Here's how working in the sex industry prepared me to be a wife and mother

For as long as I can remember, I've always wanted the kind of "normal" family I'd never had growing up. Then, in college, I needed cash fast while living as a student abroad: I became a sex worker, starting as a stripper while living abroad in Oaxaca, Mexico.

With that one impulsive decision, my dream of normalcy felt forever compromised. Yet, the actual job duties were surprisingly familiar.

As a stripper, you get paid to do the emotional labor women are expected to perform for free. Men paid me to sit silently and listen while they complained about their jobs or talked trash about an ex. Working as a call girl was similar: Much of the job was emotional, rather than physical labor. The sex itself was not very different than encounters I'd had as a civilian. Sometimes pleasurable, it was much more often unmemorable.

By the time I met my husband, I was tired of putting men's needs first. I wanted a partner prepared to invest as much in our relationship as I would. I wanted a healthy sexual relationship. There's a stereotype that women don't enjoy sex as much as men do, and the men I met professionally often complained about their "frigid" wives. As a wife, I would have no problem pleasing my husband — but I expected to enjoy our sex life, too.

I found all that when I met Arran. Unlike men I'd dated before him, Arran was relatively understanding when it came to my sexual past. With our marriage, I felt a certain level of social acceptance — until motherhood ushered in a whole new host of misconceptions.

Sex work defines the people who do it more than any occupation. No matter the realities of our experiences, we are thought of as victims and as inherently damaged — either before or as a result of our profession. Current and former sex workers are considered a danger to society and unfit for serious public service. Stereotypes like these cost me my career. These days, stigma leveraged at sex workers threatens my relationship to my children.

Without a doubt, the sex industry — and women who participate in it — are uniquely misunderstood; but modern motherhood, too, is cloaked in misconception.

As author Sady Doyle observed for Elle, mothers are caricatured as either magical or miserable. We're either — as Doyle puts it— "the glowing, selfless Madonna who spends every minute in rapt contemplation of her child's perfection," or else we are "the harried, frazzled, three-days-without-a-shower woman who tromps through life in sweatpants covered in baby urine and milky spit-up."

While mothers who work outside the home are misunderstood, stay-at-home moms fight their own host of stereotypes. As a stay-at-home mom, I'm painted as a lazy, self-indulgent woman who spends her idle days lunching with fellow unemployed mommies, or frittering away her hardworking husband's salary on shopping. The stay-at-home mom — much like the "high-class hooker" — is a lightning rod for class resentments, never mind the fact that I was as economically coerced into surrendering my career as I was situationally compelled into selling sex.

Initially, I was bewildered by the animus aimed at mothers, but I've learned to handle the hostility in stride — just as I've learned to cope with the hatred aimed at sex workers.

Prior to full-time parenting, I assumed it would be easy. Instead, fantasies of relaxed days spent introducing my infant to educational toys while baking homemade bread and beautifying my home, then working on my own career while he napped, failed to reflect my experience. Full-time mothering — like stripping and prostitution — is hard work.

Thanks to having worked in the sex industry, I know how to hustle. When Oscar was still an infant, I could do the dishes, feed the baby, change him twice, make the bed, and fold a good portion of the laundry all before his first nap. My first year and a half of parenting flew by, a blur of momming and chores. It was nonstop eight to six, at which point my husband came home and we'd split the "second shift."

Sex work taught me how to do it all while wearing the reassuring smile my toddler relies on. What's more, my former career helped me long ago get over any prudishness related to my body. Parenting boards are shockingly priggish, whereas I had no problem asking an online mommy group about hormone-related vaginal dryness. As an infant, when Oscar would act up in public, I'd have no qualms about whipping out a boob.

I'm a good mom not in spite, but because, of my sex work past. I'm not perfect. No mom is — and we shouldn't have to pretend to be.

When it comes to parenting, everyone's got an opinion on everything, from breast versus bottle to how much screen time a child gets (if any), and whether or not it's traumatic to let a baby "cry it out." Much like the issue of women's participation in the sex industry, the mommy wars have pit woman against woman, and mommy shaming is rampant.

You'd think — having been unfairly judged my entire adult life — I'd have learned how to tune out unfair criticism. Instead, as a former sex worker turned momma, I initially struggled with fear that I wasn't doing it right, and guilt anytime I felt anything less than ecstatic. I had everything I always wanted, and so I often thought, I ought to be happy.

While current and former sex workers are uniquely scrutinized, I suspect most women with children are far too influenced by the myth of the perfect mother, an idealization increasingly out of reach. We moms struggle. Yet anytime we express anything less than absolute contentment, we are told to "Be grateful" and "Enjoy every second" because "The days are long but the years are short and they grow up so fast."

Moms don't want sentimentality, bunches of flowers, and brunch one day a year. Like sex workers, we want legislative victories that protect our rights and afford us more freedoms. We want freedom from pregnancy discrimination and more family-friendly workplaces. Give us affordable childcare options and tax credits to support full-time parenting, so that moms like me truly have a choice whether we return to work or stay home with our kids. In the meantime, we want commiserations from other women in the trenches and practical strategies for surviving the years.

Most of all, give us space to make sense of our experiences.

Over a decade ago, I found the courage to face society's misconceptions and talk openly about my experiences in the sex industry. These days, in spite of the risk I'll be cast as a bad mother, I am honest about my experiences as a mother. But for my provocative history, I am in every way your typical wife and mom: relatively satisfied, grateful, #blessed ... but also overworked and exhausted, burnt out, under constant surveillance, and yet utterly invisible, just as I felt when I sold sex.