My First Sex Party

On trying to check my mom hat

Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

My husband and I decided on our safe word.

Watermelon.

I shaved my legs, my pits, and my bits.

I waved goodbye to our three-year-old and my parents, who’d ferried over to babysit, texted our teen who was working at the froyo shop that we’d be out for a few hours. As we began to reverse out of our housing co-op driveway, the homeschooled neighbor child rushed up to my passenger-side window. “Where are you going? What are you doing?” She always wanted to know about my life. I mumbled something about a work dinner for my husband. Why did I feel so guilty lying to this eight-year-old, when lying to my kids and parents came so easily?

Bridge traffic into town was heavier than usual, and I started to worry I’d ruin this most important night out because I’d signed up late for the “sexy sauna party” and still hadn’t received the email with the address of the event’s secret location.

I needed a reset. An escape from domestic life, even for a few hours. I needed to check my “mom hat” at the door and be anonymous. Not a mother, not a wife. Not a yoga teacher. If I had to sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” for my kids’ yoga classes while balancing on my sit-bones in Navasana one more time, I was going to lose it.

My husband had less riding on this night out. His business was finally launching, and I was thrilled, even though it required him to travel almost half the month. He’d call me from Oslo or Austin, and tell me about some great meal or some new band he’d discovered, while all I had to talk about was our eye-rolly fourteen-year-old who was still pissed that I’d had another child, that the dog had diarrhea—again, that our cat kept bringing me half-dead mice, and my peri-menopause symptoms: night sweats, brain fog, and frozen shoulder were getting worse.

I had become obsessed with the idea of strangers seeing me fuck and get fucked. I wanted men…and women. I needed to forget kids’ birthday parties and lunches and pet hair and the Sisyphean effort of rolling that damn boulder uphill just to have it crash onto me again and again. I wanted orgasms to crash over me, not parent-teacher conferences.

My husband, bless his heart, found us a “lifestyle” society that hosted monthly sex positive events and the mandatory orientation night happened to be beside the Costco we went to. We could do our weekly shop, and sign waivers and disclaimers. Win win.

Ping! Just as I thought the night wasn’t going to happen for us, the email with the location of the sexy party arrived in my inbox. The basement of the oldest steam bath in the city. At over a century old, it was practically a historical landmark.

My husband and I had visited the upstairs private saunas a few times. For forty dollars you could buy yourself two hours to shower, sweat, and attempt to awkwardly mess around on the single bed with the crinkly paper cover, but I’d long been curious about the men’s-only basement. I’d seen men enter and exit, which made me wonder why men got to have bathhouses for quick anonymous hookups, but not women. Are we wired that differently? Was there something wrong with me for wanting what I was looking for this evening?

The basement locker room sported frayed, threadbare carpet. An old TV console playing some kind of fuzzy porn. Once undressed, our clothes folded neatly inside the metal locker, my husband and I entered the communal steam and sauna, with its cracked tiles and exposed ceiling pipes, and walked into what appeared to be a jubilant game of ring toss. A woman was bent over with some kind of long-handled butt plug protruding from her ass, onto which the group of about two dozen were to toss rubber rings. This was less Eyes Wide Shut and more community theatre with nudity, but I told myself to stop being so judgy. Things would get more erotic.

Next up was the “human carwash.” Men and women divided into opposite sides of the communal shower and when the emcee blew her whistle the two groups were to run toward one another like the opening rush of a dodgeball game and wriggle and writhe against one another while the emcee stood on a chair above us and squeezed neon pink shower gel all over us. I lost track of my husband and paired up with a dark-haired woman with soft lips and while this was titillating, all I could think was: I am so going to get a UTI from this shower gel.

Before the next game began, my husband and I ducked into one of the two cedar saunas, hoping this might be where the serious action was happening. Unfortunately, it was empty, but we thought, Fuck it. We’ve come to get kinky, so we may as well get to it. He got down between my legs, but my mind kept wandering.

Did our little one cooperate with the teeth brushing? Was she snuggled on the sofa watching Toopy and Binoo?

Should I be on the sofa watching Toopy and Binoo?

Then, the sauna door opened and two women entered. Someone to cheer me on, even if just from the sidelines.

But no. They sat on the bench opposite us, acted as if we were invisible, and proceeded to complain about public transit, their exes, and co-parenting issues. Groceries! What? Here we were, in an underground sex chamber, where we could do what we wanted, and these women were acting as if we were fully dressed, standing at school pick-up. Where was the erotic?

I noticed one of them was holding a bottle of whipped cream, so, hoping to entice them, I asked if they’d pass it to me. They handed it over casually, like we were fully clothed at some backyard BBQ and I was asking for the mustard for my hot dog. I sprayed the whipped cream all over my breasts and urged my husband to lick it off while trying to make eye contact with those women, but…nothing. I couldn’t believe it. Here we were, hot and willing, and they were going on about the traffic? What was even happening? Perhaps I’d set my sights too high. This wasn’t Paris or Barcelona. But still.

Finally, when it became obvious that our fantasies weren’t going to be fulfilled, I called “watermelon.” I’d put so much emotional energy into this night. I’d thought our risqué adventure would somehow cleave me open and free my dormant sex goddess, but my tailbone hurt from the wooden bench, we were both overheating, and neither of us was going to get off.

We made up an excuse as to why we needed to leave early, but the emcee told me to sit down on the locker room bench. “You can’t leave without your party gift.”

While my husband got dressed, a tall woman with long, thin breasts approached and stood behind me. She draped her boobs over my head and onto my face. Her nipples practically touched my mouth. Then, she proceeded to hum the national anthem.

“Congratulations,” the emcee announced with a laugh. “You’ve earned your boob hat!”

En route home, we stopped for a cup of tea and a piece of dry cheesecake and made a pact never to speak of this night again. Then our teen daughter called. Business was slow at the froyo shop. She was being cut early. Could we pick her up?

As the three of us got out of the car back at the co-op, my neighbor rushed out in her pajamas, hungry for news from the outside world.

How was your night? Did you go downtown? What did you eat?

I mumbled some neutral answer and told her to go back home to bed. As I closed the door behind me, my daughter asked, “Why is she always so curious about you? It’s not like you ever do anything interesting.”

Dhana Musil is a Canadian writer whose work has appeared in Grain, The Ex-Puritan, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She writes personal essays and narrative nonfiction that explore memory, place, and interesting subcultures. She lives in British Columbia.