PROMISE RING Summer before the tenth grade Alpharetta, GA Age: 16 Church nor state owned my body, but my mother did.
“Jazzy,” my mother said at dusk on the eve of my sixteenth birthday, “come out to the porch. We have something for you.”
I knew what the something was. She’d already indoctrinated my brother a few years prior.
I took my seat between them, my parents on either side. She had prepared a speech, a hand-written contract inked in gold. This was not a rash decision. She’d thought it through, down to the gold promise ring, fashioned in the same maile-leaf design as my parents wedding bands. Once I signed, I’d be wedded to them.
We lived on the top floor, in a three-bedroom apartment—our porch inching out into a small pine forest—from the time I was twelve until my parents moved to California when I had just turned twenty-three. Wholly unconventional, long-term apartment living wasn’t done in the wealthy Southern suburbs my mother had moved us to. Apartments were rented temporarily while their gigantic houses were being built.
But after owning nine acres of land on Kauai, they didn’t want to be responsible for so much land and so much house, and, always counter-culture, my mother thought the homes in the partially gated, planned communities were ugly.
They’re like big boxes on a tiny plot of land! And backed against the road with no privacy!
Once we moved to Georgia, my parents reembraced their Jewish roots and switched their attendance from a church to a synagogue. Promise rings weren’t a Jewish thing, but it didn’t matter because my mother, the eternal collage artist, swapped herself in for God. She knew our word to her was binding in a way it wouldn’t have been to anyone or anything else.
My mother gave me material freedom, praised my discernment. She let me choose my clothes and activities and how I wanted my hair. It was the days before affordable cell phones, but once I started driving, she never made me check in. She let me take summer road trips down to the beach with friends and drive to the grocery store in winter-mix conditions. If I said I was spending the night at a friend’s house, she never questioned me like it was a ruse for something else.
My trust in her was in direct proportion to how much she trusted me. But her trusting me, and me trusting her, didn’t mean I trusted myself.
“I want you to know we adore you and the women you’ve blossomed into,” my mother told me.
Her terms of endearment when I was little were: Jazz-matazz, Jazz, Jazzy, thrown in often with that’ 50s term,‘atta girl.’ At some point, she transitioned into metaphors of my name: blossom, fragrant flower, beauty. She was so sincere in her love, I actually felt honored to be receiving such a gift. I’d wear it with pride. I’d wait till marriage to have sex.
After I signed my name under their own, she asked, “Do you have any questions?”
So many. I have so many questions now, but it’s only in hindsight.
I’m not sure I’d call it a gift, as it sometimes feels limiting, but my mind doesn’t future-think or daydream. I don’t race to worst-case scenarios nor ponder all the possible paths with unknown outcomes. In the moment, I’m scared or hopeful or undecided.
This may sound contradictory to my rock bottoms and subsequent crippling anxiety as a mother because anxiety means fear of the future. But I fear the future only in relation to what’s already happened. It’s as if I come into each new experience as a blank canvas, but once the first splash of red happens, I hang onto it forever, convinced my creation will be taken over long after I don’t want any more of that particular color.
I hadn’t had a promise ring experience that had gone bad, none of my friends had come before with cautionary tales, Google didn’t exist, which meant I didn’t hesitate when I signed my name because I didn’t doubt my mother.
By then, I still hadn’t kissed a boy or held hands with one, or experienced anything more than some painful crushes. It wasn’t for a lack of want—it was because I had an internal gauge. Even before the promise ring, I needed whatever I chose to do with a guy to matter.
Except my mother didn’t know any of that, because she never asked. She made assumptions about me based on her own sexual experiences as a teen and young twenty-something, which can prove problematic for mothers and daughters. She came to me with her own wounding, a little spirituality, and a lot of conviction that the only person I needed to seek permission from, was her.
But by trying to fix one problem, she inevitably created another because she asked abstinence to do something it couldn’t. Abstinence would undoubtedly prevent unwanted pregnancy, but it could never protect her children from life. It seemed like such a small blip, a benign thing she did, but that night on the porch, when I agreed to that contract, what my mother didn’t realize was that I wasn’t signing sex away, but self.
Known as the processor of emotions, for women, the sacral doesn’t just stop at the womb, but the place where all literal creation resides, and perhaps most important, pleasure. Pleasure doesn’t have to be sexual. It can be, but it also encompasses play, passion, curiosity. It means engaging in the things that bring you joy, because joy is the bridge. On the other side of pleasure, is purpose.
In her 2017 article for goop, “The Secret Sauce to Opening the Intuition,” intuitive and certified herbalist Deganit Nuur explains that when our second chakra or sacral is in balance, “We’re fluid with our feelings… our relationships are fulfilling and meaningful, [and] we have a healthy sense of self and sexuality.” But when our second chakra is out of balance, we tend towards extremes. “We could be… a love or sex addict, co-dependent or emotionally unavailable. We may be struggling with our identity, feel weepy, insecure, doubtful, ashamed, embarrassed, or inadequate.”
By seventeen, I’d experienced my first kiss and, in the years that followed, many other firsts, but not full sex. My views surrounding hook-ups were a strange mix of obligation to my mother, hypersexualized magazines I’d read as a teenager like Cosmopolitan, and whatever my closest friends were doing.
I knew from Cosmo countless ways to please your imaginary guy, but I didn’t know anything about my own pleasure. My girlfriends normalized oral sex, but I didn’t understand the exchange would feel more uncomfortable and vulnerable than intercourse.
I walked through my teens and early twenties with a conflated vision of marriage, that it was the ultimate destination, while simultaneously always looking outside of myself for fulfillment.
I wanted to be wanted. I’d either get the guy and then feel empty, or not get him, and obsess over where I went wrong. Because what I didn’t realize, what I was actually after, what I craved most, was a rich inner life that I never learned to cultivate, with ownership of a body I was never given permission to explore.
In deprivation, we’re denied the most vital skill. We miss how to regulate, how to moderate, how to know when we’re actually full. We miss the distinction between what our ‘yes’ feels like in our body, and our ‘no.’
I stopped listening to my inner knowing, which meant I was deeply out of balance, trusting my mother too much and myself not enough. And not just within relationships, but with the trajectory of my life I so badly wanted to create, but was incapable of actualizing.
With the promise ring, I think what my mother meant to give me was a tool. But a tool for her, was a lock without a key for me. I know now, our mind, body, and soul are all connected. When we cut off our sex, we cut off our authentic expression. We block ourselves from a true inner intimacy.
Which meant when a door opened, like it did for this memoir, I not only wasn’t confident that it was meant for me, but if it was actually something I desired to begin with.
Not that the stakes were so high—so what? Write the book or don’t—but to me, they held disproportional weight, a base fear that I would do this thing being asked of me and by the end, still be left wanting.
But the truth was, I was no longer a child at sixteen, and even though I was still unsure of my path in general, I could see the next step. I could listen to my body’s ‘yes’, to the way when I woke from the dream, and before I was taken with self-doubt, my chest and throat lit with warmth.
I could not only release the need to know, but actively walk into the unknown, and in doing so, unlock the elusive root of my desire.
