Mothers and Daughters and Women.

The three of us were sitting on the floor in the middle of my mother’s bedroom. The room has gone through significant transitions in terms of design and colour scheme, but through the years we have continued to huddle together in the same spot—the patch of flooring between the seating area and the sleeping area—a spot meant for nothing but to walk from one side to the other. I was sipping on some green tea, my mother was nursing her whisky and my sister was drinking a mug full of her latest alcoholic obsession, a cherry liqueur called Wishniak to which she was introduced by her mother-in-law. My father was curiously peeking from the other end of the room as we rolled around on the floor in spiels of laughter.

I had just told them the story of Kitty.

Kitty used to be my neighbour some years ago, and even though she was 25-years older than me, we were friends. She reminded me of my mother. One evening, kitty came over to my place to have a drink and she started to talk about her relationship with her husband, and then, rather abruptly, she broke into tears and confessed she was cheating on him. Something about my face makes people want to admit their affairs to me; I am the crypt-keeper of infidelity and I should have seen it coming. After she cried for a while, I asked her how long she had been cheating.

“20 years,” she said.

“Kitty! 20 years was before you even had kids, why’d you stay?” I asked, aghast.

“Oh, no,” she responded, “I’ve been cheating for twenty years but obviously it was with different-different men!”

I had shared this story after my sister, who is deeply passionate about early-childhood education and gossip, had extracted from my mother a list of all her friends who were having affairs and my mother had shared her own story about her friend Minnie. Minnie is on her fourth affair, and my mother who has always had the role of being the alibi of her friends, had accompanied Minnie to a resort so she could meet her lover. Over dinner, the lover, had casually suggested to the two of them that they have a threesome. My mother is quite a character, she is fiercely worldly, shockingly polite, uncharacteristically innocent and exceptionally savage, so she responded by telling this man that she’d much rather have dessert. I realise the levity with which we approach infidelity is not palatable to everyone, or really, anyone. Most of time, when I regale these tales to other people, they ask questions about why these women don’t just leave their husbands or practise polyamory and in a utopic world, I may agree, but I’ve been watching these women since I was a child and there is a lot of context required to understand their lives.

Most of my mother’s friends are small-town girls from working-class families who were arranged married very young to men who were deeply patriarchal, already wealthy or on the path to becoming so and they took on very heavily controlled and prescribed roles as *professional* wives as their husbands sailed the seas or worked overseas. They kept perfect houses, hosted beautiful parties, raised children, suffered abuse from their husbands and their families, and quietly endured the powerlessness for a couple of decades and then, when their children, especially their daughters, whom they all raised to be outspoken, independent and strong women, were adults who were out in the world, they leaned on us to start speaking out. They couldn’t, and mostly still cannot, get divorced or leave, the social and financial costs are too high, but they decided to start *living* and the affairs are a part of that. You can condemn them or declare there is a *better* way but unless you have lived a life in which any freedom can really only be carved out of a confined space, unless you have experienced the gilded cage, I am not certain you can truly understand their lives. It certainly took me a while. When I was a young girl and I saw all the cheating, I could not understand why they kept these relationships, and it was only when I realised that my inability to understand had only developed because I was raised to believe I *never* had to endure a relationship I did not want or be financially trapped in one I did not desire, that I started to see that it was these women who also secured my freedom for me. They are a paradox, they fought a battle so severe I cannot even relate, but they ask me questions so innocent, it breaks my heart.

“Do people really have threesomes like this?” My mother, the savage, asked as we continued the conversation.

“Yeah, they do, but ideally, one should communicate well and do it ethically,” I said, “I teach that in some of my classes, actually.”

“You teach classes about threesomes?” My mother asked, aghast, “Do you..do them?”

“Obviously, you cannot teach a class if you don’t have..practise,” I responded as she looked at my sister for the same information.

“No, I don’t have threesomes,” my sister responded, “But maybe once I am in my forties, I will try?”

My mother shook her head in horror, giggled and then lowered her voice as she asked many more questions about how threesomes might work. The conversation moved on to vibrators and she was confused as to why we would use them in the presence of our partners, believing that if you did have one (she does, I bought it for her years ago and she is very private about it) surely it was only meant to be used alone. We talked about pleasure, the tedium of partners you’ve only learnt to love and the inability to advocate for your pleasure and how it has been passed down generationally, and we did it, in stories about Kittys and Minnies. It was a riotous evening of mirth spent on the floor of my mother’s bedroom, a transient space, that was never really meant to be used for anything. Hours later, when my sister and I were upstairs in our childhood bedrooms, with our spouses, we told them about the conversations we had had, and they looked confused and perturbed.

“You have to admit it is a bit weird to talk to your mom about threesomes and sex like this,” they said, “We cannot believe you guys actually do that.”

It was not the first time someone was surprised by the fact that we talk sex like this and usually people approach it from two perspectives. Either, they believe that my mother is a very *progressive* person and we are from a very *progressive* family because talking about sex has to be *progress*, right? Or, they believe it is a question of identity-assertion for me, in that, I need to be able to declare to my family that I am kinky or alternative in some way, and maybe that is what it is for some people, but for us, it’s neither one of these things and it’s much more multi-faceted than that.

For a moment, let’s forget that we are sisters and mothers to one another, and remember that we are women, in a specific social environment, raised a particular way and exposed to *information* especially about our bodies, through a lens that taught us we are not as strong as men, not as able, not as logical as men, we are created to make babies and pain is a reality we must accept. All of us were subject to that socialisation in some way which meant that we also realised we had to teach each other things we weren’t being taught because of how we were viewed. Our mothers, or at least, mine, taught me what little (and it was, little) she knew about sex but she, and her circle of compatriots, taught us so much shit we had no hope of learning on our own. They taught us taxes, navigating bureaucracy, dealing with a contractor, standing up for ourselves, handling a bank account, driving a car and countless other things they only were able to learn in secret, through a battle or after years of fighting for it. In turn, as we grew up, we lived in a world where sexuality was more available to us, so now we teach that to our mothers. We’ve taught them about lube, papsmears, vibrators, orgasms, sexual compatibility and the thousand other things they never learnt because they weren’t given that kind of ownership over their bodies or apprised of their right to pleasure. Maybe this *is* progress but it’s not as simple as mothers and daughters, we are women together.

Sex is not just sex. For one thing, for centuries no one has batted an eyelid at the idea of fathers taking their sons to brothels, no one believes groups of men shouldn’t make crass jokes about sex, no one cares that for ages men got to treat sex like it was solely their purview and we were merely recipients of it, objects from them to guide, teach and enjoy, and in that world, three women sitting on the floor, sipping drinks, and laughing about their pleasure, sharing knowledge and making merry feels like an act of subversion. Look, there are some traditional conventions that require mothers to have *certain* conversations with their daughters—of blood, weddings and babies—but for the rest of it, we’re supposed to not talk about it at all, even at the cost of our health, we’re supposed to be careful around the subject and it may have changed to some degree, but for the most part, it would be considered inappropriate to be so open, and I think, that is what encourages us most of all. If it is such an affront to be *open*, then we are certainly the women who want to offend you.

It may seem strange to many people that we talk this way but it’s because of the superficiality of the thought. It’s not just sex and gossip. It’s connection. It’s transgression. It’s love. It’s witnessing one another in our (lack of) knowledge and sharing it. It’s about raising women who understand you and being women who know they need to fight for their right to be understood. It’s about generations of women overcoming our trepidation, our reservations, the enforcement that we need to seek permission to discuss our own bodies and sitting in the middle of our homes, drinks in hand, and laughing till we cry as we talk about threesomes. It’s not just sex. It’s everything.