adult. I had frequent meltdowns in which I would scream and yell and sometimes, as a child, act physically aggressively towards my parents. Even though no one says that this excuses the actions my parents committed, people often do say that it is my autism that is the main problem, and that, if my parents had sought help for my autism — which they didn’t, since they were in denial –, nothing would have happened.

Even in abuse survivor communities I sometimes hear talk as if my disability is at fault instead of my parents having to take responsibility for their actions. Once, I wrote to a support group about being triggered by an article that revealed that children with behavioral conditions are more likely to be victimized to abuse, and I was informed repeatedly by a fellow member that people needed to protect themselves and others from the hurt done by children with behavior problems. This gave me the idea that my disability was truly at fault for the abuse. When someone stuck up for me and said the other member’s words were inappropriate and that abuse by parents is never the child’s fault, this person was reprimanded by the group owner.

I have internalized a lot of the logic that says that disability makes abuse understandable. Survivor guilt is the result, but a more complicated kind of survivor guilt than that experienced by most survivors of trauma and abuse. “It was not your fault,” simply doesn’t make sense when people go on to blame an integral part of who I am.

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Please support the Naked Pictures of Faceless People project by commenting on the posts. Comments which attack or attempt to guess the identity or any aspect of the identity of the blogger will be deleted, however. Protect and respect this space as though it were your own work on display here, naked and faceless.

Anonymous comments are welcome on NPFP posts. Simply put “Anonymous” or any pseudonym in Name, and either your own or a fake email addresses (ex me@me.com) as the email. NOTE: If you have a Gravatar associated with your email address, it will show up even with an anonymous name, in which case please use a different or a fake email address.

11 Comments | Posted on 4 March 2011 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Naked Pictures of Faceless People | Tags: ableism, autism, disability, violence against children

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Naked Pictures of Faceless People: Yes, Tinkerbell!

Welcome to RMB’s Naked Pictures of Faceless People, a series of guest posts from diverse anonymous bloggers. (Read more about NPFP’s origins.) These are the posts that are jumping to get out of us, but for whatever reason — safety, embarrassment, conflict of interest, protection of loved ones’ reputations or feelings, or so on — we don’t or won’t or can’t post at our own blogs. Anyone, whether blogger or reader only, is welcome to submit or discuss a potential post by emailing me at arwyn at raisingmyboychick dot com.

Yes, Tinkerbell!

I am the mother of a toddler boy (or apparent boy, but I’m going to stick with the male pronoun since as best we know it applies), and recently he had his second birthday. We took him out to do several things. Including pick something (modest, not huge) out at the toy store, and get a toddler pillow for his new bed.

At the toy store, we were wandering with him in his dad’s arms (where he had chosen to be), trying to spot things to offer him as choices. As we strolled through the books, he lunged down to grab at a book on a shelf that was waist-high to his dad (ie, down around his feet) and clung to it. Well, then. The book in question was a Tinkerbell book, an oversize board book with a little keyboard that played some pre-set sounds related to the story. My husband was briefly concerned but, to my relief, his concern was whether or not the book had small parts (our son still tries to eat his toys and books) — it was age-suitable, and my husband relaxed.

Our son loves this book. He punched buttons all the day he got it, and he comes back to it frequently. One button is a pink sparkly heart that makes a sound I can only describe as sparkly, and the first time I heard it I said “Awwww!” (in that sappy voice you do) and now my son says that about every fifth time he hears that button.

That evening we went to get him a second pillow for his newly-converted bed (he already had one I made him). There were a number of options, but once we offered him the Tinkerbell pillow he rejected all others in the “this one or that one?” game and clung to it throughout the store. So Tinkerbell came home again.

When we got home, he poked the pillow in Tink’s nose and frowned. “Bwoken!”

“No, honey, it’s not broken. The book makes music. That’s a pillow. It’s still Tinkerbell, but it doesn’t make music.”

He set the pillow down on a chair and went back to playing with the book. I left the tags on the pillow, waiting to see what would happen (and to give him time to forget the disappointment), and he appeared to ignore it for the most part. Two days later I asked him if he wanted the Tinkerbell pillow in his bed (the Tinkerbell book stays downstairs; we try to keep loud toys out of the bedroom). “Tinkuhbell upstairs!” He hugged the pillow. I took the tags off. He’s cuddled it many nights since.

I don’t personally understand his love of it: it’s very pretty, and the back side is soft, but the Tinkerbell side is scratchy because of the fabrics and threads she’s done in. All the same, he does love it.

To those of you who, when told this story, give a sigh of relief when I describe his disappointment to discover that the pillow didn’t make music, and to whom I never tell the ending: fuck you. The Tinkerbell pillow is cute, my son loves it, and I probably ought to tell you that but I also refuse to pull him — a living breathing person you know — into a battle he doesn’t even realize exists.

To those of you who are neutral: thank you.

To those of you who visibly bristle when I say I left the tags on the pillow (often before I say why, because of how I normally tell it, feeling out my audience), and who relax or smile when you hear why, and that he did keep it? Thank you. Thank you for caring enough to be ready to tell me off (or at least be contemplating it) if I was squashing my child. I remember, and I appreciate it.

Thank goodness, none of the people who disapprove of his love of Tink are close to him so far. (At least as far as I know; maybe someone hid it better, but if they hide it, it’s their problem, not his or mine.) Because if it were someone who would bring it up to him, I’d have a Conversation to have.

A few things for you to think about, if my son’s love of Tinkerbell bugs you:

1. He’s two. Just barely two. Nothing about now is permanent, unless it is. There’s no way to know.

2. What is he supposed to do, hate girls or fairies? I’m not too worried about him being antisocial with faeries (the Tinkerbell kind, not using this as the modern slang, thanks), but he does have to attend school and work with girls and women as he grows, and I’d rather he liked them than not!

3. If you’re worried he’ll grow up feminine, or gay, or…let me just say that if he turns out to be a lesbian when he grows up? My one hope would be that he’ll be a happy one. Which means that if you disapprove of this kind of thing, you’re not the person I want much involved in his life, in case I’m using all the wrong pronouns now.

He’s young, and he’s a person, and he’s finding his own way. I won’t push him to like or dislike Tinkerbell — or trucks, or dragons, or roaring, or anything else that isn’t harmful to himself or others. And if I can help it, I won’t let others, either.

Because I want him to grow up whole and strong. Whoever he is, whoever he will be, he is my child and I love him. And I expect you to at least respect that he is and ought to be his own person.

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From Arwyn: For more posts on this topic which, serendipitously (or unsurprisingly, given my known interest in gender and parenting) I recently ran across, see Tinkerbell Valentine of Much Consternation and And Another Thing! at Pax (Ro)mama and My Sons are Gender Conformists at Blogging When the Baby Isn’t Looking.

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Please support the Naked Pictures of Faceless People project by commenting on the posts. Comments which attack or attempt to guess the identity or any aspect of the identity of the blogger will be deleted, however. Protect and respect this space as though it were your own work on display here, naked and faceless.

Anonymous comments are welcome on NPFP posts. Simply put “Anonymous” or any pseudonym in Name, and either your own or a fake email addresses (ex me@me.com) as the email. NOTE: If you have a Gravatar associated with your email address, it will show up even with an anonymous name, in which case please use a different or a fake email address.

21 Comments | Posted on 27 February 2011 by Arwyn | Category: Naked Pictures of Faceless People, Parenting | Tags: Gender, gender diverse parenting, gender neutral parenting, gendered products, Links, societal pressures

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Naked Pictures of Faceless People: Trauma by Any Other Name

Welcome to RMB’s Naked Pictures of Faceless People, a series of guest posts from diverse anonymous bloggers. (Read more about NPFP’s origins.) These are the posts that are jumping to get out of us, but for whatever reason — safety, embarrassment, conflict of interest, protection of loved ones’ reputations or feelings, or so on — we don’t or won’t or can’t post at our own blogs. Anyone, whether blogger or reader only, is welcome to submit or discuss a potential post by emailing me at arwyn at raisingmyboychick dot com.

Trigger Warning: There is a trigger warning on this post for descriptions of medical/birth trauma.

Trauma by Any Other Name

There’s a lot of stuff around about on the Internet about birth trauma — both the medical-clinical kind, wherein actual physical damage is caused to baby or mother or both, and the emotional/psychological kind, which is posited for babies and reported by mothers after some births. Like, I suspect, a lot of women, I’ve read my share of these stories and have been moved by many of them, horrified by others, and mystified by a few.

While sympathetic, even empathetic, to the raw pain expressed by many of these women, I wondered in my heart if birth trauma wasn’t what my mother has always referred to as “women’s war stories” — an expression of shared trouble to bind and bond a group as much as to release emotion. Birth, after all, is by its nature a major, transformatory and physically and emotionally very significant event. I suppose it would be fair to say that I never really thought the concept had applicability to my own three birthing experiences — until the past few months.

Let me be clear: neither I nor any of my three baby girls suffered physical birth trauma. The damage done to my body by the major abdominal surgery that is a cesarean section was planned, and, in the scheme of things, proportionate to the result it produced (ie a healthy, intact baby). My body was not unduly tardy in healing these gut wounds and my uterus, if scarred, remains functional and behaves normally, as does my skin. I did not feel then, and do not feel now, that my c-sections were botched or that they were unnecessary. The surgeons who performed my deliveries were careful and neat workers and I had none of the complications that I know can attend abdominal deliveries.

However.

My last delivery, of my beautiful almost-2-year-old, C, in February 2009, did involve physical injury to me, although not related to the surgery itself but to the spinal anesthetic. The anesthetic caused nerve damage to a wide span of nerve bundles in my upper spine, which caused a range of subsequent physical and emotional effects which mimicked the onset of MS, and left me living in terror of the paralysis I felt sure was coming, for several months at least.

Even after my wonderful, thrice-blessed neurologist, who took me seriously and tested me to within an inch of my life to find out what was *really* going on, had reassured me that the damage was not life or mobility threatening and that I would, in time, recover, I still had many months more of physical symptoms to get through before late 2009 and 2010 brought ever-increasing improvement and relief, to the point where now, in January 2011, those physical sensations are a nightmarish memory, with only occasional flare-ups if I am exhausted, very stressed, or very sick. (I will be vulnerable to those flare-ups all my life).

Excuse me if I ramble. I am actually having difficulty writing as I am shaking as I start allowing these memories to surface and be spoken. I need to write this, though; tonight I realized how badly I do need to.

I knew, obviously, that I had been physically traumatized by the anesthetic at my last birth. That was clear once my neurologist had completed his tests. What I have only woken up to recently, however, is the fact that I have also been psychologically and emotionally traumatized by this experience as well.

I have been shying away from calling this trauma by its name, because I have been unwilling to label myself as a “victim”, unhappy to allow the word to be breathed in the same context as the joyful welcoming of my daughter, all too aware of how much suffering others have undergone and not wanting to even implicitly compare my experience to theirs. But I know that really those are not reasons enough to deny my reality and that continuing to do so is not helping me to face these memories and deal with them.

So here it is:

I am traumatized by what happened when I gave birth to C.

Remembering the anesthetic being inserted is like an unbearable toothache, where the tooth throbs in agony but you can’t seem to help yourself from poking at it with your tongue. I try not to dwell on it or even give it head room, but things remind me, and all of a sudden I’m back, telling the anesthetist that it feels wrong, different from the other times, and being shushed. I flush with heat and then cold, and then the tingling starts, a psychologically induced but physically felt ghost of the myoclonic jerking, loss of balance, parasthesia and terror that I felt when C was 1 to 10 weeks old (the worst time).

By careful mental discipline, I can think about C’s birth without allowing my mind to touch on the anesthetic. I can remember the delight I felt in seeing her delivered safe and beautiful, I can remember her sweet newborn smell, I can taste my tears of happiness as I gave her the very first and blessedly easy breastfeed. If I focus my mind’s eye on her, on C herself, I can remember peacefulness and love and tiredness and happiness and milk and sleep and sweetness. All that good stuff. It’s not lost to me and it’s not less real for the fact that, if I let my mind stray to my own body -

I feel sick.

I feel incredibly anxious.

I feel fearful and closed-in and yes,

I feel invaded.

It was brought home forcefully to me how strong this reaction is as I was telling my elder daughters stories before bed tonight. They wanted me to tell them the stories of when they were born, stories they have always loved hearing and I have always loved telling. Tonight, for some reason (perhaps her increasing need for detail to know every bit), the 7 year old wasn’t content for me to talk in generalities – she wanted the specifics of how the needle was inserted, where it was inserted, how it felt when my legs went numb. And although her birth was not traumatic at all, I found myself struggling to breathe as I described these things to her, my mind’s eye filled with a picture of myself in 2009, lying on that table, about to be harmed. I had to tell her that I couldn’t talk about it anymore, and move the story on to talking about her surgical delivery (I can talk and think about my abdomen being incised and a baby removed with complete equanimity and even humor. Strange).

Is this reaction disproportionate? Sure, it is. Is it reasonable? No, I know it isn’t. Do I have any just cause for complaint? I think I don’t, and so I don’t complain.

I’m not complaining now. Not really.

I’m just calling it by its name. Birth trauma. Trauma, occasioned to me, during a surgical birth. Trauma that I have to understand and acknowledge in order to be able to release.

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Please support the Naked Pictures of Faceless People project by commenting on the posts. Comments which attack or attempt to guess the identity or any aspect of the identity of the blogger will be deleted, however. Protect and respect this space as though it were your own body on display here, naked and faceless.

Anonymous comments are welcome on NPFP posts. Simply put “Anonymous” or any pseudonym in Name, and either your own or a fake email addresses (ex me@me.com) as the email. NOTE: If you have a Gravatar associated with your email address, it will show up even with an anonymous name, in which case please use a different or a fake email address.

9 Comments | Posted on 23 January 2011 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Naked Pictures of Faceless People | Tags: birth, Mental Health

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Naked Pictures of Faceless People: Will You Love the New Baby More than Me?

Welcome to RMB’s Naked Pictures of Faceless People, a series of guest posts from diverse anonymous bloggers. (Read more about NPFP’s origins.) These are the posts that are jumping to get out of us, but for whatever reason — safety, embarrassment, conflict of interest, protection of loved ones’ reputations or feelings, or so on — we don’t or won’t or can’t post at our own blogs. Anyone, whether blogger or reader only, is welcome to submit or discuss a potential post by emailing me at arwyn at raisingmyboychick dot com.

Will You Love the New Baby More than Me?

It’s the kind of things small children worry about, not their parents. But here I am, pregnant, and worried that my in-laws will love this baby more than our first.

My husband is an only child. His family moved quite a bit. His family made it very clear starting shortly after our wedding that they expected us to give them grandchildren – that we owed his grandmother babies to play with since he hadn’t been around for her to dote on as an infant; that we owed his parents the baby girl they’d wanted but never had.

When we started pursuing fertility treatments, we said nothing. Smart-ass comments met every question about when we were giving them grandchildren. A friend of theirs came to visit with a little girl she’d adopted a year or so before, and my in-laws spoiled her rotten… and proceeded to berate us further about not giving them a baby girl. When it got to be too much that evening, I finally said that we were considering adoption. That stopped my father-in-law in his tracks, and his response was that their friend was very lucky, and we had to be careful if we were going to adopt, “because you never know what you’ll get.”

My response was that you didn’t really know what you were getting with your own child either, but he brushed me off as being silly. Looking back, that should have been a clue right there.

After 5 years, including a couple of breaks and a consult with the world’s least sympathetic reproductive endocrinologist, I got pregnant. We told our parents right away, and told them we weren’t telling anyone else yet. The following weekend, I was 6 weeks pregnant, and we traveled to a family gathering in a small town a few hours away, only to discover that my father-in-law had told everyone in his entire hometown that we were having a baby.

I knew only a handful of people there, but more than half of the attendees stopped to congratulate us and to ask the age old questions – boy or girl, due date, names, etc. Seriously, I was six weeks pregnant, just getting hit with all-day morning sickness on the trip, and we didn’t even know most of these people, yet here they were, asking questions that really, there was no answer for.

My in-laws continued throughout the pregnancy, suggesting names based on the most embarrassing nicknames they could come up with, and making comments about how they’d be more than happy to babysit immediately upon birth, if not sooner. They wanted us to have a girl so they could buy dresses more appropriate for pageants than babies. They wanted us to at least partially formula feed so they could feed the baby too. When our ultrasound said it was a girl, they were ecstatic.

Imagine their horror then when complications resulted in an emergency c-section very early in the pregnancy. When they arrived at the hospital, their only concern was when they could see “their” baby – keeping in mind that I was so sick I did not see my baby for more than two days.

And then we had the audacity to tell them “by the way, the ultrasound was wrong, It’s a Boy!” Their dreams were crushed, and you could see it in their eyes.

During my recovery in the hospital, my in-laws accused me of being rude for being too sick to carry on conversations with them. They were angry that the hospital had rules for the NICU and thought the rules shouldn’t apply to them. Their visits became rarer as they realized the nurses meant business, and even when they did come, they stood back in the corner, terrified of the equipment and alarms.

Over the years, it’s not gotten any better with them – we have a pretty smart child with some physical challenges. Grandma and grandpa would not hold him when he was finally big enough to hold, and are now upset that as a busy toddler he doesn’t want to be picked up by people who he’s not comfortable with. They wouldn’t learn CPR when he was about to come home from the hospital, and they were horrified that we expected them to learn to care for his physical needs if they wanted to babysit (they haven’t learned, so they haven’t babysat, and no longer seem interested in doing so). They only come to visit for holidays, and they’ve actually never called to check on him when he’s had surgery – and he’s had 5 surgeries over his short life. They’ve said to him, “well, we’d like you to come visit, but maybe when you are bigger and need less attention.”

And now, here I am, pregnant again. Will this be the perfect little girl they so desperately want? If so, what does that mean for my son and his tentative relationship with them? Would they love her more just because she was the baby they wanted but didn’t have, and how differently would they treat the two?

And if this child is not “perfect” – and let’s not even get into defining that – I suppose it depends on how it works out, because it’s obvious from things they’ve said that they see a hierarchy of disabilities. Apparently they see it as a blessing that at least their grandson is towards the top of the food chain – he can see, he seems cognitively intact, he’s not in a wheelchair. They’ve made comments about other children in his favorite signing videos – amazement that “kids like that” can learn sign language or even have any sense of meaningful communication.

Their bigotry goes further though. They’ve told us that they’re glad we didn’t adopt – glad he didn’t come from some foreign country, glad his skin color is the same as theirs, glad his mother wasn’t “some crackhead”. They’re very pleased that, as far as they can tell, he’s “all boy”; we’ve been asked not to dress him in anything too girly, even for Halloween, for fear of turning him gay, because that would be horrible, as far as they’re concerned.

What a sad world they must live in to see things this way, and to not have learned that all children start out the same, and they all deserve our love. How sad that they’re missing out on our amazingly cute, opinionated little boy and his wicked sense of humor; that their promise in his first days of going to the park to play has not materialized….even though the park is one of his favorite places to go.

In any case, we already love this new baby as much as we love our son – I’d prefer a full term healthy baby and a complication free pregnancy, but if not… we’ll play the hand we’ve been dealt, just as we have with our son, doing the best we can to get everything this child needs to succeed in life.

I just hope I never have to figure out how to explain why it seems that grandma and grandpa love one of them more than the other.

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Please support the Naked Pictures of Faceless People project by commenting on the posts. Comments which attack or attempt to guess the identity or any aspect of the identity of the blogger will be deleted, however. Protect and respect this space as though it were your own work on display here, naked and faceless.

Anonymous comments are welcome on NPFP posts. Simply put “Anonymous” or any pseudonym in Name, and either your own or a fake email addresses (ex me@me.com) as the email. NOTE: If you have a Gravatar associated with your email address, it will show up even with an anonymous name, in which case please use a different or a fake email address. If your comment does not appear within 12 hours of posting, please email me as I may have to rescue it from the spam filter.

23 Comments | Posted on 4 January 2011 by Arwyn | Category: Naked Pictures of Faceless People, Parenting | Tags: ableism, birth, disability, myth of the Perfect Baby, pregnancy

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NPFP Guest Post: My Breasts, My Children, My Self

Welcome to RMB’s Naked Pictures of Faceless People, a series of guest posts from diverse anonymous writers. (Read more about NPFP’s origins.) These are the posts that are jumping to get out of us, but for whatever reason — safety, embarrassment, conflict of interest, protection of loved ones’ reputations or feelings, or so on — we don’t or won’t or can’t post at our own blogs. Anyone, whether blogger or reader only, is welcome to submit or discuss a potential post by emailing me at arwyn at raisingmyboychick dot com.

My Breasts, My Children, My Self

Boobs. Hooters. Knockers. Ta tas. Bazongas. Melons. Tits. Jugs.

Breasts have a lot of nicknames. It’s how you know they’re naughty, right? I can also think of a lot of nicknames for penises, vulvas and vaginas. But I can’t think of any for elbows or ankles. It tells you something about what were afraid to name. It probably also tells you something about why our society is so intensely uncomfortable with breastfeeding. Breasts are naughty, therefore breastfeeding must be naughty, right?

But that’s not my point. Not exactly.

No matter what you call them, I’ve always been rather proud of my breasts. Since I’m anonymous here I feel free to say that I have great breasts. I have enjoyed them immensely — both out of vanity, and as part of my sexuality. My breasts always play a large part when I express myself sexually.

Then I had babies. I always knew that I wanted to breastfeed. It wasn’t easy at first, but I did it. The exclusively breastfed-for-six-months-and-continued-well-into-toddlerhood kind of did it. Breastfeeding plays a large part in my mothering. I would have been a mother whether I breastfed or not, of course, but the fact that I did has been incorporated into most every part of my mother-identity.

In sex and breastfeeding my breasts serve two very different functions, and I keep them separate. I don’t feel aroused when I breastfeed. And I don’t think of my babies when my partner licks my nipples. My frame of mind is not the same. The sensations are not the same. The people I’m with are not the same.

And yet, my body isn’t always so clear on the separation. If I watch a suggestive TV show while I’m breastfeeding, I find the intermingling of nursing my baby and sexuality to be uncomfortable. The scene on the TV (which may only be PG-rated petting) plus the stimulation of breastfeeding leaves me feeling slightly aroused, and I don’t want to feel aroused while breastfeeding. So I steer clear of TV shows that are likely to feature anything more than chaste kissing while I breastfeed, and I’m fine.

When I’m sleeping, though, it’s not so easy. At least three times over during my years of breastfeeding I have woken up from a suggestive dream that happened to occur while my baby was latched on and nursing. My babies nursed at night a lot — eventually I was bound to have a sexy dream while they were doing it. But on these occasions, the telltale clenching in my vagina told me that I’d just had an orgasm.

This is not a good orgasm. It’s intensely emotionally disturbing. Breastfeeding my baby caused me to have an orgasm. What kind of mother am I? What kind of person am I? Children and sexuality should not intermingle. I don’t want them to intermingle. I am concerned about what other people would think of me, and my mothering, if they knew that they had intermingled in this way.

After waking up to an orgasm while breastfeeding, I feel reluctant to breastfeed for some time. For days, I try to put my baby off when he or she asks to nurse. To this day I haven’t told anyone that I orgasmed while breastfeeding, not even my husband. I am too afraid. I have faced a lot of internal turmoil, and decided that it’s something best kept to myself.

I do realize that I haven’t done anything wrong. I in no way asked for this to happen, or caused it to happen. If I were conscious, I would do everything in my power to keep myself from feeling aroused while breastfeeding. And to put it in perspective, we are talking about three occasions over the course of many years of accumulated breastfeeding. I believe that my own emotional discomfort over these incidents is outweighed by the benefit that my children gained through breastfeeding into toddlerhood. But I still wish it hadn’t happened.

I love my breasts. My breasts have provided some lovely window dressing. They have provided immense pleasure. They have nourished my children. They are a part of me, even though I haven’t always gotten along with them. I suppose this is why we’ve given breasts so many names – they can be enigmatic and fill us with conflict. They can sustain life and create pleasure, but they can also cause intense discomfort as we just try to get a decent night’s rest. By calling them boobies, or jugs, or melons, we’re just trying to lighten the blow.

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From Arwyn: Though our stories are different, this naked and faceless writer is not the only one to feel sexual sensations while breastfeeding. If you have as well, and thought you were alone, I promise you are not: On breastfeeding and things we don’t talk about, and Nursing and nuance: breastfeeding isn’t creepy, except when it is. Please share links in the comments or email me if you are aware of other stories of how parents who breastfeed have struggled with — or embraced, or ignored, or done away with — arousal during breastfeeding.

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Please support the Naked Pictures of Faceless People project by commenting on the posts. Comments which attack or attempt to guess the identity or any aspect of the identity of the blogger will be deleted, however. Protect and respect this space as though it were your own work on display here, naked and faceless.

Anonymous comments are welcome on NPFP posts. Simply put “Anonymous” or any pseudonym in Name, and either your own or a fake email addresses (ex me@me.com) as the email. NOTE: If you have a Gravatar associated with your email address, it will show up even with an anonymous name, in which case please use a different or a fake email address.

Boobs. Hooters. Knockers. Ta tas. Bazongas. Melons. Tits. Jugs.

Breasts have a lot of nicknames. It�s how you know they�re naughty, right? I can also think of a lot of nicknames for penises, vulvas and vaginas. But I can�t think of any for elbows or ankles. It tells you something about what we�re afraid to name. It probably also tells you something about why our society is so intensely uncomfortable with breastfeeding. Breasts are naughty, therefore breastfeeding must be naughty, right?

But that�s not my point. Not exactly.

No matter what you call them, I�ve always been rather proud of my breasts. Since I�m anonymous here I feel free to say that I have great breasts. I have enjoyed them immensely - both out of vanity, and as part of my sexuality. My breasts always play a large part when I express myself sexually.

Then I had babies. I always knew that I wanted to breastfeed. It wasn�t easy at first, but I did it. The exclusively breastfed-for-six-months-and-continued-well-into-toddlerhood kind of did it. Breastfeeding plays a large part in my mothering. I would have been a mother whether I breastfed or not, of course, but the fact that I did has been incorporated into most every part of my mother-identity.

In sex and breastfeeding my breasts serve two very different functions, and I keep them separate. I don�t feel aroused when I breastfeed. And I don�t think of my babies when my partner licks my nipples. My frame of mind is not the same.The sensations are not the same. The people I�m with are not the same.

And yet, my body isn�t always so clear on the separation. If I watch a suggestive TV show while I�m breastfeeding, I find the intermingling of nursing my baby and sexuality to be uncomfortable. The scene on the TV (which may only be PG-rated petting) plus the stimulation of breastfeeding leaves me feeling slightly aroused, and I don't want to feel aroused while breastfeeding. So I steer clear of TV shows that are likely to feature anything more than chaste kissing while I breastfeed, and I'm fine.

When I�m sleeping, though, it�s not so easy. At least three times over during my years of breastfeeding I have woken up from a suggestive dream that happened to occur while my baby was latched on and nursing. My babies nursed at night a lot - eventually I was bound to have a sexy dream while they were doing it. But on these occasions, the telltale clenching in my vagina told me that I�d just had an orgasm.

This is not a good orgasm. It�s intensely emotionally disturbing. Breastfeeding my baby caused me to have an orgasm. What kind of mother am I? What kind of <em>person</em> am I? Children and sexuality should not intermingle. I don�t want them to intermingle. I am concerned about what other people would think of me, and my mothering, if they knew that they had intermingled in this way.

After waking up to an orgasm while breastfeeding, I feel reluctant to breastfeed for some time. For days, I try to put my baby off when he or she asks to nurse. To this day I haven�t told anyone that I orgasmed while breastfeeding, not even my husband. I am too afraid. I have faced a lot of internal turmoil, and decided that it's something best kept to myself.

I do realize that I haven't done anything wrong. I in no way asked for this to happen, or caused it to happen. If I were conscious, I would do everything in my power to keep myself from feeling aroused while breastfeeding. And to put it in perspective, we are talking about three occasions over the course of many years of accumulated breastfeeding. I believe that my own emotional discomfort over these incidents is outweighed by the benefit that my children gained through breastfeeding into toddlerhood. But I still wish it hadn't happened.

I love my breasts. My breasts have provided some lovely window dressing. They have provided immense pleasure. They have nourished my children. They are a part of me, even though I haven't always gotten along with them. I suppose this is why we've given breasts so many names - they can be enigmatic and fill us with conflict. They can sustain life and create pleasure, but they can also cause intense discomfort as we just try to get a decent night's rest. By calling them boobies, or jugs, or melons, we're just trying to lighten the blow.

17 Comments | Posted on 2 December 2010 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Naked Pictures of Faceless People, Parenting | Tags: attachment parenting, breastfeeding, sex, Sexuality

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