Kaleigh Trace - Hot, Wet, and Shaking: How I Learned to Talk about Sex

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Text copyright Kaleigh Trace, 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Trace, Kaleigh, 1986-, author

Hot, wet, and shaking : how I learned to talk about sex / Kaleigh Trace.

ISBN 978-1-926743-47-9 (pbk.)

1. Trace, Kaleigh, 1986- --Sexual behavior. 2. Sex. 3. Women

with disabilities--Canada--Biography. 4. Feminists--Canada--

Biography. I. Title.

HV3013.T73A3 2014 362.4092 C2014-903616-7

Cover & Interior designed by Megan Fildes

Typeset in Laurentian and Slate by Megan Fildes

With thanks to type designer Rod McDonald

Printed and bound in Canada

Invisible Publishing

Halifax & Toronto

www.invisiblepublishing.com

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.

Invisible Publishing recognizes the support of the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Communities, Culture & Heritage. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Culture Division to develop and promote our cultural resources for all Nova Scotians.

This book is dedicated to my younger self and all our younger selves. To those years we spent uncomfortably stumbling towards who we are. I am so grateful for all of the wrong turns I took that led me here.

What I have stumbled upon has pleased me most.

Eli Coppola

An Epilogue, Dear Reader

People always talk about how writing a book is like having a baby. You gestate on it, spend all of this time thinking about it and growing it, and then you painstakingly push it out. When it is all said and done and you have it finished in your hands, it is beautiful and your reason for living is made clear. Or so it goes, they say. And I guess that analogy could work here for me, maybe. Writing this book was certainly a painful process of expulsion, as birthing is said to be. But the truth is, now that it is all done I cant quite be sure if it was a pregnancy or just constipation Ive been experiencing. I dont know if what we have here is a newborn or a turd.

While I was writing this book over the past year, my extremely supportive mother would often ask me what exactly I was writing about. She knows what I do and what kind of blog I write. But I suppose she was hoping that my book may be a little bit more presentable, something slightly easier to share with her girlfriends than my blog has been. Alas, it is not. Not at all. So I would evade her questions every time and cringe as I thought of her (and my dad, and my grandmother, and my entire extended family) reading this. When eventually I confessed and let my mother in on the fairly obvious secret, I realized that something had to be done. Just telling my mom (and all one hundred extended family members) that my book was about my sex life and I would prefer that she not read it would not be enough. She would definitely read it. And so would my grandmother, my aunts, etc. Can you imagine if someone you love, someone you have known since they were born, someone you maybe even pushed out of your vagina, wrote a book? How could you not read that book? YOU PUSHED THAT PERSON OUT OF YOUR VAGINA. So, I get it, I do.

I decided that what had to be done was to write my family a readers manual, so to speak. As I finished off my first draft and undertook the second, third, fourth, and fifth rewrites, I paid attention to the details. I took note of which pages I swore on, and of when I talked about my cunt and its size. I considered which chapters spoke of my sex life directly and which, if any, were slightly less vulgar. Eventually, I compiled all of this information into A Guide to Reading My Book, solely for the use of my family. I gave it to my mom and dad with a letter thanking them for all the good work theyve done since my conception, for raising me and loving me without conditions (right guys? No conditions?). Doing this gave me a deep, deep sense of relief. Not only because I was experiencing the come down from the caffeine high that I had been strung out on since this book project began, but also because I felt like I finally had some context. Writing my parents a letter of explanation gave me a purpose, a way to frame this whole book thing that the writing and editing process had not done.

This does not mean that I am now sure of the value of all of this. This whole book could still be utter shit, from what I can tell. Considering that I wrote it, I have had a hard time getting a clear perspective on this one. But it is relieving to know that regardless of its calibre, I wrote a book for reasons that I feel are worth it. I did not expose my sex life, my inner monologue, and all of my not-so-secret-secrets for nothing.

\It felt like a good way to end this whole thing would be to share with you my personal mail, that private letter I had written to my parents. Because we have not yet pushed the boundaries of knowing one another far enough in these pages, I want you to know not only the quantity of my urine or the size of my bodily orifices, but also just how much I love my family. I want you to know that I am a woman who carries around dildos, and someones beloved granddaughter, a disabled person who rides a tricycle, and someone who has great sex. Identities are complex and incongruous, multi-faceted and impossible to circumnavigate. I want to be everything and to be seen as everything. Dont we all?

So let me wrap it all up by beginning it all again. Here is a letter of introduction.

Dear Mom & Dad:

A Letter of Thanks and a Guide to Reading my Book

Let me start by saying: THANK YOU. You have both done an incredible job. I am all that I am because you taught me that there is no other way to be. Mom, with your indiscriminating warmth and undaunting self-certainty, you taught me to love widely and to move through the world confidently. Dad, through your tireless efforts to call into question all forms of authority, I have learned to never be made to feel less valuable because I am different. I am quite sure that I would not have made it through the world as successfully as I have thus far if not for these tools. You have armed me well. At the end of every day, I go home loving myself because you both loved me with so much assuredness and unconditionality.