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. [↩]

During the last ten minutes of the final day of swim lessons the manager turned on all the pool’s assorted water toys and let the children run free, a combined celebration and break from the ceaseless toil of never-ending bobs, floats and dives.

My son raced away from his instructor and spent the time at a row of some half-dozen jets designed to shoot water head-high to the grade-school set. At first he was content merely to run through them, but once an instructor showed him how, by blocking one of the jets with his foot, he could make the rest rush ultra-high, he did nothing else. If one blocked jet created a four-foot tower, he pondered, how high would three blocked jets go? He enlisted a friend when the span of his own feet fell short and the two created a geyser that loomed as high as a dinosaur and no doubt just as thrilling.

He was, in short, in heaven.

In contrast, his sister hardly budged from the side of her teacher, a seventeen-year-old slaving in the pool before commencing her senior year come September. My child idolizes her; she chatters incessantly about her hair and assortment of swimsuits when we’re not at the pool and hurries to sit next to her as soon as we are. This young woman wobbles on the very precipice of adulthood, one moment speaking to me clinically about my child’s progress, the next tugging on the top of her suit and flipping her hair as another swim instructor, a young man, saunters by.

These two teach next to each other in the pool, and while lessons themselves are carried out with the nothing but professionalism, the few moments between lessons allow for a just an inch of hijinx. Then the two surreptitiously splash at each other and whisper quietly. There is much gazing into eyes.

It is very sweet.

I watch, all but invisible due to age, from beneath a huge umbrella. I watch because I can so clearly remember being seventeen and enveloped in love and lust. I watch because I can’t remember being so effortlessly beautiful — though photographic evidence says I was.

And I watch because my child watches. She grins right along with her teacher as they splash the boy, and if he splashes back she gets wet too. “Do it this way,” the teacher demonstrated during the one class I spent with them in the water, and I watched my little girl’s eyes shine as she got a response from the young man. She beamed and laughed and I could so clearly picture her assuming the teacher’s place in just a decade.

“It’s a class in swimming and flirting all at once!” I said to the teacher, and she agreed that it certainly seemed so.

Two classes for the price of one? I’m happy with that bargain.

Before they were born I envisioned spending loads of quality time with my offspring. We would hike to the tops of mountains, swim in quiet waters and lie peacefully watching clouds roll by. Every so often they’d ask a question. I’d ponder mometarily, drawing together lines of thought from sources disparate as biology, the Bible, and Beatles lyrics before enlightening them with my erudite words.

“You’re so smart, Mommy,” I imagined them saying. “I understand now.”

“Also,” I heard their little voices intoning, “Thank you for bringing us with you on this adventure. It has been educational and enjoyable.”

Instead they grouse from the edge of the public pool, snarly because of uncooperative goggles and downright pissed at not being allowed to perform belly flops upon their siblings’ heads before spending the entire ride home wishing for more, something more, anything more, always more.

“Now that we’re done at the pool can we go to Chuck E. Cheese,” they wheedle from the back sea, bellicose and querulous in their damp towels. “I want some french fries! When can we go to the splash park? Can Nicholas come over for a slumber party? Can I have cookies for lunch? You should buy us some Moon Sand. Why can’t we order pizza for dinner? Can I have a popsicle? Are we going to take tumbling classes? We haven’t gone to McDonald’s forever,” and on and on ad nauseam, to the point that I’ve stayed mute to their plaintive requests until one of them parrots back the words I’ve said so many times before: “Mommy’s already spent lots of money on summer activities. We should be happy about what we have and not ask for more.”

Clearly I should have devoted more of my pre-motherhood time in fantasizing not about hazy-hued mountaintop scenes but instead about how to instill in them some gratitude. Eight weeks into this interminable summer it feels like all I do all day long is ferry these little ingrates from place to place, and you know what? The Mom Taxi is just about out of gas.

Help!

***Whoops, this posted several hours ahead of schedule. Please to forgive the regrettable error that allowed a draft to go live before its time. —aag***

The two sides are set to meet with a third party, an impartial observer and mediator who is equipped to help us resolve enough of our differences that we can face life in a civilized fashion.

That is, in theory, the goal. I have no hope that it will actually happen, and as the hour of our meeting ticks incrementally closer I grow more and more paralyzed to the point that I’m pecking out this post now with the near-certain knowledge that I won’t be able to afterward.

I foresee two possibilities. First, I could be roundly excoriated by the counselor for my tattoos, purple-blue nail polish, excessive tummy, lack of proper employment, intractable promiscuity and overall “lifestyle” mayhem. He is a Christian; because of this I fear that any weirdness on my part will solidify in his mind my parents’ belief that I am a horrible human being. If this happens I am prepared in a grim sort of way to fold his advice into a very tiny wad, slip it beneath my waistband, and ignore it just as steadfastly as I have ignored lectures without number from my parents on identical topics. In this timeline the net change in our relationship will total a big fat zero. We will be left exactly where we started.

Well, other than the fact that during the week I spend folding up the advice, I’ll wish more than anything to disappear into the earth from having yet another respectable human being tell me that I’m horrible. There is that. But as I count damage to myself as nigh onto nothing, we will not worry about that week.

In the other possible future the counselor ignores the ways I differ from the average American and advises my parents to do the same. He confirms that Christian or not, forgiven by God or not, I have every right to protect my children as I see fit.

This might seem like a more positive outcome but first appearances are deceiving; such an occurrence would no doubt cause my parents’ dislike to grow even more intense as they become convinced that I set the whole thing up. Or that the counselor wasn’t as good of a Christian as he originally seemed to be. Or both.

I cannot foresee any other possibilities.