Sex and the Single Mom Part One, or "Like a Virgin"

When I got divorced, nearly a year ago now, I didn't have the slightest idea how I would ever have sex again.

I'm a pretty highly sexed person. Once a day is generally good maintenance for me. I don't say no to twice. In most of the long-term relationships I've had, sex has been a major part of the deal, by some estimates too much (to those who so claim, I answer that if it's 50% of how you spend your waking time with someone, it had better be good, right?). Even my marriage, which managed to make me declare that I hated my life and to sing along with Pearl Jam's song "Better Man" with entirely too much pathos, didn't entirely kill my sex drive. I can't remember an average, but in the fall of 2008, when everything was coming to an ugly, bulbous, about-to-erupt head, we did it at least once or twice a week.

But when I got divorced, my sex drive went on vacation. I initially felt that sleeping with another man would feel like being unfaithful, especially since I was not the initiator of the divorce and would have liked to spend more time "working on the marriage" before calling it quits. I imagined with terrifying vividness the moment arriving, being naked with a man, about to consummate my divorcée status, and bursting into tears at the sight of his cock...

(This scenario was based, it must be admitted, on a convoluted Heideggerian argument I'd constructed in which I was "always already" married to my ex, therefore always already would be married to him, and therefore would be betraying that marriage by sleeping with another. At least, it started with Heidegger. I think it probably ended with that Robert Creeley poem "A Marriage," the one that ends "he gave up loving/and lived with her." But I digress.)

...Which, let's face it, isn't the most encouraging response for a dude to get the first time he flashes his Johnson.

Many would turn tail and run.

The other problem I imagined with resuming a sex life was that I had, and have, the kids full time. 100% of nights. Nearly 100% of days. The parenting plan has the kids spending one afternoon a week with their dad; we informally agreed on an additional afternoon, but it has been hit-and-miss. And I work full time. And had only 16 hours of daycare for the younger one for several months (I can work partly from home). That's going up to twenty this week, but it still doesn't leave a lot of time to get my work done and then prowl the streets for willing men. Basically, my time was all allocated, and I was very conscious, and remain so, of not letting anything but my kids monopolize my attention.

Here's how I'd put it to my friend J.: "I don't want to subject the kids to the Parade of Men. And I can't have dudes over unless they can at least risk seeing the kids. And I don't have any nights off or money for babysitting. So basically, I'm never going to get laid until I establish some kind of serious relationship with a dude who's willing to wait around for several months until I can introduce him into my life a little. And WHO HAS THAT KIND OF PATIENCE?"

Now, J. has been a single mom for fourteen years. So she just nodded and smiled, then said, "I'd be happy to babysit for you sometime. You know, it is possible to have sex at someone else's house."

Duh. Of course I continued my protests that I'd probably become a nun, that the town would erect for me a chastity arch (a practice in pre-revolution China done for women who, widowed young, remained faithful to their husbands FOREVER, thus adding to the honor of the family), etc. etc.

Don't get me wrong, I knew that something would probably happen. To put it bluntly, I'm not the type of girl who goes for long periods without a boyfriend. Which probably has something to do with how I got in this single-parent situation in the first place.

But that something was actually a long time coming. The last time I had sex with my husband was on Nov. 30, 2008. He moved out Dec. 10. The divorce was final April 28, 2009.

And I met L. on July 29.

Eight months of celibacy isn't insignificant for anyone in my book. For me, it was an eternity. Because a lot happened in that time. I went through the stages of grief. I was uninterested, a little interested, repulsed, enthused. I wept. I began to feel oddly grateful to my ex for leaving, because I wouldn't have and because I was happier without him and our family was happier without him. I changed, I grew, I became exceedingly grateful for that sex toy shopping spree my cousin took me on in June. I basically spent every night in July before L. showed up with three vibrators and a few different volumes of Penthouse Letters.

L. was a friend of a friend. We'd gotten to be friends through Facebook. We had never met. This is not something I ordinarily do, but he friended me, and he's an old college pal of my best friend in town, and I wasn't feeling like being as exclusive and unavailable as usual. So I said yes. We had a fair amount of internet back-and-forth, we sent some emails. He started phoning me during the stormiest period, December and January, when the ex had just moved out, when I thought I might not actually survive, and when I spent pretty much every moment my kids weren't awake chain-smoking and weeping.

It was a bad winter. I recommend that if you plan to undergo a miserable divorce that inspires you to resume smoking and give up food, you do it in summer. Your hands won't get chapped and your basal body temperature won't suffer as much. As it was, I was a shadow of my normally thin self, a scarecrow of Angst and Weltschmerz.

But by summer I was better. I was, at least, horny again. I'd actually had several minor flirtations, one of which resulted in a man standing outside my house staring up at it for an hour, which was sort of cute in a Say Anything sort of way. Or would've been, if he'd been 18 and John Cusack.

And the L. came to town. He had been living overseas and was moving -- with his fiancée, natch -- across the world, with a stop in the U.S. on the way. I knew we, um, liked each other, or at least had the potential for it. And somehow he managed to arrange this trip into a crisscross of geography that resulted in him being in my town after the fiancé left the country.

Arrive Wednesday noon, leave Friday morning. He was slated to stay with our mutual friend, she who had known him for 16 years. It was the hottest day of the year. I'm going to resist the urge to say that it got a lot hotter.

But you know it did.

Because, after all, when a couple of differently chromosomed heterosexuals spend eight months whispering sweet nothings in each other's virtual networking ears, it's like laying tinder at a gas pump.

Or something.

How it all happened, and how it remained a secret from our mutual friend, was very sweet. I met L. at the corner bar Wednesday afternoon. We chatted. We hung out. I took him to our mutual friend's house, came home, and got the kids in bed. Then J. came over to babysit.

When I showed up back at our mutual friend, M.'s, house, L. was out front having a cigarette. He sat on the top step, wearing a t-shirt and sweating. It was still over a hundred degrees, maybe 9 p.m., summer above the 45th parallel meaning it was still light out. Still light and hot enough to sweat without even moving.

"Honey," L. cried, "I'll give you a hundred dollars if you let me come sleep in that air-conditioned room of yours. A hundred dollars. And I promise I won't try to sleep with you."

I looked at him. I smiled. I said, "The hell you won't. But okay."

He kissed me.

M. came out and we all had a drink. We drank and shot the breeze for a while, until she and her husband were bleary-eyed and she was slurring her words and tripping. L. made his excuses. L. and I walked, upright, to the car.

When we got to my house, J. gave a wink and took off. Then L. and I retired to the attic, turned on the crappy window air conditioner that my ex-father-in-law had just helped me prop up with dowels, sat in chairs, and talked.

Sat on the bed. And talked.

Lay in each others' arms. And talked.

It was exactly like getting together with a shy guy you really like in college, when dorm rooms are easily accessible, beds are the only furniture, and nobody really wants to make an unequivocal first move, so you just keep inching together until at some point it's a tangle of limbs and nebulous intentions. Except that we were in our mid-thirties and not our late teens, and he was engaged to someone else, and we were probably never going to see each other again, or at least for years, after two days. So at some point before any clothes came off, one of us (it was probably me) called a smoke break and we retired to the sweltering (at 2 a.m.) front porch.

"So, um." I said, "Is this okay?"

"What do you mean, okay?" L. asked, "Do you mean is it okay with her or do you mean is it okay in the sense that it's not going to wreck anything?"

"Both."

"The latter, yeah, I think so," he said. "The former, definitely not."

I thought about this for a minute.

"So...how not okay is it?"

"On a scale of one to ten? Maybe a four."

Sold. We went back upstairs. Oh, there was more discussion, but this is the gist and the important part. I wanted to confront this man that I thought I knew, through our mutual friend and through our correspondence, and see what he had to say about his situation. I didn't know, going into that conversation, if I would get an answer I could deal with. I didn't want to be a homewrecker (and in fact had discussed the issue with our mutual friend M. when his arrival became imminent; that there was "a vibe" was clear, what would develop less so -- and in fact she apparently admonished him, when he announced his intention to stay with me, to not "take advantage of my situation"). I had been the victim of homewrecking, actually, though whether it was sexually consummated was unclear (the erotic texts, Facebook love letters, etc., were there, but the ex swears he did "nothing dishonorable" -- in our last memorable fight about it, I asserted that it didn't matter where his penis went if he'd already betrayed me emotionally). And our friend M. knew this, so she thought I was vulnerable and also urged me to take the high road.

And I had thought I would. I wasn't dumb enough to think that L. hadn't come to visit at least partly to get in my pants. And I wasn't dishonest enough to think that I didn't want him to. But I had thought that I would decline. I had thought that I would find a way not to have sex with him in order to stay on my moral high horse with regard to my ex, or in order to not have to face M. and her disapproval, or in order to not let myself get attached to a man who was completely, utterly unavailable, because (as a recent episode of Grey's Anatomy put it), my heart lives in my vagina. I am not the kind of girl who has meaningless sex. And I frequently turn sex into a relationship because I can't fathom the idea of having fucked a stranger I don't care about.

I realize this might be seen as a slightly flawed strategy. On other other hand, who has a perfect one? Maybe I could protect my heart by putting a big LOCAL USE ONLY sign on my vajayjay. But I kind of doubt it. I think then I might just be sexually frustrated and lovelorn.

So I really thought there was a possibility I would say no to sex with L.
But I didn't.
Not because I was that desperate to get laid, actually. I was horny, yes, -- but I don't recall that being my primary emotion. And not because I wanted to wipe away the stain of the ex by, um, turning to the next chapter in Penises I Have Known (a possibly multi-volume tome that really needs to be switched to the Kindle version), although that impulse -- the impulse, quite simply, to have the ex not be The Last Person I Fucked -- was strong. But because I wanted the First Person I Fucked, post-divorce, to be L. I wanted the first person I had post-divorce sex with to be this guy who was hilarious and flawed and macho and hip-hop, this guy who wrote letters with cartoons drawn in the margins and who wrote short stories about Jesus or divorce or Robocop, this guy who, for whatever reason, had decided to let me in, and who looked at me back and got me. I wanted to lose my chastity arch with a person I really, to put it simply, liked. And who liked me back.

And at some point I had to ask myself if I was responsible for L.'s relationship with his fiancée, or for what he chose to do within or without it, and even as the woman formerly scorned, my answer was no. I maintain this is true. I don't think much of my ex's girlfriend, it's true, but she is not the one who betrayed my marriage. He is.

So we went upstairs. And we got naked. And as it happened, I wondered if all those feelings of grief and regret, the ones I had thought would make me cry the first time I had sex with someone other than my husband, would come back. But they didn't. I didn't come close to crying. Maybe it was because I was pretty clear about what I was doing. Maybe it was because enough time had passed. Maybe it was because I was with a man who (for all his apparent flaws and idiosyncrasies) was a better friend, lover, and boyfriend in 48 hours than my husband ever was.

It is a powerful thing to be looking in someone's eyes as you straddle him and realizing that he hasn't failed you as a friend.

We had sex. It was hot. And it felt like the first time. Not just because the quality of my relationship with L., and of my knowledge of myself, was so different than before -- also because, after the eight-month drought, it kind of hurt at first. But in a good way. Just exactly like when I was seventeen and having sex for the very first time with my boyfriend of six months, whom I loved, who loved me, and I knew that even though it hurt like a bastard, I wanted this, it would be good.
This time didn't hurt like a bastard. But it was a little uncomfortable at first, and the discomfort reminded me of why sex is so good and why we want it and how part of me had known that, even the first time.

So that was it. It was like being touched for the very first time. And as the argument goes in Reservoir Dogs, was it like that because I was vulnerable and I'd been fucked over a few times and I met a nice guy, or was it like that because of a really big cock?

That's a tough one. But offhand, I'd say both.

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