it’s time for time

this has been coming for a while. when you get right down to it, it’s been coming since the beginning, since i saw a plus sign on a pregnancy test, since i made every decision that has led me down this particular road. i will not deny that this new man has turned my whole world upside down. he most certainly has. i feel compelled to state, for the record, that all of this would have happened eventually. maybe without him, it would have happened too late for repairs.

i was 18 when my husband and i started seeing each other. he was 21. for as generally together as i’d like to think i was, i was still an 18-year-old girl. his talent intimidated me. i slowly shut down important parts of who i was. i stopped singing and writing, stopped wandering around alone on my bicycle at all hours of the night. it was never his fault that i cut off parts of myself, that was all me. it was stupid, but somehow i think i might have thought that relationships were supposed to be like that. handing over all your inferiorities to someone who could make better use of the time you’d been wasting on them. turning yourself into half of a couple, dumbing down the vibrant, wild, fiery, independent beast. it all happened slowly. pregnancy certainly shut down a lot of the more wild and frightening parts of who i was.

now i’m being thrown for a loop. i’m remembering that i’m just not the kind of person who has a kid or gets married. but… i have a kid, and i’m married. it’s been a difficult couple of weeks. mostly we’ve been taking a long hard look at our marriage. the rings are off for now. we need to take a big step back and remember how to enjoy each other, to have fun and be friends outside of our lives as parents and spouses. every day for a week i was having these extreme highs and lows, going from total optimism to utter despair within the space of an hour. yesterday was my first entirely optimistic day. we’re restructuring, and we’ll see how it works. in very different ways, we both missed out on a lot of growing up when we got pregnant. i think that we have done very well so far, and i hope that all of this hard work will reward us with something freeing and beautiful. it’s exciting and it feels like the right move, but it’s scary. it’s always scary when changes happen seemingly out of nowhere. we’re just not sure where anyone stands in relation to anything right now. we’ll get there, though.

it all started when…

four years ago today, i found out that i was pregnant.

did i know what i was getting myself into when i decided against an abortion? no, not really.

all i knew was that i saw potential joy in the direction that i chose, and more importantly a future with the man i was starting to fall deeply in love with.

most days, if i had it to do over again, i would make the same choice. if i had known just how hard the choice and the following years would be, i would have been a lot more okay with the minor annoyances of contraception. but… here i am.

i love my husband even more than i did the day that he said he’d stay with me and see this through. i love my son and wouldn’t know what to do with myself without him.

it’s all working out, i think. i hope.

my days

i don’t have the easiest schedule in the world.  i wake up every weekday at four a.m., while my husband and son are sound asleep.  i dress quietly in the darkness and tiptoe downstairs (as much out of fear of stepping on our resident mouse as of waking anyone).  i leave the house at five, with any given percentage of a pot of coffee already sloshing around in my belly.  there’s an hour-long bus ride and another hour at work before there’s even a hint of sunrise.  i usually work between four and eight hours, then there’s the hour commute back and a mandatory shower because my workplace smells…funky.  in the bad bad bad way.  twice a week my husband works in the afternoons, so the entire morning is rushed and stressful.  i come home in a bad mood (which is usually amplified by some godawful bus experience or another), and the poor husband has to suffer my murderous glare as we try to get lunch together before he leaves.

but when he leaves, a magical thing happens.  i am clean.  i am fed.  the child is fed, and can be sat down with a movie in the living room.  i get “personal time.”

you can practically see the golden glittery light of fairytales surround my bed as i lay back on the pillows.   sometimes, if i’m really, really lucky…  it’s quiet.

breathing freely is a miracle in this world.

there are days when i use this time to nap.   there are times when i can’t keep my eyes open anymore, and all i need is to be curled up in a blissfully empty bed, under blankets that are not being hogged by anyone else.

the best days, though, are ones like today.  no one needs me for anything.  i even remember to take the laundry out of the dryer so i don’t have to interrupt myself.  i have a guaranteed hour of peace and quiet.  to a lot of people, this won’t sound like a lot of time.  to many, it probably wouldn’t be nearly enough.  to me, it stretches forward, something vast and indefinite.

i pile up the pillows and recline like a goddamn queen.  just a lazy reach to one side and there’s a vibrator in my hand, all plugged in with a washcloth rubberbanded around its head and ready to go.  that first orgasm is always fast and tense, just enough to brush away the surface stress and start feeling things a little more.   the next one takes patience, to breathe through the jolting hypersensitivity to a place where tension really starts to melt.  i’m almost never satisfied with one or two.  sure, they leave me with that high singing feeling behind my eyes and a little more bounce in my step, but it takes four or five good hard comes to get me where i want to be.  in the middle of that magical final one, you’ll almost invariably find me on my knees, gripping my njoy hard enough to make dr. kegel himself proud, yelling things that might not be words and shaking like a leaf.  it must be a beautiful thing to behold.

i collapse back onto the pillows, but not for long.  i float out of the bedroom to do the requisite washing, and in the mirror all i see is a transcendent smile and rosy cheeks.  it’s like the morning never happened.

reality does descend before too long, because there will always be a tantrum over some forbidden non-toy, or a blood sugar meltdown when the little one is too excited about life to eat his snack.  it’s a cycle of ups and downs, and i just need to keep remembering that my time is never more than a couple of days away.  most of the time, it’s worth the wait.

advice

sometimes people will ask people to look back on their lives and offer a few words of advice for some unknown future generation.  usually one comes up with some trite little nothing, the answers that anyone will give (and precisely what does “be yourself” mean, when it’s coming from someone with a godawfully warped self-image?).  i digress.

here’s my advice:

• if you’re going to go to college, know what the fuck you’re really interested in and focus on it, hard.  don’t get a wishy-washy degree in something you never want to talk about again.  if you do, you will quickly realize that you’ve wasted several years doing just about jack squat.
• condoms are a really, really good idea.

yup, that just about covers it.

Goodness

I had a baby three years ago. I had a healthy, libidinous pregnancy, a natural home birth, and just over two years of breastfeeding. It’s all been great, except the sleep deprivation. I’ve found myself needing to get closer and closer to 9 hours a night, while it’s getting less and less likely that I can or will.

Now, I don’t agree with the people who say having kids ruins your sex life. Then again, I don’t agree with the people who say that it doesn’t. Let’s just say that it certainly can, but it doesn’t have to.

My husband and I have been together for just over four years. That’s four total, not four married. Around six months into our relationship, we found out that we had done something incredibly stupid. Despite my guy’s stress levels (young pregnant girlfriend, three jobs, etc.) landing him in premature ejaculation territory, we were having sex all the time. Much to my midwife’s amusement, we kept at it even when it started sending me into false labor. Oh, youth. Then there was a baby, and we weren’t sleeping much at all, and suddenly sex was not so frequent. We’d go four days, a week, two weeks… Recurring yeast infections certainly didn’t help. It felt wrong to not be having sex. We felt like we were turning into one of those couples that tells everyone how kids/cohabitation/marriage ruined their sex lives. We felt like we were supposed to be having sex, and so we had perfunctory, exhausted, brief sex. Not so fun. Now, though… We’ve got this thing down. The trick is to wait until you’re both ready – not too tired, unbathed or stressed out. It might feel like a long time between sex sessions, but in my experience the quality of the sex entirely makes up for the wait. Sex isn’t a job! You don’t have to have a schedule, or stress about it if you really just need to go to sleep instead. If you need to get off quick, masturbate alone or with your partner. Vibrators are Great for this. Just take the performance pressure off for a while, until both of you are ready to give your all.

Now that our little one is older we’re learning new tricks to distract him while we sneak off for daytime romps in the bed (while we’re still both energetic and enthusiastic). We’ve found the time of day that works best for us (between our opposite work shifts), and we’re comfortable letting each other know just what we want. I’d much rather have the type of sex we’re having once a week than the empty crap we could be putting ourselves through nightly.