My Formerly Hot Life (16 page)

The best part about sex nowadays is that the whole endeavor feels less performative than it did when I was younger, before I fully understood that nothing was expected of me other than to absorb and reciprocate pleasure. When I was in my 20s, I was ultra-conscious of how I presented during sex, like I was playacting some movie-influenced role of “sexy partner,” which left me focused on how I was perceived, instead of how I felt. Feeling your way through sex, of course, leads to much better sex for you and your partner. I’m also much less worried about impugning Paul’s skill by pitching in in a hands-on way if the situation calls for it. As my friend Keisha puts it, “If I need to, I go ahead and open my own fortune cookie.”

Of course, in order to be in the position to have your fortune cookie opened by you or anyone else, you have to have ordered in, and kids are a huge obstacle to even looking at the menu. Even at their most adorable and rewarding, they
will
suck the life out of you during the day. And at night, there’s nothing like a groggy child wandering in for some water or complaining of an octopus under her bed just when things might be getting off the ground.

Somehow, making sure our sex life doesn’t dwindle to nothing feels like one of my many responsibilities, on par with making sure the car payments are up-to-date, and replenishing the paper towel supply. I sometimes think,
I simply need to make it a priority
. In countless magazine articles over the years, I’ve quoted dozens of experts about the importance of putting your sex life first.

It’s not terrible advice, but I have never been quite able to take it myself. When I consciously think of sex as something I need to better apply myself to, as if I were back in junior high French, I feel overwhelmed and remiss, which further grinds any smoldering spark into the pavement like a spent cigarette. Sex needs to be a priority. Absolutely. But, well, what isn’t a priority, really? My children are usually my first priority, along with work, so said children may eat and wear bejeweled Sketchers high-tops, and because I love it. I need to see my friends every so often, and then there’s exercise, sleep and “me” time, which are essential to my health and sanity, without which the entire house of cards scatters to the wind. And then there are the countless other things my husband
and I like to do together, which feel important for our relationship and knit us together in intimacy—such as, you know, having the occasional conversation. Sex is a priority, yes, but a priority among many priorities I must juggle, which often means it has to get in line. How many things can be critical at once without your head exploding or something falling by the wayside? So I try to fit it in where it fits, without taking it on as yet another obligation, one that I will no doubt fail to deliver on from time to time. Guilt is about the least sexy thing I can think of, aside from leprosy.

I’m told that as kids get older, sex starts to feel less like something that needs to be wedged in between wash cycles, and so becomes more a natural part of life again. I’m counting on it. Of course, depending on when and if you had children, a Formerly’s sex life might be just roaring. “We’ve been at it like bunnies,” my friend Danielle, whose husband just had a vasectomy and whose children are in school, confided (and here I am blabbing it!). “Once the kids are a little older, and you don’t always feel like, Put your own fucking socks on, things really lighten up and you can enjoy your spouse again. The more the kids can do for themselves, the more you can start thinking about yourself as a person. If you can look at yourself as a person, you can actually give something to your spouse.” I can see flickers of a sexier future on the horizon.

My informal survey would seem to indicate that Formerlies, including moms, generally like sex, in theory if not in practice, and that’s why I just have to say that terms like
“MILF” and “cougar” really wind my watch. That women who are no longer 21 and also might be parents enjoy sex should not be headline news, but somehow, the world seems perpetually shocked at the concept. That whole Madonna/whore thing dies hard (the Freudian paradigm, not the singer).

Come to think of it, the term “MILF” grosses me out. “MILF” sounds like milk, which, in the context of motherhood, makes me think of breast-feeding. That reminds me of when I had swollen, leaky boobs and sore nipples and had to tote a heavy, noisy breast pump to the office after sleeping a total of four hours at night. The last thought on my mind during the nursing era was of doing it with anybody—least of all a guy who would use the term “MILF.” I picture some loser at the beach clutching a beer cozy and rating moms as they walk by his lawn chair on the way to taking their toddler to the potty.

I know of many a Formerly who doesn’t share my point of view on “MILF,” preferring to accept the deeply embedded compliment that they are still desirable, or at least conceived of in a sexual context. I get that. I usually take the unsolicited thumbs-up where I find it, now that I find it way less than I used to. Still, I can’t get past the idea that the very use of “MILF” implies that attractive mothers are such a freaky fringe concept that it requires a separate acronym.

A married friend of mine said she felt complimented when some young guys in a bar she ducked into to pee called her a cougar. But to me, “cougar” (growwwlll!) is even
ickier, connoting a sexually rapacious, insatiable, practically pedophilic older woman, thrusting her unwanted attentions and enormous Wonderbra’d bosoms on wide-eyed young men, or trawling for gigolos on the beaches of Kenya on sex safaris with her like-libidoed girlfriends. I don’t know any women of any age who “prowl” for sex, and while some surely exist, they’re a tiny, bored minority who probably don’t have a decent sex-toy shop nearby.

For the single Formerlies I know, it’s more like, interested in finding someone to hook up with, yes. She might make an effort to go out, hopeful of meeting someone desirable who finds her likewise so they can act on their mutual attraction. If he (or she) happens to be younger than she is, that won’t necessarily disqualify him, especially if he looks like he may know what he’s doing. But
prowl
for sex? Who has time? Who has energy? Please. The word “cougar” signifies that a not-young woman who might actually want to have sex is so uncivilized that she belongs in a National Geographic wildlife documentary instead of on a bar stool near you.

To my knowledge, I’ve never been called a MILF. This could be because no one other than my husband wants to fuck me. I have considered that. But given that men aren’t particularly particular, I’m thinking it’s because those I come into contact with are too polite to use a term like that, at least within my hearing. And for that, I’m grateful.

I do, however, appreciate when some random person finds me attractive, as does my friend Amy (agrees with me, that is;
although I’d like to think she finds me cute). Still, there’s something palpably different about the experience now that she’s been with her husband 12 years. “About twice a year I become dimly aware that some guy is almost hitting on me,” Amy told me a while back. “Once the shock and surprise and surrealness wears off, I get a faint wash of gratefulness, drowned out by a motherly, Awww, isn’t that sweet.” When it happens to me—maybe six times a year, but who’s counting?—I feel jazzed, and am comforted that my market value hasn’t plummeted too low. I’m not thinking of selling—I’m happy where I am and my marriage has lots of potential for expansion—but I’m not dead, either.

To be sure, that external affirmation from men, which I used to take for granted like the air I breathed, comes my way less frequently. Fortunately, I’ve learned that unlike the air I breathe, I can live without it, and it means much less to me now that I am solid in that which I offer the world and my husband and others I love. Like sugar, which is horrifically difficult to cut back on but which I’ve mostly succeeded at, I don’t need it like I used to.

Though, like sugar, there is no perfect substitute. In the elevator at my office the other morning, this young messenger was staring at me. Our building is old and the elevator slow. His gaze was lingering, his grin rather … sly.
He couldn’t be … nah. Looking at me? Weird
, I thought. Wait, a full-on smile, with teeth and everything. I thought I saw his eyes dart down to my chest. He
was
checking me out! I pressed the button for my floor and he moved beside me, looking again at my chest. I was wearing a coat, so it didn’t feel too
sleazy. W
ow. I guess I still have it, at least a little
, I thought, as the elevator lifted off. Check me the eff out! As I strode off the elevator, I felt caffeinated by my harmless ego boost, and took a private pride in my own still-hotness.

Then I got to my office and hung up my coat. There on the right boob area was the neon green adhesive foam “M” that Sasha stuck on me this morning as I was leaving her classroom. “M” for mommy. “M” for moron. “M” for
My God, woman, did you think to look in the MIRROR?
Something else I don’t do as often as I used to.

I met my husband, as I mentioned, on the subway when I was in my mid-20s; proof, if all my photo albums were to be destroyed in a fire, that I was at one time hot. I was, you’ll recall, “I meet men on the train” hot. And he was adorable—ruddy-cheeked, with curly auburn hair, smiling brown eyes and a naturally broad, buff, athletic body.

Fifteen-plus years later, he’s standing in front of the mirror in our bedroom in his boxer briefs and dress socks, flexing his biceps and asking me, “How’re my guns?” That’s the male Formerly’s version of
What if this part here were just, like, up here?
I am on the bed, braless and unshowered, the moustache bleach on my upper lip preventing me from answering. “Yrrr guns looooo gggrrraay, huunnyy,” I manage to eke out through my teeth as I pantomime a Mr. Universe pose and throw him the thumbs-up. In fact, they do, to me. Then he gets into bed, I rinse my lip, we watch Keith Olbermann, and fall asleep, exhausted from the day and the kids and Keith’s spitting vitriol, and from just being us.

A younger, unmarried person might see the above scene
as an illustration of what a slog marriage is, or as evidence of the oft-repeated point that the spark fizzles once you’ve been together awhile. For sure, what I just described is hardly going to send anyone searching for the his-and-hers K-Y. But what I see in that scene—what I felt as I participated in it—was an abiding sense of intimacy and love and companionship, free of pressure to be anyone other than me, just as I am, tending to what Sasha calls my girlstache. I’m with the guy I can laugh with, the guy who would find a way to tell me honestly that he thought I looked nice even if my girlstache spread up the sides of my face like a she-wolf. He loves me that much.

Paul and I haven’t been together for 15 straight years. We dated after meeting that day on the train, but, hot as I was, I torched him and moved on to my long and rather silly romantic career, involving (incomplete list) a few writers, a trainer, a “branding specialist,” a historian and a ballerino, several percussionists and grad students, an SAT tutoring magnate, a lighting designer, numerous journalists and at least one male nurse. (The man I opted for over Paul back then was obsessed with futzing around in a computer lab and spent most of his time on some ridiculous nascent pursuit called “the Internet and computer animation.” Clearly, that was going nowhere.) Most of these guys, I recognize now, were unwitting foils to my self-discovery. I learned a lot from them, primarily how ill-prepared I was at the time to settle down myself.

Eventually, at 34, I remet Paul, at a wedding of mutual
friends, and within 18 months we were married. We are in the unique situation to have dated when we were in our mid-20s and then again when we were older. By the time we got together for keeps, both of us were fully adults, and good and set in our ways. Still, the shift to Formerly, which took place after we were married a few years, has brought subtle changes.

For me, this has mostly to do with feeling, in the words of the immortal Popeye, that I yam what I yam. I have felt this way for a long time, since before I was with my husband, but now that I’m a Formerly, it has a less defiant, defensive quality, because it no longer seems that what I am is at risk of being diminished by the man I’m with. It did back when we were first married, and it led to various territorial skirmishes. Marriage is about union, and as much as I wanted to marry Paul, I was on guard that uniting didn’t mean merging and thus ceasing to exist. Now that what I am is completely mine, now that I’m completely me, that sense of self could no more get lost than my uterus could fall out from between my legs without my noticing it.

It’s a relief to feel I can go about negotiating closeness with another vulnerable, imperfect human with the knowledge that who I am will not be suppressed or compromised into nothingness. That’s a gift that time has given. I’m not saying that I compromise in my marriage less than I used to. In fact, I compromise more, as does my husband. Just not about who I am, something I did as unthinkingly as wearing stupid shoes when I was younger.

From my current vantage, I find some of the stuff I did in the name of love rather horrifying, but clearly, self-abnegating behavior was not my sole province. I have a newish friend, Diana, who is one of the coolest, most together, non-doormat-type women I know. I guess I assumed she popped out of her mother’s womb self-actualized, but that, too, seems to be a by-product of living and loving for as long as we have. One thing she admitted she did reminded me of the type of advice I read in women’s magazines when I was a teenager: “Guys like girls who share their interests, so act interested!” When, at 25, Diana first started dating the man who later became her husband, she professed an all-consuming passion for mountain-biking, because he mentioned that he liked it. She then dropped $1,500 for a mountain bike to join him on the trails. It wasn’t until after they’d been together for a couple of years that she felt comfortable saying that not only did she not enjoy mountain-biking, but that it did a real number on her pubic bone. “I treated dating like a job interview—I didn’t know at the interview if I wanted the job, but I acted
as if
because I wanted the offer,” she told me. The bike’s now on Craigslist, along with, no doubt, countless other objects other Formerlies have decided are no longer necessary to further their purposes. Knowing Diana, she’ll probably spend the money she makes on something she really enjoys, like a spa day.