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At Thanksgiving my brother-in-law pulled his wife into the pantry and stayed in there with her for seven full minutes. They've been married 30 years. Everyone noticed. Nobody said anything. My sister-in-law walked back out with her cheeks pink. He followed her with his hand on the small of her back. They sat down and passed the green beans. Nobody at that table said a word. I said a word. Not out loud. Inside my head I said "when was the last time someone touched me like that." I couldn't come up with an answer. ======== I'm 50. Married 24 years. Two kids out of the house. One golden retriever. One husband I've loved since I was 26. From the outside we look like every other couple at a Thanksgiving table. Underneath the table I was doing math. How many months had it been since my husband pulled me anywhere. Not the pantry. Not the laundry room. Not the hallway. How many months since he'd grabbed my hand in public and not let go. I couldn't get to a number. Which is how I knew it was bad. ======== Sex started hurting when I was 46. Not every time. Enough. Enough that I started bracing before his hand even landed on me. Enough that I'd catalog my Mondays as "recovery days." Enough that I got very good at the small performance. The moan at the right time. The arched back at the right second. The "mmm, honey" that meant nothing. I'd roll over. I'd smile into the pillow. I'd wait for him to fall asleep. Then I'd stare at the ceiling and hate myself for a little while. I never told him. Not once in four years. ======== He figured it out anyway. Not the faking. He couldn't tell the faking from the real thing. He figured out I wasn't in the bed. My body was there. I wasn't. He stopped reaching around year two. Then he stopped kissing me goodnight on the mouth. Forehead kisses started. Which are the worst kind of kisses when you used to get the other kind. I counted one night. Eight months of forehead kisses. Eight months. I'd been married to a man who'd been putting his lips on my forehead the way you kiss a niece. ======== I did what every woman does when her body stops working. I went looking for someone to fix it. My OB gave me estrogen cream and a pat on the knee. "Try this for three months." I tried it for seven. Second doctor said "have you considered a vibrator?" I already had one. It had been in the drawer so long the batteries had leaked. I had to throw the whole thing out and scrub the drawer with a wipe. The pelvic floor PT was the worst of them. Eight sessions. $180 each. Biofeedback sensors taped to my skin. A woman half my age watching a screen and saying "relax your glutes now." I'd cry in my car afterward. Then I'd drive home and make dinner like nothing had happened. I spent $1,440 and learned how to breathe with my diaphragm. My husband and I had sex twice during those two months. Both times it hurt. Both times I faked it. ======== Here's what gets me. My boss is 56. His wife mentioned at a work dinner that he has testosterone pellets. Covered by insurance. $20 co-pay. He bragged about it over dessert. "Feeling twenty again, right honey?" She laughed. I laughed. I'd just spent my whole afternoon in a paper gown while a nurse practitioner told me to "be patient with my body." Men get insurance. Women get patience. The difference isn't biology. It's priority. ======== I gave up in August. Not on the marriage. I loved him. I gave up on the bedroom. I told myself a good marriage doesn't need a bedroom. I told myself I had a best friend and that was more than most people got. I told myself a lot of things. None of them were true. The truth was I was lonely in a bed with my husband in it. ======== Thanksgiving was in November. Four months after I'd given up. I watched my brother-in-law pull his wife into that pantry and something in my chest cracked open. Not jealousy. Something worse. Recognition of what I used to have. That night I drove home in the passenger seat while my husband drove. I had my forehead on the cold window. He said "you okay?" I said "just tired." Which was the other lie I'd been telling for four years. ======== My sister-in-law pulled me aside at Thanksgiving. Not the one who went to the pantry. The other one. My husband's older brother's wife. She's 58. Quiet. Never my favorite. She was rinsing wine glasses in the kitchen when I came in to help. She didn't look up. She said "I noticed you watching Linda and Mark earlier." I froze with a dish towel in my hand. "You looked like I looked six months ago." I didn't say anything. "Can I send you a link? It's a pillow." I nodded. I didn't trust my voice. She dried her hands. Pulled her phone out. Sent me a text right there at the sink. "Open it at home. If it's weird, it's weird. Text me either way." I drove home that night with her text sitting in my phone. Unopened. ======== I opened it on Black Friday at the kitchen island. My husband was out running errands. It was a link to something called the Moodie Comfort Pillow. I read the whole website standing up. Coffee going cold next to me. Here's what it said in plain English I could actually follow. After menopause, vaginal tissue thins. Every doctor had told me that. They hadn't told me the next part. When tissue thins, the geometry of sex changes. Lying flat pushes one specific wall of tissue against bone. That's where the friction comes from. That's where the pain comes from. It isn't dryness. It isn't hormones. It isn't in my head. It's an angle. For four years I'd been trying to fix the friction with creams. Which is like trying to stop a door from scraping by oiling the hinge. When the problem is the door's hanging at the wrong angle. ======== The pillow is made at one exact angle. 27 degrees. It lifts your hips into the spot where sex stops hurting. Firm memory foam that holds under body weight. Soft cover. Looks like a throw pillow. The box just says "Moodie." Nothing else. I ordered it before my coffee was cold. ======== I hid the box in my closet behind my winter boots for four days. I kept almost telling him. Then not telling him. On a Thursday night I pulled it out and put it on the bed. My hands were shaking. I put it under my hips the way the instructions showed. And I waited. I was more nervous than our first date in 1999. He came up around 10:30. Saw the pillow. Didn't say anything. Just sat on the edge of the bed for a second. Then he reached for me. ======== I don't know how to describe the next twenty minutes without lying to you, so I'll just say what happened. I didn't brace. His hand was on my hip and my body didn't lock up. Four years of locking up. Gone. My body was in the bed. Not somewhere else. About fifteen minutes in he stopped moving. Pulled back two inches. Looked down at my face. "Wait, what did you just do?" I laughed. "Nothing." "You did something." I said "I don't know." He said "don't stop doing it." I cried a little with my face turned sideways into the pillow where he couldn't see. ======== Week one we had sex twice. No bracing. No recovery Monday. I moved normally all week. Week two he kissed me on the mouth in the kitchen. A real kiss. While the eggs were cooking. I hadn't been kissed on the mouth like that since our 20th anniversary. Week three I reached for him. He was brushing his teeth. I came up behind him and put my arms around his waist. He spit out his toothpaste and turned around so fast. Month two we were having sex on Tuesdays again. Tuesdays. Not scheduled. Just because. ======== We were packing up the Christmas tree in January when he told me. I was in the attic handing him boxes down the ladder. He said "can I ask you something." I said "sure." "What happened in November." I almost dropped the ornament box. "What do you mean?" He said "you came back. I don't know how else to say it. I've been trying to figure out how to ask you about it for six weeks." I sat down on the attic floor. Knees drawn up. I told him about the pantry at Thanksgiving. About watching Linda and Mark. About his sister-in-law at the sink. About the pillow. He climbed back up the ladder and sat down next to me in the dust and the tinsel. He said "I almost gave up on us last summer." "I know." "I wasn't going to leave. I was just going to stop hoping." "I know." He didn't say anything for a while. Then he said "thank you for not stopping hoping." I put my head on his shoulder in the attic. ======== I'm telling you this because Thanksgiving is coming again. And there's going to be a woman at a table somewhere watching another couple disappear into a pantry and doing the math I did. If that's you. Your body isn't broken. It isn't old. It isn't your fault. It's a geometry problem. There's a pillow that costs $129 that fixes the geometry. That's the whole thing. ======== 👉 https://trymoodie.com/products/moodie-couples-pillow 100-night money-back guarantee. Discreet shipping. The box just says Moodie. If your husband hasn't pulled you into any pantries in a long time, this might be the thing. P.S. Last weekend my husband pulled me into the laundry room while I was folding towels. Closed the door behind him. Didn't say a word. I'm 50 years old and I was late to my sister's birthday dinner because of a laundry room. Not sorry.