I transition from mother to lover so clumsily that unless I will myself to stand still for a moment, alone and naked (or in new sexytime attire purchased specifically for the occasion) I cannot even figure out where to put my hands. Minutes before they were packing lunches! And now they’re supposed to do what? And my mouth? Which just kissed my daughter goodnight? I’m meant to put it where? You can see the difficulty!

In this instance, however, I had not even enough time to put down my purse and keys; in fact I barely manged to rip off my glasses before he pushed me back on the stairs and slid down my throat. Worry about where to put my hands? There was no need! They dug into his ass to keep him from tumbling down the stairs, and before the time I’d normally have spent trying to get into character had passed my clit was thumping hard in time with his strokes into my mouth.

“I kind of attacked you the second you walked in the door,” he said afterward, curled behind me in the bed. “I hope that was ok,” and while I assured him that it most definitely was, I had to wonder for whom it would not be ok? Who wouldn’t like being the recipient of such extreme desire that it could not be put off long enough even for a purse to be set down or glasses to be removed?

Seriously, who wouldn’t like that?

In an average month sickness or late nights at work kept me away perhaps three times. The other twenty-seven (or twenty-eight, or twenty-five, or twenty-six) days found me there for at least an hour and quite frequently for closer to three.

The stress slid off my shoulders six feet outside the door. By the time I’d shown my card, grabbed a towel (the towels always smelled reassuringly of heat and bleach) and punched in the code to the locker room, I had no recollection of the annoyances which had seemed so vast just moments before. Far from stopping me, the omnipresent scent of Hot Man pulled me in to the weight room, where I’d spend a blissful half-hour surrounded by specimen my friend and I affectionately dubbed “The Bigs,” focused on nothing more taxing that making a block of steel go up and then come down without a clang. This was followed by an hour of step aerobics,¹ leaving me as happy and calm as a medicated clam.

Additionally, three days a week I practiced punching and kicking (and getting punched and getting kicked), a workout more grueling than anything that could be dished out in weight room or aerobics studio. If none of those options were available (and sometimes even if they were) I walked in the open air, occasionally ticking off as many as thirty miles in a single week.

That might have been excessive, no?

Out of the corner of my eye I observed my co-steppers and -lifters and -kickers and -walkers; I particularly noticed the ones who weren’t moving at my same speed. Invariably they were the ones weighted down with strollers and surrounded by a roiling cloud of children. Often I caught the hint of a suggestion of annoyance on their faces as they wrangled their offspring or sat impassive on the sidelines. I’m ashamed to say that I pitied them. However do they manage to get any time to come to the gym on their own, I wondered, then quickly thrust away the thought as the only conceivable answer was too horrifying to bear.

Eventually biology nudged me; it suggested that I could churn out my own tiny replicants and in the process not lose myself. “Those parents weren’t very good at managing their time,” I smugly thought. “Of course I’ll do better.” And when I had but one child, I did. I maintained my martial arts training and weight lifting, and when I took walks it was with the added cardiovascular challenge of a fully tricked-out stroller. But then arrived child number two, then hard on the heels of an impending divorce came child number three, and neither finances nor the clock permitted the extravagance of my past workouts.

These days I’m lucky if I can squeeze a few crunches into a schedule that’s increasingly overrun with the social, academic and athletic demands of my children. Has this taken a toll upon my formerly rock-hard waistline and super-powerful thighs? Oh hell yeah. Even worse it’s taken a toll upon my psyche as is evidenced by the fact that while registering my three children for three sessions of back-to-back swim lessons during which I was interrupted by said children no less than a number equal to the sum total of aforementioned individual classes,² and despite having not, against all odds, forgotten how to add, I lost my motherfucking shit over the final bill.³

All that money spend on my children, who will frolic joyously in the pool while I stew and glower from the sidelines, dry of body, baleful of spirit and empty of checkbook, feeling nothing but the most shameful resentment toward the small souls who are entrusted to my care.

It is not a happy thing to admit to resenting one’s offspring, but I have to imagine that I’m not the first to feel such an emotion. Nevertheless, I recall no mention of this phenomena in my longstanding and painfully close research into what to expect from parenthood.

I’m not the first, am I?

1. do they still teach step aerobics? [↩]
2. if you’ve lost count, that’s eighteen [↩]
3. Classes run $30, so you do the math. [↩]