ERIKA LUST
“wHO SHOULD I MAKE IT OUT TO?”
I smiled up at the middle-aged couple, my pen paused above the DVD of my latest film.
“Alex . . .”
To Alex, I begin.
“. . . my son.”
I stop and look up again, this time with surprise. The mother shrugs. “He’s sixteen, he watches porn anyway. I’d rather have him watching yours.”
My partner, Pablo, and I were in Girona, Spain, for an art-house screening of Cabaret Desire, an indie adult film I’d written and directed the previous year. In my line of work, there is always this amazing interplay of sex and parenthood: No matter how much people want to keep the two separated, they’re impossibly entwined. We spent an amazing weekend there in Girona—full of parties, interviews and tours—which felt like a vacation, even though it was only an hour up the highway from our home in Barcelona.
Just five years ago, this little taste of paradise would not have been possible. Our eldest daughter, Lara, was born in 2007, and there was a long period where I was very protective and anxious about my new role. When she was around five months old, Pablo suggested we have a weekend away all to ourselves, much like the one I just described in Girona. Even though I knew he wanted to reconnect with me (and maybe get a real night’s sleep), I balked at the idea and couldn’t get over the thought of physical separation from my daughter. In the end, Pablo and his winning common sense got the better of me, and we left Lara with his sister for the weekend.
I cringe when I think of how I spent that whole first night bawling into a crisp hotel pillow over the fact that my little girl was a ten-minute taxi ride away from us. But at the time, she might as well have been on the moon. The second night, I relaxed enough over a glass of Rioja and an endless Spanish dinner to realize that I was looking at my partner for the first time in five months—looking at him and actually seeing the man I dated and fell in love with, full of excitement, smiles and sarcastic humor. When had he become this ghost in my peripheral vision, the extension of myself as a co-parent that I’d been living with for months? And what, for that matter, had I become to him in that time? In the end, that didn’t really matter, because as we sat flirting, joking, and giving playful squeezes under the table, I settled into my old self again and so did Pablo.
I remember this weekend so clearly, because it was when I discovered how important it was to remove the motherhood mantle for a while: not only for my well being, but also for that of my relationship. This is why Pablo and I made a promise to one another: one date a week, one weekend a month, and one week per year with no kids, just us. I can’t say we follow this to a tee, but we try, and that’s what matters. This is the same reason that I love going to work so much. By the time I’ve gotten our daughters (now aged two and five) up, bathed, fed, clothed, and ready for school, I feel like I’ve negotiated and mitigated more than the average lawyer. I love arriving to the office, seeing ERIKA LUST printed on the door, sitting down at my desk, and feeling a restorative sense of control and calm that I get from being my own boss.
What’s funny about my line of work is that people just assume that I have a leg-up, so to speak, when it comes to keeping the relationship alive in the bedroom. To be honest, I feel I have some advantage, in that working in the adult industry really reinforces the importance of sex in maintaining intimacy. On the other hand, that gem of wisdom only made me feel guilty when sex was the furthest thing from my mind. And that is something that no mother can escape. It’s only too easy to become an asexual parent when you factor in the lack of sleep, stress, and inherently unsexy tasks that face those who are rearing a child: diaper explosions, food riots, temper tantrums, and unstoppable crying jags—at the end of one of those days, I am in absolutely no physical or psychological state to feel sexy or want sex. On top of it, it seems deeply unfair that, under the same circumstances, Pablo would have no qualms about hopping in to the sack.
Be that as it may, I have to find the time to have, and indeed want to have, sex just like any other parent. And trust me, it’s hard. We have two small girls and run our own business: in fact, often times our dates have to be penciled-in like business meetings. It’s not like I shoot explicit films all day and then want to rip my clothes off the minute the apartment door closes. Rather, on Friday night, even if I’m grumbling about how much I just want to curl up on the couch, I head to the wardrobe and exchange my sneakers for some sleek boots, my hoodie for a leather jacket. I’ve stopped thinking about the couch by the time I’m curling my hair and applying lipstick in the bathroom, reminiscing instead about getting ready for a college party. And by the time I slide into a booth next to Pablo, gourmet cocktail in hand, I feel absolutely sultry.
In this way, being a mother is hugely inspiring for me. By challenging my own sexuality, motherhood forces me to realize that sometimes getting to the bedroom isn’t as natural, fun, or easy as what is done in the bedroom itself. And this is something I’m trying more and more to infuse in my films: one example being an installment called, “Married with Children,” where a very seemingly normal couple by day lose themselves in a world of S&M by night. I want to impart to my viewers, and parents especially, that sex, lust, and passion are absolutely worth having in your life, even if it is incredibly difficult to manifest at times. I hope not only to inspire others in this sense, but to continue to be inspired by others . . . like Alex’s parents at the Girona screening, who were not only so accepting of his sexuality, but also of their own. In this way, I hope we can keep inspiring each other to break down the divide between sex and parenting.