{"id":117,"date":"2010-10-25T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-10-25T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/thequeenofmyself\/2010\/10\/myself-as-maiden.html"},"modified":"2010-10-25T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-10-25T10:00:00","slug":"myself-as-maiden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thequeenofmyself\/2010\/10\/myself-as-maiden.html","title":{"rendered":"Myself as Maiden"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>This week I am offering my own sensual, sexual experiences as Maiden, Mother, Queen and Crone-to be.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><b>Myself as Maiden<\/b><\/p>\n<p>I have pretty much always had a current love interest, a paramour, an inamorata-of-the-moment in my life. Ever since elementary school, I have been involved in a series of crushes, flirtations, romances, relationships, and marriage\/partnerships of varying degree of consummation, duration, maturity, intensity and pleasure. However, before I turned fifty, I had never felt myself to be particularly beautiful in the abstract. <\/p>\n<p>While I had definitely attracted my share of admirers, one by one, over the decades, it is not as though I ever had a queue of suitors waiting outside of my front door, vying for my affections. Try though I might, I never quite fit the popular, idealized, mass-market parameters of beauty or body type or demeanor. Far from being a femme fatale, with a Hollywood face or figure, I usually failed to turn heads in a crowd. <\/p>\n<p>Certainly I had been told many times that I was pretty, but it was always in the dubious context of, &#8220;You really ought to lose some weight, you have such a pretty face.&#8221; Or, &#8220;Why don&#8217;t you pull your hair out of your face so that people can see you.&#8221; Those motherly suggestions didn&#8217;t exactly serve as Self-image enhancing morale-builders. Oh, I was probably pretty enough, but it was a pasted-on look. My lips were fetchingly colored, but my smile was frozen in fear. During the Maiden years of my teens and twenties, I was serious, withdrawn, self-conscious, over-sensitive and as unsure as a tentative spring shoot caught in an inclement frost. <\/p>\n<p>Completely unprepared emotionally, I was out there, and available because I was expected to be. But my heart was never in it. I was way too shy to perceive &#8212; let alone enjoy, and heaven forbid, <i>show<\/i> &#8212; myself as the sweet, loving, sensual, sexual swan-in-waiting that I really was in my secret, tender hidden heart. <\/p>\n<p>Instead of being who I was, I believed and internalized everything that I had been taught: that I was not thin enough, striking enough or vivacious enough to attract appreciative attention. And that was what life was supposed to be all about, after all, wasn&#8217;t it girls? To be attractive to men. <\/p>\n<p>By the age of thirty, I had left an idiotic mistake of a marriage and several semi-serious boyfriends behind. Like Greta Garbo, I <i>vanted<\/i> to be alone. Those relationships were not awful or abusive or co-dependent or any such thing. They just didn&#8217;t fulfill me, the full me. Something crucial was always missing. Eventually, I began to realize that the absent ingredient was myself, that mysterious shadowy stranger who lived in my body and who did and thought things beyond the scope of my ken. <\/p>\n<p>How I yearned to learn who I was, myself, in the heart of my soul and not as a warped reflection of someone else&#8217;s view of me, be it mother or lover or <i>Glamour Magazine<\/i>. In an undeniable flash of inner truth and commanding clarity, I felt myself called upon by spirit, by destiny, by dharma, by fate, by free will to embark upon a concerted search and rescue mission for the Holy Grail of my own elusive soul. And this expedition had to be solo.<\/p>\n<p><i>Tomorrow:<br \/>Mama Donna: Me as Mother<\/i><\/p>\n<p>***<br \/>The Queen welcomes questions concerning all issues of interest to women in their mature years. Send your inquiries to <a href=\"mailto:thequeenofmyself@aol.com\">thequeenofmyself@aol.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week I am offering my own sensual, sexual experiences as Maiden, Mother, Queen and Crone-to be. Myself as Maiden I have pretty much always had a current love interest, a paramour, an inamorata-of-the-moment in my life. Ever since elementary school, I have been involved in a series of crushes, flirtations, romances, relationships, and marriage\/partnerships&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":218,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-midlife","category-self-esteem","category-womens-issues"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Myself as Maiden - The Queen of My Self<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thequeenofmyself\/2010\/10\/myself-as-maiden.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Myself as Maiden - The Queen of My Self\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This week I am offering my own sensual, sexual experiences as Maiden, Mother, Queen and Crone-to be. Myself as Maiden I have pretty much always had a current love interest, a paramour, an inamorata-of-the-moment in my life. Ever since elementary school, I have been involved in a series of crushes, flirtations, romances, relationships, and marriage\/partnerships&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thequeenofmyself\/2010\/10\/myself-as-maiden.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Queen of My Self\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-10-25T10:00:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Donna Henes\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Myself as Maiden - The Queen of My Self","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thequeenofmyself\/2010\/10\/myself-as-maiden.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Myself as Maiden - The Queen of My Self","og_description":"This week I am offering my own sensual, sexual experiences as Maiden, Mother, Queen and Crone-to be. 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She has published four books, a CD, an acclaimed Ezine and writes for The Huffington Post and UPI Religion and Spirituality Forum. 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