365 Nights Read online

  “I’m in the tub. The kids are upstairs with a video. I have a cold beer here, too . . . Want to join me?”

  He said, “No, you go on and finish up. I’m fine.”

  I don’t even know where to begin with this one.

  It’s Friday night and we’re scheduled to go out. I have strategically placed the kids upstairs to watch a video. Here I am trying, really trying, to create some moments that stand out from our standard sex-every-day moments and this is all I get? The disappointment is exacerbated by the fact that we have the most awesome garden tub in our master bathroom. In fact, when we first looked at this house, we were blown away by the indulgent bathroom—double vanity, tiled shower, and a tub à deux that sits in the corner. It was a far cry from our teeny master bathroom in our old house (which didn’t really qualify as a master bath because it was attached to another bedroom).

  This tub is like a small swimming pool, and when we first moved in, we took baths whenever we could and our kids bathed nightly. It was like Spa Muller. While we had visited lots of places with nice bathtubs, we had never owned such a spectacular bathing experience. Then we got our first water bill and it was like four hundred bucks! Our waterlogged eyes couldn’t believe it when we read the bill, but I guess it makes sense. We were filling a tub the size of a plastic pool from Wal-Mart—and nearly every day. From then on, we went on a tub rationing program. Our kids learned to take showers and we doled out tub time for special occasions and as a reward for good behavior.

  So when I was inviting Brad to join me, it was a twofer—we were going out (a regular and always welcome occurence) and I was rewarding myself for a job well done in the domestic goddess department (still kind of a new thing even after two months). After all, I thought I was doing a darn admirable job on our intimacy arrangement by getting the kids all happy and situated upstairs, while I was ready and waiting inside this glorious tub. All this, and some friskiness, too, was lost on Brad.

  Later I told him. “You know, I was trying to mix things up a bit with the bath and beer thing. I’m talking two kinds of suds involved. I can’t believe you weren’t even interested. I mean, can you throw me a bone?”

  “Whoops—I totally missed the signals, sweetie.” He grimaced, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. If I had known this was a planned rec activity, I would have been more involved. I guess I’m kinda used to our routine.”

  Routines. They’re a curse and a blessing.

  We had gotten into a lovin’ groove—occasionally in the A.M., but nearly always in the P.M. On the weekend, we would mix it into our “getting ready to go out” repertoire. This caused Brad to be a completely charming dinner guest because he was so darned slap happy, and I could grossly overeat and overdrink and nose-dive into a catatonic sleep at the end of the evening, because our little intimacy engagement was behind us. But the bathtub? Clearly, I had thrown him off with a change of venue.

  It’s September and the early-morning routine is back in high gear: Wake up at dawn, shower, wake up the children, get lunches made, backpacks found, children dressed, teeth brushed, and off to school. As I see my own children hustle off to school and I walk to the end of the driveway to grab the paper, it hits me that I’m the mom here. It’s not me skipping off to school with nary a trouble in the world. Instead, I realize that I have ahead of me years and years of this routine. Years and years.

  It’s a whirlwind, but by 7:45, the house is quiet again; I’m frazzled and popping open my second Diet Coke of the morning. I’m taking comfort in that soft fizzing noise and thinking about the old days, when I was a young and single marketing executive, living in the big city. On the weekend, I could sleep in until eleven, eat lunch at three in the afternoon, take hours to get dressed for the evening, and then cap it all off by watching cheesy Lifetime movies until the wee hours of the morning. Fast-forward five years . . .

  “Hello. Charla Muller,” I answered into the phone, a pencil wedged in my teeth.

  “Hey, it’s Nina, how are you?” Nina was calling me from home.

  “Ugh. I’m so tired I could die. I just went and napped in the handicapped stall. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Hang on . . . I need to put my head between my legs, I’m feeling woozy.”

  “Well, it’s two P.M. Have you eaten?”

  “What? No, not really. I don’t feel good. Don’t really have an appetite. ” I was reduced to mumbling by this point.

  “Char, are you sure you couldn’t be pregnant?”

  That woke me up. “Don’t be ridiculous! I couldn’t be pregnant—it’s too soon. Heck, we’re still waiting for our wedding album from the photographer.”

  “I want you to go eat a pack of Nabs from the vending machine and go by Eckerd on the way home for a pregnancy test.”

  Whoops.

  Yep, within ninety days of getting married, Brad and I were actually pregnant. So after a lovely courtship, wonderful engagement, and dream wedding: Hello! You’re pregnant, Charla! No, we didn’t plan to get pregnant this quickly, we thought it would take some time, but it turns out I’m very fertile.

  But we were incredibly excited, and had fluffy dreams of cuddling together alongside the beautiful sleeping baby, and moving her into a decked-out nursery that would make Martha Stewart weep with joy. Those dreams were swiftly shoved aside by the sloppy realization of what it means to be parents to a real-live baby. I mean, it’s alive and everything!

  Don’t get me wrong. This is what I wanted. Or what I thought I wanted—in the abstract. And that’s what the future is most of the time—a dreamy, vague notion of some sort. For me, I wanted to get married. I wanted to have kids. I wanted to work—a little (I didn’t want to be CEO, but I did want to be successful). I wanted to live in a great house in a great neighborhood and go to fabulous dinner parties every weekend where I would mingle with my charming, witty, and wildly successful friends.

  It’s only when you look into the shadows of those dreams that you see the sharp and pointy details of your future. Of living with a spouse who isn’t perpetually in a good mood (has he always been this grumpy?). Of raising babies who don’t want to sleep (from whose gene pool is this kid?). Of living with neighbors who are just as bleary-eyed as you are, and not nearly as charming as you had hoped (like you, they were so much fun before kids).

  Once our children debuted, the impact they had on our sex lives was significant. We went from lovely sex several times a week to . . . [insert chirping cricket noises here]. So while I was aware of the drastic change in our sex life, it was trumped by this amazing brand-new human life! Nothing was more important than keeping alive this small person who weighed only nine pounds. Nine pounds?! You have no idea how small and fragile babies are, and how many things can go wrong with small and fragile babies—it’s enough to haunt you in your sleep. Which it does—all the time—to first-time mothers. I briefly worried, in between all the other worries that I had as a new mother, whether this was a blip on the sex screen or whether, after I finally let the dust settle around the last box of Huggies, this was going to be a permanent state of affairs.

  My sense of desirability went bye-bye after I had a baby. A few moments that led me down into the valley of Motherhood, as a friend so astutely observed, included: when the ladies at the Lancôme counter started to call me “ma’am”; when my hairdresser threw up his hands and announced, “I’m at a complete loss to help you”; when I realized that I’m no longer the “young hotshot” at work; when my husband asked me if women think Angelina Jolie is as hot as men do (the answer is yes); and when my need for sleep grew exponentially greater than my need for sex.

  Yes, the list is tediously long. But there’s one moment that confirmed just how much I had changed in the last few years and how unglamorous and unsexy I had become:

  I’m driving down the street and listening to Anita Baker’s “Giving You the Best That I Got,” which is a languorously sexy song. Sadly, it does not occur to me that the song has absolutely no relevance to me, Brad, or my sex life. R
ather, I am basking in the sun, the kids are at preschool, and I’m thrilled that I don’t have to listen to Radio Disney. I am happy, relaxed, and feeling good. The window is down and I have on some très trendy sunglasses. I might even have managed to slap on some lip gloss, making it a banner day. I pull up to a stoplight, and see a cute, sharply dressed, sexy man sitting in a luxury car next to me. I wonder about him, and whether he would think I might be remotely cute, and I smile nonchalantly and dreamily (disinterested, of course, because I am a happily married woman . . . who’s now intimate every day with her husband, too!), but I like to think that maybe, just maybe, on this breezy day in September, I’ve still got it. That perhaps I can be married, a mother of two, and still be attractive to men.

  And then I realize, I don’t still got it. That in reality, I am towering over this attractive man, looking down into his luxury BMW from the great height of my monster, Mom-sized SUV. And that I and my two booster seats and my crapload of Happy Meals toys, chewed-up crayons, socks, cat fur, hair bows, and “artwork” from last year don’t really cut it. It was a disconcerting realization that I had sitting up high in my ungainly SUV that gets about twelve miles to the gallon. I scrunched down in my seat and changed the station to clear my head of the shocking awkwardness of it all.

  However, I will say this: I don’t care how ridiculous and unsexy I felt at that moment in my big, honkin’ SUV, because at least I will not ever, ever drive a minivan. I don’t care how practical they are, how highly rated they are, how great the resale value is, how the children enjoy their bucket seats and never fight anymore, and how all the electronics are wired up to each seat. It does not matter that my trendy, quite handsome younger brother drives one and constantly taunts me to “come over to the Dark Side” with his GPS system, iPod-infused, DVD-playing, bucket-seated, great mileage minivan. I simply can’t. It’s a flagrant, open, “shout out to the world” admission that I am no longer relevant, stylish, sexy, or cute.

  There are too many other things I have in my life that shout out that I am no longer relevant, stylish, sexy, or cute, so I’m hanging on to my boat on wheels. And my girls in the minivans? We’ll, they’re just as sold on their wheels as I am on mine, and hey, I guess even Angelina Jolie could look hot driving a minivan. I would rather drive a luxury BMW (and they don’t make minivans, so don’t you think that means something?). And for you hybrid-loving sisters out there getting all worked up about my monthly gas intake, don’t worry about me. I make up for it in other ways—I occasionally recycle and occasionally use paper instead of plastic and have been known to buy in bulk, on occasion. Baby steps . . .

  But I am never just occasionally more interesting without my children—I am always more interesting without them. Don’t get me wrong: I love my children . . . dearly. I think they are nearly perfect and the thought that I can’t even begin to know all the ways in which I am scarring and disappointing them for life keeps me up at night; it really does. But the fact remains, I am much more fun and entertaining without them. And you really don’t know and appreciate that until they’re here, and then it’s too late and you’re stuck lugging around a diaper bag the size of a Mini-Cooper and wondering if today is the day your kid will get head lice at preschool.

  A lovely couple we know just put in a pool in their backyard. The husband wanted to have a giant pool party for families. The wife wanted to have a small, intimate pool party for couples. Husband thinks said pool party with fourteen adults and twenty children sounds like “great fun.” The wife doesn’t. “We’ll all be in the pool playing games, hanging out, having a cocktail . . . it’ll be great,” he says. “Charla, what do you think?”

  Is he kidding? First, there is not one wife in that bunch who will be in that pool “playing games, hanging out, and having a cocktail.” After forty and motherhood, it’s simply not a good look for many. And after you get out of the pool wringing wet and it’s time for dinner? Again, not a good look for most. Hanging out drinking in a pool was so Spring Break 1989 (and need I mention that no one had kids on Spring Break 1989?).

  Second, the husbands will be standing near but not in the pool, playing games (like placing bets on when some cute wife is going to hop out of her Lilly cover-up and go for a dip) and having cocktails. Meanwhile the wives hump it to feed the kids hot dogs, wipe up spilled lemonade, get more butter for the corn on the cob, and generally work themselves into such a sweat that they’ll wish they could jump into the pool and cool off. Or at least they’ll consider the pool a sad alternative to the chaos of feeding twenty children.

  And then, once the kids are fed and swimming in the pool, you cannot even consider having a meaningful adult conversation because the odds are that you’ll find yourself totally distracted. It’s highly likely you won’t be able to make eye contact with an adult because you’ll be looking over the shoulder of some friend of a friend that you’re talking to. Let’s imagine: As you’re engaging “Mike, the New Guy from the bank,” you can’t help but watch someone else’s kid standing in the distance and sticking his arm down the drain hole of the pool. And you’re nodding your head as “Mike, the New Guy from the bank” talks about how much he and his wife love their new house, and you’re thinking about how this kid’s arm is going to get stuck, and you’re wondering if butter or Crisco will work better to unstick that dumb kid’s arm.

  You just know how the pool party would unfold if this couple decided to invite parents and children.

  So puuuulllleeeease, let me pay twelve bucks an hour for a sitter, leave my kids at home, take a shower, and come to your house and drink lots and lots of your wine. I promise I will be charming, interested, and interesting. I will thank you profusely for inviting me and I will try to conduct myself in a manner that will get me invited back (no guarantees, though). I will look you in the eye and be fully engaged when we talk and I will not look over your shoulder and wonder if the kid who’s got that chain link around his neck is going to get hurt and if his parents even know what he’s doing.

  So if people want to get the best that I, Charla, have to offer, then take me somewhere without my kids. And without other people’s kids. I promise, it is then that “I’m giving you the best that I got.”

  Brad would agree. After all, some of the best intimacy we’ve ever had during the course of our entire marriage was when our children weren’t around or we weren’t around our children. “I don’t understand it,” Brad would exclaim. “That was great, why can’t it be like that every day?”

  Well, dream on, Dorothy. Most days we’re not at a charming B&B where we can sleep till nine, have a leisurely breakfast, and stroll down a Main Street so perfect it seems straight out of central casting. And most days my children are not comfortably ensconced at my parents’ house, where their every need is being met with great attentiveness. And most days I am not exempt from cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry. And most days I am not dressed in a cute, freshly pressed outfit that makes me look and feel fairly attractive. And most days I do not shower and get dressed while sipping a glass of perfect chardonnay for a romantic dinner prepared by someone who is not me.

  So the lesson here is that real life rarely, if ever, is conducive to great intimacy. Rather, real life begets real sex. And sometimes real sex is a quickie. Sometimes it’s a distracted roll in the hay. Real people having real intimacy while living real life is not always sexy. Rather, it’s imperfect and muddled, just like real life.

  Sadly, sometimes real life doesn’t include any real intimacy at all. Many of my girlfriends have, once they have conceived the number of children they wanted to, turned their backs on their sperm donors (oops, I mean husbands) and are trying desperately to get out of ever having sex with them again. I was once among them. However, pre-The Gift, I was amenable to hopping back in the sack for an occasional shot at procreation. Women have an unbelievable biological drive for wanting babies that I could compare to men’s unbelievable drive for wanting sex . . . or wanting insanely expensive cars. It’s a powerful
, powerful thing that is very difficult to turn off, even when you are in the midst of chaos with one kid just out of diapers, one baby still in them, and extrabig plastic toys and blocks scattered throughout your family room, which you can’t imagine ever being tidy again. The need for a new baby, even with two perfectly good and wonderful children, supersedes the reality of my being stretched to the extreme.

  “Oh, come on, honey, let’s try for number three. It will be wonderful, ” I said on more than one occasion, pre-The Gift.

  “Which part?” he asked. “The conceiving or the next eighteen years of raising a contributing member of society?”

  Who was I kidding? Definitely the latter. “We would be great with three kids. Besides,” I reminded him, “you’re one of three. Wasn’t it great?”

  In reality for Brad, not really. According to him, he was stuck in the middle seat on all transcontinental car rides, where his father chain-smoked with the windows sealed shut. He was always the odd man out on the roller coaster. And if there was someone left out at cards, it was usually Brad. Oh, the list of “Third Child” transgressions goes on and on. But the real reason Brad didn’t want three kids? He wanted his wife back.

  Explain, s’il vous plaît.

  Then the truth came out. He admitted that he thought, despite all my best efforts, being a mom and being a wife were at such odds that I defaulted to one. And guess what? It wasn’t being a lovey-dovey, superattentive, “please, tell me all about your day while I rub your feet” kind of spouse (if ever such a woman existed, she certainly didn’t exist in south Charlotte). I think what he really missed was the vibrant, engaged, and funny gal he married. The one who loved to try new restaurants, debate government policy, and watch late-night television in bed. The one who wanted to spend time with just him. In his defense, we didn’t have much of a newlywed period. “I didn’t get much of you before we had kids. If we keep having them, there won’t be any time with you on the back end either. Our whole marriage will be about our kids. And as much as I love them, I love you and want to spend some portion of my life with the woman I married.”