Breaking Open

By Melinda Banks

In this erotic memoir, Melinda Banks reveals her Gen X disillusionment of marriage, persuades her husband to explore polyamory, and dives into dating websites in search of non-monogamous love.

 

Breaking Open is the advice you need from a friend who's been through it. Melinda Banks takes the re

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melinda Banks
• Release date: Jul 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781087899312

Melinda Banks

Melinda Banks is a former Egyptian missionary, Russian piano prodigy and Italian-American housewife currently inhabiting the exhausted and overworked, yet fabulously sexy, body of a mother of two teens. While terrifically accomplished in both arts and letters, she prefers to live as an impostor and spy among caregivers, accountants, retail salespeople, and working-class artists. In her fleeting spare time, she is an amateur photographer of very small things.

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Table of Contents

Preface: Hold This for Me vii

Prologue: Test Drive xiii

Boxed In 1

Murmurs 13

The Big Bang 28

Naughty and Oh-So-Nice 41

Learning to Swim 62

Cumming into It 136

The Small Bang 163

Schrödinger’s Elusive Love 175

Sea Change 200

Epilogue: Mind the Gap 219

Copyright 228

Preface: Hold This for Me

Anonymous

You don’t know me. Or you do, but I won’t admit it.

Melinda Banks is a pseudonym, not my real name. I have my family’s privacy to protect. I haven’t broken any laws, except the biblical kind. That’s not a major concern for me. Still, I can’t risk losing my cover now, while my kids are young, and so blissfully unaware that our private life could impact anyone else.

I confess—I’ve been a little naughty. We all have our vices. They say never kiss and tell, but there’s so much I want to tell. So rather than resist the stirring details of my secret life, I’m closing the door of my identity in order to focus on the story of my opening more candidly. I’m going to tell you how my husband and I found ourselves rewriting marriage to include other lovers, and how those men and women—the kind rarely mentioned until deathbed confessions—became symbols of all the difficult choices and delicious pleasures of our first pioneering year.

It was never easy. It was a touchy, complicated balancing act—but then, I’m a complex person. If you’re here for sex, I might disappoint you with thoughts on ethics and raising a daughter. If you’re here for ethics, I’ll surely disappoint you with stories of mad fucking. If you want to know how my faith in God informed me, you’ll discover pretty quickly I’m a sacrilegious, pan-spiritual fool, and if you don’t want to read about God at all, my faith will strike you as too devout. You may think this is a story of Stella, getting her groove back. But in fact, this is the story of an infinite spiritual being who finds itself in the body of a twenty-first century, liberated American woman, attempting to manifest the greatest potential in this lifetime. (Okay—maybe that sometimes looks like Stella getting her groove back.)

Who am I? During the events of this book, I was a woman in my mid-forties—a wife and a mother. But I was also a philanderess. A polyamorous free agent. I was a mature and complicated human being in the sexual prime of my life. I dare you to see me.

Lest You Condemn

I won’t tell you the real city where I live or my occupation there. The world I’m in is not a web of lies—it’s a net of confidentiality. You don’t need to know my identity. Just consider that you might already know me. There are people like me everywhere. Maybe where you live, too.

My life doesn’t revolve around sexual deviance, believe it or not. I’m a regular, reasonably well-rounded working mom. I volunteer at my kids’ school. Sometimes I attend city council meetings. I’m a good citizen—not a revolutionary. Whether or not you find my lifestyle respectable, it is my choice and I am still good. Although I claim not to fear the truth, I admit it catches me in sticky places sometimes. It’s painful for me, too, to leave my comfort zone.

Was I a forty-something girl gone wild? Couched in the library on Monday, nose buried in a book—but a warrior of the weekend, out drinking and partying, taking off my top and cheering? Your sweet yet sinful coed roommate, now grown up as a daringly wanton wife and mother? It’s forgivable, right, if I’m still good at heart?

Surely, it was a midlife crisis. I didn’t want to be twenty. Twenty was miserable. Forty was way better. Although I still hadn’t accomplished everything I wanted to, my forties were fantastically liberating. I realized I was never going to be the grownup I thought I was in my thirties. And thank God. I did the hard work required of me, but I learned to play the role without internalizing it. My lot in life may have changed for better or worse, but it didn’t define me. Instead, I was defined by my beliefs, my choices, my devotion to others, the values I built my life around and the truth I learned about myself through personal trials.

I was grounded in my community, thriving in the larger whole. I was grounded at the playground, too. I loved being in that eyes-wide-open, anything-can-happen world of children. It reminded me of my purest self.

My purest self only wanted love—given freely, never taken. Offered without question. I never meant to threaten beliefs or boundaries. I had no intention to make light of the sacrifices others made for their lives. I only meant to add my light to all the darkness people allowed to accumulate inside them. I only wanted to love freely, so I had more to share. If I did it badly, or if I did it wrong, please, allow me the benefit of my best intentions.

Thanks

I’d like to thank the men. All you gorgeous, sexy, funny, loving, comforting, deeply flawed, absolutely maddening, potential assholes out there. This book is lovingly devoted to you.

I’m sorry I put you in it. I know you probably didn’t want to be here. I’m sorry I gave you such stupid names (those of you who didn’t get a choice). I’m sorry I took deeply intimate and personal moments from our time together, and things I wrote that were meant for you alone, and brought them out into the sunlight for everyone to see. I’m sorry I didn’t give you a chance to tell your side of the story.

To the men who shared my body with me as I began my experiment into open love—even the ones who never got close enough to touch, but still managed to make me cum—I want to sincerely thank you for bringing my body back to life, eager for more. You have not only helped me return to my naturally healthy sexual state—you are helping me rewrite history. You are men empowering a woman, and that’s hella sexy.

To the women, many I now consider friends, who became a part of my life through my husband—while I’ve known many of your stories, there’s so much more I don’t presume to know. I’ve left any intimate details I’ve heard for you or others to tell, because I wasn’t there with you, and you are the sources of your own stories. While you did make agreements of sorts when you came into Pierce’s life, you were never asked to share everything. Even so, I hope you’ll find some reflection of yourselves in these pages. I hope you’ll recognize that whatever I did to manifest the freedom and strength I found for myself was also, in small part, for you.

To any so-called hippies I may have disparaged here, I apologize in advance. The truth is, I came up too late, found my counterculture voice in the punk-rock movement, and never could listen to the Grateful Dead. But obviously, there’s a bit of your heart-centered, soul-searching, free-loving spirit in me, too. Of course y’all know I’m just jealous. As time has passed and I’ve been over and around many sides of this story, I have come to love and appreciate the revolutionary nature of the sex-positive community in a much deeper, more nuanced way.

Thanks to all the amazing women who have found a path of sexual awakening and enlightenment—the polyamorous; the swingers; the kinksters; the lesbian, bisexual, non-binary and transgender spirits. All of you courageous enough to express your unique sexuality. I recognize our parallel journeys, and I admire you tremendously. Thank you for defending my right to be manifest as a whole person, as much as you defend your own. Especially to those who write, speak, lead, or march for this beautiful endeavor, I am eternally grateful. I salute anyone navigating their own path, and leading it in a sexier, sluttier, bolder, and more self-confident way than I ever will. Claiming and reclaiming our sexual power is a huge victory, and I am incredibly grateful to the men and women who work so hard at it. Every story of sexual empowerment is vastly and uniquely different, and I bow down before you and the expression of your incredible spirit.

I don’t know how I got so lucky to find my friend Moss Clay, but I’m tremendously pleased to have had you as my dating advisor, as well as collaborator. There is still a bit of flush in our cheeks when we acknowledge all the fucking we’re really talking about here, but I trust your respect for me implicitly. Alexander, as well—you’ve been an unwavering supporter and editor, always helping me find the heart and the true intention of my process, without compromising the entertainment value of a racy tale.

Thanks so much to my family, although you may never know what I’ve done. I am confident in your support of my writing, and I believe someday you will understand my choices, as well. I have some work ahead in that regard—to be a transparent and true, warts-and-all kind of role model—but please know it has always been my intention.

Most of all, I offer my undying gratitude to Pierce, the husband and partner with whom these years were shared. Neither the journey nor this book were easy for you. There were many painful steps along the way, and you have borne a lot of the load. Thank you so much for your incredible courage and honesty. It has not come without tremendous struggle, but I hope there will be abundant joy available for us all when we reach the other side.

Prologue: Test Drive

There is only one way to begin this story. It is a cold night in a small city in the Pacific Northwest in 1996. There’s a shitty little Honda Civic hatchback parked on a side street in front of a row of dark, unsuspecting bungalows. The windows are slightly foggy, and there is movement inside: two lovers, pressed against each other, lips against lips, his hands finding her breasts under a sweater, her hands finding the treasured hard cock inside jeans. A passionate embrace, lips finding the cock, the cock rising into her throat, pulsing with life-force spunk, one lover murmuring and shuddering sweet release, and the other, enraptured in cum-swallowing delight.

Then there is the later hour, when the cum-swallowing lover falls back onto her bed, with the sleeping husband unaware. She sighs, and measures the depth of her sins compared to the sins of the husband’s cruel depression, which have flooded the ground where all hope for the future had been sown, and left them gasping for air, writhing and oblivious to the breadth of their imprisonment together.

The cum-swallowing lover finds a way out of there and into the arms of the cock-pulsing murmurer, and never once in all their early years did they say—

never once did we say—

"Let’s get a minivan.

It’s got more room for moving," (which we would do time and again),

and babies, (we’d make two of them),

and we’ll have the back seat for lovers when time permits. (Which would be when?)

We can’t know what lies in store, I’m sure I would have said,

but we can always give it our best.

Maybe I’d prove this time that I could go for the long haul. Maybe a better man would inspire my fidelity. But then, we can’t know what lies in store.

Indeed.

CHAPTER ONE

Boxed In

No Comfort in the Zone

He became Daddy. When we met, Pierce was a twenty-six-year-old waiter who loved football, poker, and guitars. I was a twenty-seven-year-old, mix-tape-making, married waitress, trying to keep my dry-drunk husband happy despite my scattered and inept attempts at domesticity. I was completely unaware I was on the verge of the fabled astrological Saturn return, and a dramatic restructuring of my life. In an attempt to find some joy and sensuousness in people other than my disconsolate husband, I enrolled in massage school. I confess I wanted to be lovingly caressed. I wanted to get away with caressing others, too. In my enthusiasm for a more sensual life, I gave in to infatuation and craving, and I asked Pierce to be my lover. He did not hesitate to say yes, assuring me immediately and repeatedly, with a thousand kisses.

We survived my ugly divorce. Pierce helped me get on my feet again, while my ex, whom I’ll call Tormented Genius, helped undermine my self-esteem with weekly phone calls, cataloging my deepest flaws. Tormented Genius was well acquainted with those flaws, because eight years before that, I had fallen in love with him while engaged to one of his best friends. My love for the one I wasn’t with was like a broken crown, passed down over the years from one disgruntled loser to the next better man. It broke my heart, too. I didn’t love myself much, but I was comforted that someone else was always there to pick up the slack.

I vowed that Pierce would be the last time the crown got passed. I thanked God I was able to use my dubious philandering skills for one more chance at love.

We were good for each other, although in some ways an unlikely pair. He was, by choice, not a complicated man, and I was ridiculously complex—mystical and enigmatic, even. But Pierce had the amazing capacity to hold a space for the vast spectrum of my inner world without ever letting it cause him a moment’s anxiety. Not completely insensitive, and not necessarily aloof, he managed to keep himself politely removed from my stormy disposition. Though it was sometimes maddening to me, I’m pretty sure it saved us. I loved him for letting me be.

A few years passed, and Pierce became Daddy. Exhausted by responsibility, his self-protective barrier wore thin. His sunnier outlook had depended on my affection, which was hard to come by in the early stages of parenting. I transferred all my love to our babies, and very little space was left—in my heart or in our bed—for him. He became resigned to expect less of the whole arrangement. Less love from me. Less freedom. Less choice in household matters. I initiated two relocations, thousands of miles away from where we had been living. When I first convinced Pierce to leave for a brighter future elsewhere, I had asked him to follow my lead for five years. If he wanted to move back after that, I would oblige. Deep down, Pierce resolved to himself that his happiness would no longer be my concern.

It happened in relationships all the time, and it happened to us. Without the ingenuity to reinvent our partnership as needed, we subjected ourselves easily to unhappy compromises. We balanced our marriage on the tip of breaking, to the point of no return, the point of letting ourselves die inside—all those clichés, and all those wrong ways to live. It was either break out and break up or stay in and suffer together. We didn’t want either choice for our children—every path was weathered and overused. But we were exhausted, clawing desperately for a peek over the horizon, and we just couldn’t see it. Our children mirrored the best and worst of us, bringing every little weakness to light in excruciating detail. We were loved unconditionally, so we were always within arm’s reach of redemption. But the burden was on us to make ourselves worthy.

We were fractured in a million places, unknown to our children. But to them, we were the framework and foundation for their entire lives. We had become the original archetypes: Mommy and Daddy. We relied upon the container of normal life to hold our fragile pieces together.

The Catalyst

Before 2010, we were a fairly typical family, with a marriage eleven years in and two kids under age ten. Pierce had become invaluable at his job as an executive assistant. I was a stay-at-home mom, and a somewhat unrealized artist. We lived in a two-flat near a great school, surrounded by a fantastic network of families and friends. It wasn’t the happiest marriage, but it was as functional and stable as we could make it.

In the fall of 2009, I decided once and for all to get serious about my writing, and I planned to start my first book during November’s National Novel Writing Month. For my novel, I chose the setting where Pierce and I had met—a city in his home state. Just as I was diving in, with the determination of a fresh start, Pierce came home with news that he was devising a story of his own. Except his was a real story, starting hopefully with a job transfer and ending with the family moving back to that same city. In my book, the place was destroyed by natural disasters and war, scattered with the few battered survivors of apocalypse. In the end, in a way, both stories came true.

As I furiously tried to keep up my daily writing, fighting against the clock and my increasing lack of clarity about the direction the novel was taking, it became clear that Pierce’s project was more successful. His phone interviews were breezy. He and his prospective bosses chatted about local sports teams. With glowing performance reviews, Pierce only had to ask for the job, and he was on his way. He won the transfer easily.

I didn’t have time to wrap my mind around it. My feet were dug into a nostalgic representation of a place that held no future for us. My book was loving, but incredibly tragic. While my characters were freezing, starving, and shell-shocked in their post-apocalyptic dystopia, in Pierce’s autobiography, he was enthusiastic and emboldened, putting thoughts into action until everything fell into place. He’d be reunited with old friends and family before the end of football season. Home for the holidays, and all. If I stayed on track, I would finish my novel on the last day of November. Pierce would fly out the next morning, just like that.

Yet I refused to be derailed. I heard myself telling friends Pierce was leaving the minute my project ended, and I knew it meant there would be no time to process the unfolding events. We were both steadfast on separate courses. Stubborn. I wouldn’t sacrifice my first attempt at a novel. Pierce wouldn’t sacrifice a chance to move back home. December 1 landed on the calendar like a prison sentence.

I was plea-bargaining.

Don’t take a pay cut.

He took a pay cut.

Make them pay our moving expenses.

They paid half.

Don’t leave on the first. Give it a few more days, at least.

He left on December 1, mere hours after I finished the last chapter. I was a stay-at-home mom, alone with two kids, ages four and seven. We had no idea what that would do to us. We didn’t know we’d never be the same again.

My friends wondered why I didn’t just say no, but they didn’t understand our agreement. I had pushed for us to move away, but asked for five years to prove it was right for us. Now in the tenth year since we’d left our hometown, it had become clear from many conversations that not only would Pierce never settle down where we were … he didn’t even like the place.

We had already discussed when and how to return, but I thought I had more time. I didn’t say no or even not yet, because Pierce had honored my choices for five years longer than I asked him to. It was my time to honor his. Clearly I couldn’t refuse, and therefore I needed to accept the move as my own. Sure, I was angry. But I was bitterly aware of the taste of my own medicine.

Perhaps such a change would always seem too hasty to the reluctant partner. With our previous moves, I felt I had planned more carefully and been more democratic with Pierce than he was being with me. Maybe the one who’s getting their way always hopes there is a consensus. Pierce’s failure was certainly his hopefulness, and his belief that we’d bounce back, as always. I told him I wouldn’t be ready to leave until spring. He said taking the job meant he had to go immediately. I complained that we had no nest egg to fall back on, this time. He insisted we’d make it work. I would finalize our affairs in the old place while he set us up in the new one. People do this all the time, and so can we, I said to myself, again and again and again.

What Pierce saw as logistics, I saw as losses. I measured every one against whatever good our future might hold, and against everything I’d ever taken from Pierce. The years away from his family, the promising jobs left behind, the irreplaceable friendships, and—let’s be honest—the home team. He missed them all.

I had to assume I had caused Pierce losses he never bothered to articulate to me. I had forced him out of his comfort zone, and while he never complained, he must have held it against me. Once I recognized my own resentment about the new move, I began to understand how much resentment Pierce had probably felt with the last ones, and how that resentment had revealed itself over the years in the little ways he refused to love our life in our new town. He never seemed to pine for home, but he never lived as if he was at home, either.

When Pierce left on December 1, when I couldn’t pick up the kids and follow him onto that plane, we didn’t know what that would make of me. We knew I’d be a single parent for a while, that I’d pack the apartment and move out all the kids and pets on my own. But we didn’t imagine how the time alone would change me.

The truth is, none of this happened at a strong point in our relationship. Rather, it was the weakest point. Pierce and I were both worn completely down from move after move, from all the trials of life with young kids, and from the utter loss of intimacy that resulted. We barely hung by a thread. I had turned to church as an answer to my blues, and Pierce would sometimes stay out late after work to avoid coming home