What a difference a year can make. These past 9 months have taken me on a journey that I could never have envisioned for myself, even just one year ago.
Now, I am one year older and still trying to become a mom, but I am no longer a virgin. As someone who grew up in a religiously observant family, I always believed that I would wait for marriage to have sex. When you are brought up in a religious environment no one talks about the guilt, shame, and mixed emotions surrounding the topic of sex.
We were educated to be shomer negiah β which means to refrain from any form of physical touch with the opposite sex until you are married. Many young adults tend to bend or outright break these rules, myself included, but sex was never an option.
Perhaps in a world in which everyone finds a partner at a young age, this notion of waiting could be wonderful. Sex would come naturally within the framework of marriage; couples would have children and feel fulfilled on many levels. The desire for physical intimacy is among the most natural and basic of human needs, and therefore, the prohibition of physical contact becomes an excruciatingly painful challenge. I did not want to give up on the values I had been raised with, but I also craved to experience that kind of closeness with another person.
A few years ago, when I finally made the decision to start the process of becoming a mother, one of the hardest things for me, ironically, was not the fact that I was a single, modern Orthodox woman trying to have a baby on her own.
