Moms Don't Have Time To

by Zibby Owens

  After three months of dating, I accidentally let it slip. I was late for work because of a sleepover (really, you should assume everything I write that smacks of innuendo actually is). Heading toward the door, I kissed Paul and said it: “I love you.”

  When he replied that he loved me too, I thought he was too kind just to say, “Mm-kay,” and when he agreed to marry me, I was not entirely convinced that he understood. But here I am a decade later, seldom having sex with my good-looking, good-natured husband.

  This may come as a shock, but if you lock two half-naked, gay men in a bedroom, the end result is not always sex, though it used to be for us. As I pull on my shirt, I glance over at Paul and wonder, how did we get to this place?

  Paul puts a finger to his tongue and pretends to tweak a nipple, inviting me to do the same.

  I button up my shirt.

  There are times when we are in public and the last golden rays of sunlight are caressing Paul’s face and moments when we walk along a lonely stretch of New England beach that I think, yes, this. I see in his profile an irresistible, childlike wonder, and I want to reach out and clasp his hand or kiss his lips, but more than four decades of muscle memory are telling me Stop! Someone might see you—it’s not safe; not now. So, all of my physical touch is funneled into the shadows. In this time and space and place, sandwiched between aging parents and adult children still at home, are mounting responsibilities, cooking, cleaning, reading emails, and writing to deadlines. There is only a small sliver of time for physical affection and splinters of that time are divvied up into sleep and sex. There are nights, becoming more frequent, when we roll from side to side, enjoying neither.

  In this time and space and place, sandwiched between aging parents and adult children still at home, are mounting responsibilities, cooking, cleaning, reading emails, and writing to deadlines.

  It was our youngest daughter, Celine, who is attuned to every tiny vibration of change in our household, who noticed—even before I did—that sunny-side Paul had become somewhat hard-boiled. When I walked into the kitchen one weekend morning she was sitting at the dining room table, a pile of college textbooks in front of her and a hand on her forehead. She looked up at me and said, “Dad seems out of sorts lately. Have I done something wrong?”

  I paused for a moment and concluded that at twenty-one years old, she could handle the truth.

  “Oh no, no sweetie, he’s not upset with you,” I said, patting her hand. “Your father and I just haven’t had sex in a while.”

  “Um,” she replied, and then looked out the window. “Ew. Okay, but that’s actually a relief. Is everything all right?”

  “Oh, God, yes! We’ve just hit a dry spell.”

  “Again, a lot of information.”

  She stood up.

  “That settles it. Ben and I are going to the movies tonight,” she said, referring to her older brother. She flashed her eyebrows at me and said, “Rest up, sport, you’ve got a big night, tonight.”

  Walking to her bedroom, she paused and then slapped me on the rear end. “Go get him, tiger.”

  That night, I decided to spice things up by wearing my glasses, the readers with black plastic frames, during our lovemaking. I was going for the sexy, nerdy look. Afterward, my head resting in the crook of his arm, Paul turned to me, kissed my nose, and said, “What’s with the grandpa look?”

  Instead of getting angry, I started laughing uncontrollably, which reaffirmed my steadfast belief that I married exactly the right person, and as a bonus, we have a blended family with five beautifully irreverent, wonderful kids.

  We’re getting older, Paul and I, and with that comes creaking knees, spreading waistlines, and a decreasing libido, but looking over at Paul, all of him stretched out on the bed, I remembered that time by the fire.

  We’re getting older, Paul and I, and with that comes creaking knees, spreading waistlines, and a decreasing libido, but looking over at Paul, all of him stretched out on the bed, I remembered that time by the fire. After that first night, while he was sleeping, I tiptoed to the bathroom and sobbed. It was too much, that unbearable voluminosity of emotions, consuming joy after a lifetime of denial.

  Work can wait. I walk over to Paul while unbuttoning my shirt, and he places his smartphone down on the bed.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, smiling as he puts a hand to his ear and pulls out the earbud. “I’m on mute. Do you want something?”

  “Yes,” I say, cupping my hand around his perfect face—yes, dear husband, I do. “But not now.”

  Bill Dameron is an award-winning blogger, essayist, and the author of The Lie: A Memoir of Two Marriages, Catfishing & Coming Out.

  How to Have Sex with a Germaphobe

  CLAIRE GIBSON

  I scrubbed my classroom surfaces with Lysol wipes. I used hand sanitizer religiously. And still, during my first semester as a middle school teacher, I caught a nasty virus.

  Around the same time that I started teaching, I fell in love with Patrick, a Nashville native with a thick red beard, freckles, and a penchant for plaid shirts. Those first few months, our dates often included a bottle of wine and a stack of papers to grade. His red pen was swift, likely because he was doing the math: the sooner the papers were graded, the sooner we could start making out. And make out we did. A lot.

  It was a stressful year: a student threw a dictionary at my head. A colleague cornered me in my own classroom to shout me down for being insensitive. During those months, Patrick’s kindness and help (and yes, his hot bod) bolstered my courage to face each new challenge. When I struggled to fall asleep, he’d stay by my side a bit longer, hold me close, and whisper in my ear, “Rest, love. Just rest.”

  Perhaps that’s why I fell so hard, and why, only five months in, I said yes to his marriage proposal. Patrick’s steady, calming presence had become an essential ingredient in my emotional stability. Though I’d dated plenty of men, there was something different about Patrick. My experience of physical intimacy in the past had always felt like an act of subtraction. But kissing Patrick felt like an act of multiplication. We were young and in love. And so we made out, oblivious to the germs passing from the students to the teacher to her fiancée.

  We entwine our bodies and believe in our souls and connect at a distance that the government will never control.

  A few days after he proposed, Patrick got a sore throat. While we drove to Georgia to be with my family, he called his doctor and begged for a prescription to calm his irritated lungs. The entire Christmas break, while I was high on the adrenaline of new love and wedding plans, he was high on cough syrup and ibuprofen. We kissed and canoodled through it all, germs be damned. Not wanting to ruin my time with family, Patrick pretended he was well.

  Only now, ten years into our marriage, do I realize what a feat of love that must have required.

  Though he hid it well during our short engagement, my husband is a bona fide germaphobe. He elbow-bumps like a champ. He washes his hands until they’re so dry they crack. At work events, if a stranger offers his (potentially germ-infested) business card, my husband snaps a photo of the contact info with his iPhone, and then puts his hands in his pockets and says he doesn’t like clutter.

  Throughout our marriage, Patrick has taught me the art of social distancing. Only, before this coronavirus outbreak, I simply thought he was being rude. For example, earlier this winter I had a runny nose and itchy throat. Properly medicated (thank you, Dayquil), I grabbed my purse and prepared to leave the house for work. On the way out, I leaned in to kiss Patrick goodbye, only to feel him pull his head back slightly, purse his lips together, and wince. Properly rejected, I went from loving to completely pissed off in a nanosecond.

  “What the heck?” I snapped.

  “I don’t want to get sick,” he explained.

  “You could at least hug me,” I huffed. “You don’t have to treat me like a leper.”

  “I’m just playing it safe. We both don’t have to get sick.”

 
This is a common argument—one that gets replayed every flu season without fail. Me, pooh-poohing the natural laws of communicable diseases, and my husband, holding strong so that at least one of us is well enough to parent our two young children. For years, I’ve held the pessimistic mindset that if I get sick, we’re all going to get sick. Patrick takes a different tack. If one of us gets sick, he goes into battle mode, ready to hole himself away to ward off the domino effect. Forget sex; if one of us is sick, we usually end up sleeping in separate beds. I stew, feeling rejected. Patrick shrugs, knowing he is ultimately helping our family get better faster.

  It’s an act of resistance against the forces of evil that will try to pull us apart . . . It’s a silent shout that screams, “Hell no. Heaven yes.”

  For years I raged against his precautions. And then, a new, deadly disease emerged on the face of the globe—one so contagious, it had the potential to infect hundreds of thousands of people, and might just shut down the entire world economy. In the weeks before the United States finally understood what it was up against with COVID-19, I tentatively began asking Patrick about his strategies to avoid germs. He encouraged me to change my hand-washing habits (as in, do it more, Claire). When I began to feel worried—about our friends in the restaurant industry, about my friend who owns a home-cleaning business that will likely go under, about my parents who refuse to believe that the virus is real—his still, calm voice continues to offer reassurance.

  For now, we are both well. We are practicing social distancing from our dear neighbors and friends in Nashville, many of whom are still reeling from a tornado that passed through three weeks ago. And so at night, he reaches for me. He caresses my shoulder. I kiss his mouth. He doesn’t pull back. We entwine our bodies and believe in our souls and connect at a distance that the government will never control.

  At a marriage conference several years ago, the speaker explained that sex is an act of outrageous hope. It’s an act of resistance against the forces of evil that will try to pull us apart. It is a moment of total presence, of silence, of belief that life and pleasure and ecstasy can still exist in the midst of chaos. It’s a silent shout that screams, “Hell no. Heaven yes.”

  In the afterglow, my husband whispers in my ear.

  “Rest, love. Just rest.”

  His steady, calming influence is more important now than ever. And if one of us gets sick? Patrick has a plan. He’s ready to quarantine himself or provide so that I could do the same. We don’t both have to get sick, he reminds me. He’s ready to ensure that our family stays safe. Is there anything sexier than that?

  Claire Gibson is the author of Beyond the Point, which is currently in development with a major Hollywood studio.

  What My Mother Taught Me about Sex

  CAITLIN MULLEN

  Our conversation lasted ten minutes, but in my mind it stretched hours.

  I was sure my mom wouldn’t know what hit her.

  “I have something to tell you,” I said. I was seven years old and couldn’t help but gloat about what I had learned that afternoon. I felt so adult—so brimming with classified knowledge—I had to blurt it out.

  “What’s that?” she asked. Distracted, my mother glanced over her shoulder at me, then quickly returned to preparing dinner.

  “Jamie told me all about sex.”

  I expected my mother to pivot, mouth agape. Instead, she turned around slowly and eyed me with a smile playing at the corners of her lips.

  “Oh yeah?” she said. There was a knowing sound to her voice.

  It took me nearly a decade to realize that my mother had seen this coming from a mile away. My friend Jamie was two years older than me and only played with me because the power balance always fell in her favor. A quiet and obedient playmate, I lived across the street and blindly believed anything Jamie told me, hanging on her every word.

  To me, sex was a vague and furtive adult activity, something that lurked beneath the surface.

  Jamie relished her natural superiority. Earlier that year, my playmate had convinced me that it was imperative for us to wear her mom’s panty liners in our underwear. In middle school, it was Jamie who introduced me to porn, fanning through a stack of Playboys that her dad kept underneath his side of the bed. The first time she shaved her legs, she immediately ran over to my house and ordered me to stroke her hairless shins. This was the kind of friend she was—older, wiser, ready to school me in whatever new milestone she had reached.

  No wonder my mother wasn’t surprised.

  “What exactly did Jamie tell you?” my mom asked. While she knew Jamie was that friend, she also knew that Jamie likely didn’t have the full story.

  I squirmed in my chair, then looked away, feeling certain that I’d overplayed my hand. What had Jamie told me, exactly? I combed through my memory of the play date. With a knowing smile, Jamie had stripped off Barbie and Ken’s clothes and mashed their bodies together with a violence I now assume was meant to stand-in for passion.

  She’d said, “They’re going to have sex.”

  I nodded, pretending to know what she meant.

  To me, sex was a vague and furtive adult activity, something that lurked beneath the surface. There were glimpses of this hidden reality everywhere I looked. In the movies my parents wouldn’t let me watch. In magazine advertisements, where women wore lingerie in order to sell liquor or lotion or cruise ship vacations. In the sitcom jokes that flew over my head. In the song lyrics I belted out but didn’t fully understand.

  My mom interpreted my hesitation correctly, sighed, and pulled out a chair.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to tell you what you need to know.”

  My mother was my safe place, even when I felt like my world had been shattered.

  With unsparing and anatomically correct detail, my mother revealed to me what happened when two people had sex. She spoke about body parts inserted into other body parts, about sperm and eggs. I thought for a moment about what Ken and Barbie looked like underneath their clothes. The dolls, with those featureless, neutered spaces between their legs, were not at all up to the task of demonstrating the things my mother had just spoken about. Everything about Jamie’s Barbie tutorial fell remarkably short in depicting the truth my mother was now imparting to me.

  My mother’s sex talk probably lasted ten minutes, but in my mind it stretched hours, my face turning a deeper shade of red with every passing second. I was simultaneously trying to process the facts as she was laying them out while also coming to terms with just how quickly I had gone from feeling adult and worldly to clueless and chagrined.

  “Of course,” my mom said, as she got up from the table, “people also do it for fun. Including me and your dad.”

  The mention of my parents having sex made me bury my face in my hands. If I hadn’t been prepared to learn the real mechanics of sex, I certainly hadn’t been prepared to picture my parents doing it either. And fun? I don’t know what I was thinking when Jamie gave me the Barbie demonstration, other than sex was something adults were compelled to do the same way they seemed mysteriously compelled to vacuum the floor of the car.

  “If you have questions, you know you can ask me, right?”

  I managed a meek nod. And with that, my mother patted my hand and went back to making dinner as though nothing had happened at all.

  My initial reaction was shock, but later I thought of things a little differently. By leading a frank, unashamed discussion about sex, my mother also taught me that she would be there for other difficult conversations throughout my life. She taught me that honesty—especially when it is uncomfortable—is a way to demonstrate love. Jamie told me about sex so that she could revel in feeling more powerful, more sophisticated than me. But my mom, with her straight-faced descriptions, told me for the opposite reason: so that I might feel armed by the knowledge, empowered by it.

  Jamie and I drifted apart after middle school. As she fell into a crowd of her same-age peers, I grew more preoccupied with books and sc
hoolwork. But my mother and I would have years of conversations at that same kitchen table. Difficult conversations and sad ones, such as how to deal with my first real breakup and deciding when to go back to college after my father died. Each time, my mother was my safe place, even when I felt like my world had been shattered. Each time, I came away with the same feeling as I did that day my mom told me the truth about sex. That no matter what I had gone out in the world to experience for myself, I could always come back to her to help me close the gap between what I knew and what I still needed to learn.

  Caitlin Mullen is the debut author of the novel Please See Us.

  Don’t Crush My Butterflies

  ZIBBY OWENS

  I was almost forty years old, but I felt like a teenager.

  I was the only grown-up angling to get more fire on my marshmallow. Little kids shoved me out of the way as we jousted with our extra-long bamboo sticks for the perfect roasting position. It was my first vacation without kids since I’d had kids, and there I was, around a firepit in Puerto Rico, packed in with everyone else’s.

  I’d recently separated from my husband and had fallen in love with the man who I would end up remarrying. Kyle and I were in the butterfly stage of our love affair: We couldn’t stand to be apart. When we were together, we were constantly touching, swooning, smooching, and staring into each other’s eyes. I was almost forty years old then, but I felt like a teenager. My body responded to Kyle’s in such a physical way: heart fluttering when I saw him, cheeks blushing, tummy warm, drawn into his arms like a magnet.

  This was our first big trip together. My first Christmas break week without the kids. We walked arm in arm through the winding security line, stopping to kiss, hug, and touch. The disgruntled passport officer looked at us and snapped, “Looks like someone’s in love.” We didn’t need anything external to keep us occupied on the plane. We talked and laughed the whole way. The plastic barrier between our seats felt insurmountable and when the seatbelt sign dinged off, I got up and just snuggled into his lap.